I didn't say pragmatist.  I said realist.  I don't mean for the two be used interchangeably.  I mean realist in the political science sense, the sense of Hans Morgenthau and everyone after him right on down to Bill Kristol.  You can't just push aside political disingenuousness on this point because it's instrumental to understanding that the dichotomy you focus on, that of pragmatism on one side and principle on the other, is simply false.

The realists absolutely have principles.  They're just fundamentally different than the liberal/idealist view because they look at the world in a fundamentally different way.  They see the world as anarchic and view the pursuit of security and stability as the ultimate end.  That's why they prefer the appearance of democracy to the principle of self-governance itself.  They don't even think that people are generally competent to govern themselves.  The very notion that this is even possible is regarded, as Lippman said, as a "false ideal."

So, I agree with you that pure pragmatism and pure idealism are untenable because I can't even imagine what either would look like.  You could hold a principle, but without some notion of how to reach your goal in the context of the world in which you find yourself the principle wouldn't mean very much.  Principles are ultimately revealed through action or are consigned to be syllables in the wind.  Likewise with pragmatism, to what end would a pure pragmatist act?  Pragmatism without the context of worldview or goal doesn't make any sense to me.

This is why I think the frame of pragmatism versus principle is just wrong.  I can't even conceive of what it means.  Everyone has principles and everyone must employ pragmatism.  However, there is a genuine and fundamental difference of principle at work here that I would argue is obscured by the false dichotomy of pragmatism v. principle.

This is unfortunate because it benefits the realists much more than the liberals.  The Iraq war is a perfect example of this.  Instead of discussing their real principles, which they don't generally discuss on television, but are quite candid about in the relative quiet of the low-circulation journals that they routinely publish, they just act like they care about liberal principles.  So we heard a lot about being greeted as liberators, freeing Iraqis from tyranny, enabling them to democratize, etc.  In reality, they don't care about any of this.  They care about hegemony.

Of course, they don't want to debate their principle versus the liberal principle.  Liberal principles, like the liberal view in general, are much more popular.  People like the idea of self-governance.  The realists don't really care about that.  They don't even deign to argue for their principle because whether or not the mass of people agree with it is immaterial.  The whole point is that the mass of people don't get it in the first place.  They don't and won't, so what you need to do is manufacture their consent.  It's not a question of what people want.  It's a question of conditioning their preference such that they go along with the game plan.

So, the debate ends up being about who is the most pragmatic.  Cui bono?  I think we can see who benefits most from this frame, which we even see the evidence of in the academic names for these opposing views: "realist" and "idealist."

And, frankly, that's what I see here in Afghanistan: Lip-service being paid to an obviously bogus democracy, rubber-stamped as legitimate so we can continue to profess that we're doing whatever it is we're doing there with the noblest of intentions.