Within the heart of the turblent and provisional world of discourse, decision and democracy, their lives a deep seated urge to certainty. A wish for the dust to settle. To come to have, among all of the possessions that a person is allowed to have, a sense of the rightness of heaven and earth, and achieve a moral certainty of action that is beyond the reach of decision.

While this urge is often acted upon by demogouges and politicians engorged by ego, it afflicts even the most dedicated. It is for this reason that we must remind ourselves of the evils, the moral evils, of closed societies. The danger of course, is to be hypnotized by its own rhetoric. Closed societies exist all over the world, but they can no more be made into open societies by fiant than paper can be made into money by fiat. It is the value and functioning of the whole society which makes an election, or a dollar, work.

The case of Saddam Hussein serves as an example of the difficulty. There is no question that his regime was both abhorent and dangerous - a cominbination which called for a continuous and direct pressure by the open societies of this world, and a realiation that in the end, Iraq would have to breath free.

But the very nature of this realization also carries with it a second one, that the time to have attempted to establish such a new regime, and backed it with a package of aid and transitional authority which would have ended with the creation of, in all likelihood, a federal or even partition set of states - remaking both the imperial overthrows of the nacent democratic governments that had occured in the 1950's and the colonialist imposition of boundaries in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the face of Western pressure after World War I.

But once this moment slipped by, and the attempt to topple Saddam by coup and economic coercion takein, the reality is that there was no turning back. The very process of attempting to overthrow Saddam by proxy was pulverizng the base of his society, was also destroying the social infrastructure which would have made a democracy possible.

With the coming of the new millenium, a difficult choice faced the United States and what used to be called "the free world". It was a choice that both electorates and elites refused to face, and instead there was the pretense that the disputes were merely a matter of partisan politics, and were, in effect, about patronage, not policy.

The result was that the United States was on a collision course - the only large expansion in global oil capacity was in Iraq. And yet the regime could not be trusted with the revenues that lifting of sanctions would have allowed. Saddam had complied with the requirements of disarmament, but he had done so in a manner which left no trust that he would stay disarmed any longer than was needed.

Lfiting sanctions was, in theory, required, and the economic pressure would make it required. Iraq's attempt to evade "Oil for Food" kicked into higher gear. It was with the coming of Bush that there was a systematic attempt by Iraq to evade the requirements of the program, and the selling of illegal concessions.

Many of Saddam's worst crimes against humanity were in the distant past, ironically, disarming him took away the ability to engage in acts that were flagrantly worse than the admitedly low standards that dictators are held to. By removing WMD and the means to deliver them, the international community saved lives, but made it more difficult to build a case. After all, if the international community had felt that his actions fell below the standard of international law, then they should have taken him out when they had the chance.

George H. W. Bush blundered, but it was a forced error - leading a nation that could not afford war and occupation, he was forced to accept a truce rather than a peace. His successor in the White House never had the freedom of action than to do more than back a coup.

The result is a failed state that was the source of yet more failed policies. These failed policies would continue to compound.

The first dividend would be the need for a lack of public debate over Iraq. There were two questions on Iraq, the first was the question of whether, and the second of how. There was wide acceptance of the inevitability of regime change in Iraq by 2001, and with September 11th, this became a virtual article of faith in the policy making classes. But there was still the matter of how.

Bush required not only an invasion of Iraq, but an invasion on his terms for his purposes. He needed to combine the invasion with slashing of tax rates, leaving only enough for "invasion lite". The reason that Bush could not tolerate a public debate on means and ends and had to create a fraudulent rationale - is that there could be no questioning of how he was to accomplish his end, or how he was to spend the money once invasion began.

Only in this way could invasion lite win approval, and could the money be funnelled into the "Project for the New American Century" idea of replacing bases in Saudi Arabia, with an even weaker proxy state in Iraq, and without the war material to effect such a strategy. It was the best war that a broke nation could afford. The difference that Bush gambled on is that the rise of Asian central banks and other nations desiring a trade advantage with the United States would buy treasuries to keep their own currencies down. In essence, hold devaluing dollars to pay for his war.

