Now…I do wonder why this lively debate on Iraq that Berkowitz is describing has not been evident in..where do we start…? The National Review? National Review Online? Fox News? The Weekly Standard? The Heritage Foundation? The American Enterprise Institute? The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page? Commentary? Just to name a few of the leading conservative outlets where any dissent on the war on Iraq has been silenced, and the only remaining debate is between those who want to nuke Iran and those who want to do a “regime change” there. And we can go on and on… as we focus our attention on the recent debate among Republican presidential candidates and the efforts to shut-up Dr. Ron Paul. There has certainly been more of a serious and lively debate on Iraq among Democrats and liberals. Count the number of Democratic senators who voted against the recent (modified) bill on Iraq and those Republicans who voted in favor of it. Thanks to The American Conservative and Chronicles, conservatives have been able to voice their views on Iraq and the Bush foreign policy. But please Dr. Berkowitz…there was no WMD in Iraq and there has been no conservative debate on Iraq. ~Leon Hadar

Amen to that.  I had some similar observations earlier this week, saying:

What Mr. Berkowitz fails to mention is that when it comes to conservative magazines, think tanks and other forms of institutional conservatism, the overwhelming majority remains more or less fully committed to the war.  Except for long-time opponents of the war at The American Conservative and Chronicles, dissent in the journalist and pundit classes has come in small doses and has mostly been limited to questions of implementation and practicality.  The mainstream conservative response to Ron Paul points to a broader uniformity on foreign policy that goes beyond Iraq, and the sloganeering of the other nine presidential candidates confirm that this uniformity will not be challenged by any of the “viable” potential nominees of the Republican Party. 

I concluded:

Indeed, I can think of no area of policy debate where the right is more conformist and uninterested in a variety of opinions than on foreign policy. 

This lack of any real debate inside the “mainstream” journals and institutions of the movement–indeed, the enforcement of ideological rigidity by more than a few of these journals–explains why there are only war supporting interventionists and Ron Paul in the GOP presidential race.  There are no distinctive, remarkable “realist” candidates because antiwar “realists” are relatively hard to come by outside of academia and libertarian circles.  Among politicians, all of the “realists” more or less embrace the continuation of the war.  Their very balance-of-forces, stability-centered view of foreign affairs dictates that they support an American presence in Iraq for the foreseeable future.