The war to depose Saddam was always an unlikely war for conservatives. Traditional conservatives tend to view most attempts at radically altering society with a good degree of skepticism. They tend to view war primarily as a means for the narrow advancement of national interest, leavened occasionally with a dollop of enlightened national self-interest. In the internal politics of the last world empire – the British one – the Tories tended to warn against the attempt to impart liberal values to “restless natives,” while the Liberals took up what was seen as the “White Man's Burden.”

Within American conservatism, there has always been an isolationist strain and a realist one balancing any liberal aspirations in foreign policy for the GOP. In retrospect, it's peculiar that such strains were so weakened in the run-up to the Iraq war. Op-ed mutterings from Brent Scowcroft were muted by his star pupil's insistence (I refer to Condi Rice) that Saddam remained a gathering threat to the United States. The far right – represented by Patrick Buchanan and the proudly protectionist and isolationist American Conservative magazine – seemed marginal at best. But there was, perhaps, always a moment when conservatism was bound to begin to resist more aggressively what is, indisputably, a liberal project of nation-building in Iraq.

Perhaps that moment has now arrived with National Review's latest Tory editorial, which makes all the right noises about seeing the conflict in Iraq through to a democratic conclusion, while laying the groundwork for a conservative argument to cut and run at the first opportunity.