Smart, thoughtful people can disagree on the wisdom of the U.S. intervention in Iraq. My friend Yuval Levin has made a strong case for the war, and I take his arguments very seriously. But I find myself very sympathetic to Ross’s latest post on the subject:

Ultimately, though, what the war in Iraq has really impressed upon me is the bluntness of military force as an instrument of state, and the difficulty of predicting any of the long-term consequences that flow from a decision to make war. We can spin out complicated counterfactuals that justify the Iraq invasion, and complicated counterfactuals that make it look even worse. We can hope for long-range developments that make the Bush administration’s decisions seem prescient, and worry about long-range developments that would undercut the fragile achievements of the last few years. But I’m more and more convinced that when it comes to judging a decision for or against war, it’s actually better to confine yourself to the short-term consequences rather than the long-term fallout, and at assess the war based on its immediate military objectives rather than its deep strategic goals.

Going forward, I hope that conservatives will prove more skeptical about the wisdom of taking on large-scale military commitments. As someone who believes that we should subject public spending on education and medical care and infrastructure to rigorous assessment, I encourage everyone to read Christopher Preble and Justin Logan in the latest issue of National Review:

The problem with the nation-building impulse remains what it was in the past: This project is rooted in deeply flawed ideas about man’s ability to reshape society, and exhibits the very type of “fatal conceit” that Friedrich von Hayek scorned long ago. It is incoherent to believe that the same government that can produce neither jobs nor well-educated children at home can build viable states in foreign lands with unfamiliar languages, customs, and cultures. To oppose such projects at home while supporting them abroad defies the laws of economics and basic common sense.

There have been many solid arguments for maintaining a large military footprint in Afghanistan, the more salient debate at the moment. Christian Brose and Daniel Twining made a strong case in that vital national interests were at stake in The Weekly Standard, as did Stephen Biddle in The American Interest. But there’s only so much we can afford to do consistent with maintaining a sustainable tax burden.