On the other side of this, it is clear that the worst part of the invasion of Iraq was a lack of debate on both of these points. It is not clear how the public would, in the end, have acted.

However an engaged and participatory public might still have decided on intervention, or a more interventionalist course, but it would not have adopted "invasion lite" and the budgetary horrors which have accompanied the Bush war strategy. For Bush, it was paramount not to even risk the possibility that the public, or even the informed public, would demand a consensus rather than an "Just so long as I'm the dictator" approach that was taken.

Here is where the deceptive use of liberal morally normative language was essential t to the project. Using proxies such as Christopher Hitchens, the fallacy of the excluded middle never received a more loving demonstration - either Saddam had to be removed with Bush in absolute and indeed absolutist control, or one is betraying the morally normative aspects of liberalism - the belief in the dignity of freedom itself, and the necessity that all peoples should be free.

The reality of course is that freedom is not merely a negative - the absence of a dictator does not make a people free. The question that needed to be asked, but was not, was what was required to make Iraq free. This is a different question than the question of meeting some empty procedural definition of "not under a dictator." As Hobbes argued in the 1600's, life under a leviathan is preferable to death under the "war of all against all". The natural state of affairs in a failed state is, indeed, the war of all against all.

Given the long standing liberal belief in being grounded in empirical reality, arguing against the false use of liberal doctrine of internationalism was as simple as arguing in favor of positive, versus negative, freedom.

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The failure to do this shows that those who nominally were thought of as the leaders of hawkish liberalism have a fundamental misunderstanding of the credo of the philosophy. Political change is an internal, and to some extent revolutionary, state - it is not merely the overthrow of the old order which is essential for liberty, but the coming of a new order. This is the liberal critique of the French Revolution, for all of its high ideals, it did not change the fundamental nature of the public, and thus France would spend much of the rest of the next 80 years under one form or another of monarchy - restored, Bourbon or Second Empire.

The failure of liberal hawks to make this argument, or even bring it up, indicates that the trap - of desiring certainty, of giving into what one famous despot called "the need to obey" - indicates that the reform of liberalism as a doctrine - beyond modern liberalism, or any particular partisan formulation, must proceed from a reassertion of basic world view, and basic axioms. The first of these is that only a people can make themselves free, even if other peoples assist them in the mechanics of this process.

The Iraqi people were not, and are not, ready for self-government. There is no reason to believe that they cannot become ready for self-government, and at this point there is a quasi-moral imperative to attempt this transformation. But it will take longer and cost more blood than other methods of containing Saddam which could have been effectuated without violence to the international order, even if they might have entailed some use of military force now or in the future to finalize the transition.

The basic realization of liberal thought is that one must make choices, and make them between the present real alternatives. Removing Saddam did not save lives, though it did alter which lives were lost - the people who "would have" died under an extended addition of his regime have been replaced by others bombed, murdered, shot, starved, beaten, squashed and dismembered under the present conditions of chaos and civil war. Liberalism does not see the state of anarchy as preferable to the state of despotism, indeed the two share a host of traits that make them more alike than either are to a functioning state.

Part of the reason for the pragmatic failure of liberalism was the adherence to a kind of nationalized "cheap" liberalism, which had lost its ability to produce, and then advocate and implement, visionary actions which have costs in the present. The Clinton era saw the margins where change could be made as very thin, and placed deficit reduction as the first and, in the end, only policy. The failure of liberalism to make present sacrifice worthy and worthwhile, allowed those who took foolish risks with other people's lives and money, seem more bold and innovative than they were. In fact, the Bush executive merely has red green color-blindness: American's bleed red, and all they see is green.

These failures of the liberal ideology's spokes people indicates that it is time for a renewal which can only be accomplished by a changing of the guard. There are no more six month extensions for those whose judgement has been shown to be consistently wrong, nor any more excuses as to why, out of both ideological and pragmatic failure, those who were supposed to be defending liberalism capitulated to a need to obey.