Big Government Conservatism

See-dubya, writing at Michelle Malkin's site, demonstrates how modern conservatism is ultimately more about finding things for the government to do than it is about limiting the size of government. In the post, he says that it is a "fair question" of what our counter-terrorism strategy should be "when" we defeat al-Qaeda. One would think that once the biggest threat (and entire raison d'etre for most of the government's counter-terrorism expansions) was eliminated, the appropriate conservative response would be to, quite simply, eliminate those elements of the government.

But that is not what See-dubya thinks. Instead it would appear that the appropriate conservative reaction to beating al-Qaeda, rather than being to decrease the size of government, is instead to "look[] beyond the end of Al Qaeda and consider[] what fresh horror radical Islam may try to release upon the world. " In other words: once we've beaten the threat of al-Qaeda, the next step ought to be to convert our current unofficial war on Islam into an official war on Islam. I'm sure that won't do ANYTHING to push more people into terrorism and radicalism.

Neo-conservatism is increasingly nothing more than a giant self-fulfilling prophecy.

**UPDATE** I forgot to mention this little nugget from See-dubya's post:

"Administrating the peace is every bit as important as winning the war, as the history of a badly drawn peace after WWI shows."

Of course, the fact that the peace after WWI was so badly drawn arose out of a desire to punish the Central Powers as much as possible (just as See-dubya wants to punish Islam as much as possible) seems to have escaped his memory.

(Last sentence edited for grammar)