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I was planning on commenting today on David Brook's latest love letter to SecDef Gates, but it looks like Greg D beat me to it. First, Brooks:

Robert Gates has been a godsend. After a bombastic defense secretary, we now have a candid one. After ego, we have self-effacement. After domination, we have a man who welcomes discussion.

Gates was decisive during the Walter Reed hospital fiasco. He is honest and trustworthy on Iraq. And on Monday, at the World Forum on the Future of Democracy at the Colonial Williamsburg here, Gates delivered a speech that could define the center ground of American foreign policy.

He ran through the history of the never-ending debate between realists and idealists. He noted that this debate began just after the founding of the Republic. Thomas Jefferson saw the French Revolution as a triumph for liberty. John Adams saw it as reckless radicalism.

Throughout the messy years that followed, Gates explained, we have made deals with tyrants to defeat other tyrants. We’ve championed human rights while doing business with some of the worst violators of human rights.

“It is neither hypocrisy nor cynicism to believe fervently in freedom while adopting different approaches to advancing freedom at different times along the way,” Gates said...

Over the long term, Gates represents a shift in the foreign policy center of gravity. Over the short term, he is, to use a phrase he borrows from the historian Joseph Ellis, “improvising on the edge of catastrophe.”

A shift in the center of gravity? OK, sure. There's no reason to disagree with that. The question, however, is what he is shifting away from, and also what he is shifting towards. Here's Greg's response:

Now I know, in a cretin-infested Washington, these rays of common-sense appear the second-coming. But really, friends, come now. Of course you need to speak to the "bad guys" at times. Of course democracy takes time. Of course we aren't going to end tyranny in the world under the Decider's watch (reinstituting habeas corpus in this country would be a good start, however). Again, we had diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union throughout the entire Cold War. Nixon and Kissinger opened up dialogue with Red China. But the gang of mediocrities in Washington spend time coaxing Olmert not to speak to dastardly Bashar, because agenda-ridden third-tier players like a Dave Wurmser would get bummed out. In similar vein, we have a Mitt Romney (showing that success in private equity can still have you proving a reckless simpleton on foreign policy) clamoring for an Alan Dershowitz or John Bolton to serve process to Ahmadi-Nejad when he gets off the tarmac at Kennedy for the UNGA. This type of ribald fare is turning this country into a provincial-looking laughing-stock. But yes, OK, god speed to Gates. I can protest Foreign Policy 101 being heralded as some great new hybrid of 'realism and idealism' or such, but still, I'll take a sane SecDef over a criminally negligent one any day of the week.

What we are returning to is called reality. It's called tradition mixed with common sense. It's called a return to the foreign policy consensus created by liberals in the years following WWII. It's a return to the behavior that made the US a world leader in the first place. It's a rejection of utopianism in favor of realism. This is all wonderful news.

So what bothers me about Brooks? It is that he still has not accepted and admitted the role he played in dragging us away from reality in the first place. He, like so many other conservative pundits, is not an innocent bystander in this. He is a columnist for the NYT. By definition, his words matter.

Here, for example, is what Brooks had to say following Bush's inaugural address, a moment that captured with absolute clarity Bush's rejection of everything Brooks praises today. Brooks:

Two years from now, no one will remember the spending or the ostrich-skin cowboy boots. But Bush's speech, which is being derided for its vagueness and its supposed detachment from the concrete realities, will still be practical and present in the world, yielding consequences every day.

With that speech, President Bush's foreign policy doctrine transcended the war on terror. He laid down a standard against which everything he and his successors do will be judged.

When he goes to China, he will not be able to ignore the political prisoners there, because he called them the future leaders of their free nation. When he meets with dictators around the world, as in this flawed world he must, he will not be able to have warm relations with them, because he said no relations with tyrants can be successful.

His words will be thrown back at him and at future presidents. American diplomats have been sent a strong message. Political reform will always be on the table. Liberation and democratization will be the ghost present at every international meeting. Vladimir Putin will never again be the possessor of that fine soul; he will be the menace to democracy and rule of law.

Because of that speech, it will be harder for the U.S. government to do what we did to Latin Americans for so many decades - support strongmen to rule over them because they happened to be our strongmen. It will be harder to frustrate the dreams of a captive people, the way in the early 1990's we tried to frustrate the independence dreams of Ukraine.

It will be harder for future diplomats to sit on couches flattering dictators, the way we used to flatter Hafez al-Assad of Syria decade after decade. From now on, the borders established by any peace process will be less important than the character of the regimes in that process.

The speech does not command us to go off on a global crusade, instantaneously pushing democracy on one and all. The president vowed merely to "encourage reform." He insisted that people must choose freedom for themselves. The pace of progress will vary from nation to nation.

The speech does not mean that Bush will always live up to his standard. But the bias in American foreign policy will shift away from stability and toward reform. It will be harder to cozy up to Arab dictators because they can supposedly help us in the war on terror. It will be clearer that those dictators are not the antidotes to terror; they're the disease.

Bush's inaugural ideals will also be real in the way they motivate our troops in Iraq. Military Times magazine asked its readers if they think the war in Iraq is worth it. Over 60 percent - and two-thirds of Iraq combat vets - said it was. While many back home have lost faith, our troops fight because their efforts are aligned with the core ideals of this country, articulated by Jefferson, Walt Whitman, Lincoln, F.D.R., Truman, J.F.K., Reagan and now Bush.

