Sunday news roundup

David Brooks, "smart conservative" and Shannon airport fan writes, in the course of bashing Bono's pal Jeff Sachs in the New York Times:

... [Sachs] delivers an unreconstructed tribute to the 18th-century Enlightenment, when leading thinkers had an amazing confidence in their ability to refashion reality so that it would conform to reason ... The Bush folks, at least when it comes to Africa policy, have learned from centuries of conservative teaching - from Burke to Oakeshott to Hayek - to be skeptical of Sachsian grand plans. Conservatives emphasize that it is a fatal conceit to think we can understand complex societies, or rescue them from above with technocratic planning.

With these clauses, Brooks sets a record for the most intellectually weaselish use of "at least" because of course the Bush Iraq policy is precisely the idea that complex societies are easily understood via the Freedom^TM goggles and that the "Broader Middle East" can be remade through a Democratic Big Push.

In other news, reality has intruded on this Big Push, and completely predictably, the US is now negotiating with the "terrorists" in Iraq:

U.S. officials recently met secretly with Iraqi insurgent commanders at a summer villa north of Baghdad to try to negotiate an end to the bloodshed, a British newspaper [the Sunday Times] reported Sunday.

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, asked about the report, suggested that meetings between Iraqi officials and insurgents "go on all the time" and said "we facilitate those from time to time."

So Rummy wants you to think that the US official was there like one of those annoying facilitators at a corporate retreat. But the talks seem to have been pretty substantive:

One American at the talks introduced himself as a Pentagon representative and declared himself ready to "find ways of stopping the bloodshed on both sides and to listen to demands and grievances," The Sunday Times said ... During the June 13 talks, the U.S. officials demanded that two other insurgent groups, the 1920 Revolution and the Majhadeen Shoura Council, cut ties with the country's most-feared insurgent group, al-Qaida in Iraq, according to the report.

A senior U.S. official said earlier this month that American authorities have negotiated with key Sunni leaders, who are in turn talking with insurgents and trying to persuade them to lay down their arms.

As we noted before, there is likely disagreement within the Pentagon about this strategy, with Christopher Hitchens and Dan Senor doing the spinning for the US government factions opposed to talks. All in all, another sign that the market for Iraq-Northern Ireland analogies is about to heat up again. [or, via A Fistful of Euros, Iraq-Spain analogies]