I was just clicking by the talk/news channels and saw a short exchange about the Bush flip flop on "nation building" answered curtly with "things change in an instant". So things changed?
Neocons DO believe in Nation Building now? This just occurred to me. I wonder if they are just at this moment suddenly remembering the converse, "hey, wait a second. We don't believe in nation building..."
The world is looking at America and knows that Iraq did not attack us. Period. It did not attack us. When we bombed Libya that was after Libya attacked the west, Lockerbie bombing... tear my causality claim apart if you like with debate, but our nation does not even claim Iraq attacked us. Therefore it's about human rights abuse and a dictator.
If the right does believe in Nation Building... that opens up a whole line of reasoning about human rights they should now be vulnerable to.
We all know Bush ran against "nation building" and as far as I know this was an ideological thing conservatives held basically to defend against the idea of going around the world fixing problems for other people. For many the idea that it really is about oil is what makes it sensible, that's the "American interest" everyone is always talking about, it's not that complicated to understand.
Even I see that debate as a far more honest issue to debate than the smoke and mirrors we were offered which is designed to avoid debate. However, the secret reason they didn't have to think this was about nation building was because we were supposed to make it back in oil. It doesn't look like we will. Thus... they are all out of cards except "the two of Nation Building".
One progressive view has been that such cases may indeed call for peacekeepers, election monitors, and other forms of proactive potentially costly intervention. Not in all progressives, passivists are often unconvinced about something if the actions involve traditional military involvements. But in general it was this kind of military action the conservatives found themselves wanting to oppose, and those leftleaning pols advocating them were forced to point out the need to preemtively act to prevent problems that otherwise come up and would threaten America... housing violent international criminals is merely one thing that happens in states which are in a perpetual failure condition.
And now the conservatives agree and admit the forsight of progressive peacekeeping actions! But if they are remembering they don't like Nation Building... they are going to be joining the bring-them-home movement, which of course is a position with some alliances to anti-war activists. In other words, it starts to break the conservative coalition.