Americans are, as George Santayana observed, "idealists working on matter." On Thursday in Washington, the ideal and the material were on ample display. And we're reminded once again that this country has grown rich, powerful and effective not because its citizens are smarter or better, but because the ideals bequeathed by the founders are practical and true.

It simply is not possible to square that column with the one he wrote today. It cannot be done. One praises idealism, the other rejects it. Brooks might argue he intended a middle way, that we must read between the lines of what he writes, but come now... the man gets paid to write opinion columns for a living, not political philosophy. The point of his job is to be clear, not obtuse.

Or take this column comparing the visions of Bush and Kerry prior to the 2004 election - an election, mind you, in which Bush received Brooks' support:

When Bush talks about the world he hopes to create, he talks first about spreading freedom. What he's really talking about is a decentralized world. Individuals would be free to live as they chose, in their own nations, carving out their own destinies.

The optimism built into this vision is that free people would be able to live in basic harmony. There would not need to be any central authority governing their interactions. Indeed, Bushian conservatives talk about central global authorities like the U.N. the way they talk about Washington - as places where venal elites gather to serve their own interests.

When Kerry talks about the world he hopes to create, he talks first about alliances and multilateral cooperation. He's really talking about a crowded world. People from different nations would gather to work out differences and manage problems.

The optimism built into this vision is that nations will sometimes be able to set aside their rivalries and narrow self-interests and work cooperatively to thwart the sorts of global threats posed by Saddam Hussein, or genocides like the one in Sudan. Kerryesque liberals are concerned by the possibility that some nations will go off and behave individualistically or, as they say, unilaterally.

Put this way, the argument we are having about international relations is the same argument we are having about domestic affairs, just on a larger scale. It's a conflict between two value systems. One is based on a presumption of a world in which individuals and nations should be self-reliant and free to develop their own capacities - forming voluntary associations when they want - without being overly coerced by national or global elites. The other is based on the presumption of a crowded world, which emphasizes that no individual or nation can go off and do as it pleases, but should work instead within governing institutions that establish norms and provide security.

This formulation explains why Bush's foreign policy is not an aberration of conservatism, as Pat Buchanan and the other paleocons argue, but is actually its fruition. This formulation also explains why, in The Times Magazine on Sunday, Kerry compared terrorism to domestic organized crime, gambling and prostitution. In his mind there should exist an effective body of international law. It is a law enforcement problem when some group violates that law.

Seen in these terms, this election is not just a conflict of two men, but is a comprehensive conflict of visions. Both these visions have been bloodied of late. Still, they do address the central issue confronting us: How do we conceive of an international order in the post-9/11 world? Bush, the conservative, conceives of a flexible, organic, spontaneous order. Kerry, the liberal, conceives of a more rationalist, planned and managed order.

Brooks supported Bush's vision of the world then. But now, however, it is Bush's vision that he and Gates are rejecting. This is, he claims, a return to the center, a rebalancing of our national center of gravity. No admission about how we were knocked off balance in the first place.

One more column and then I will let this go. Take a look at this:

It's a huge gamble to think that the solution to chaos is liberty. But it's fitting that during the gravest crisis of his presidency, President Bush reverted to his most fundamental political belief. He began this war in Iraq repeating the sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence, that our creator has endowed all human beings with the right to liberty, and the ability to function as democratic citizens. He said last night with absolute confidence that the Iraqis are democrats at heart.

Bush is betting his presidency, and the near-term future of this nation, on that central American creed.

It's an epic gamble. Because, let's face it, we don't know whether all people really do want to live in freedom. We don't know whether Iraqis have any notion of what democratic citizenship really means. We don't know whether they hear words like freedom, liberty and pluralism as deadly insults to the way of life they hold dear. We don't know who our enemies are. Are they the small minority of Baathists and jihadists, or is there a little bit of Moktada al-Sadr in every Iraqi's breast?

Bush is putting this tenet of our national creed to a fearsome test in the worst possible circumstances. For the past year Americans have committed horrible blunders. And if this gamble fails, it won't be only the competence of our officials that will be called into question -- it will be the American creed itself. Since before the nation's founding, Americans have thought of themselves as the great democratic champions of the globe.

If this gamble fails to come off, then that mission will seem, to many, false. Perhaps democracy and freedom are not really universal values, some will say. Perhaps they are just the outgrowths of a specific culture. People on the left and right will race to withdraw from the world. It will become difficult to take on the tyrants who will menace the world...

Bush is betting his presidency on the Iraqis and their ability to govern themselves better than we governed them. At least he is now behaving consistently with the elemental conviction of this nation. If we have faith in anything, it should be in this democratic dream, which has so far, in our history, vindicated our hopes.

That "gamble" that Bush took with our country and by extension the world? That "consistency" that Brooks cheered on for not just months but years? That "gamble" is precisely what Gates' speech rejects. That "gamble" is precisely what realists like Gates work every day to avoid. Brooks once predicted it would be vindicated, how he's acting as if it should be obvious to everyone that it never had a chance in the first place.