Posted on 06/29/2004 7:00:20 PM PDT by churchillbuff
“With the benefit of minute hindsight, Saddam Hussein wasn’t the kind of extra-territorial menace that was assumed by the administration one year ago. If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war.”
Those words are William F. Buckley’s, from an article in yesterday’s New York Times marking Buckley’s decision to relinquish control of the National Review, the flagship journal of the conservative movement he founded 50 years ago.
Also out on the newsstands now, in The Atlantic Monthly, is an essay Buckley wrote describing his decision to give up sailing after a lifetime covering the world’s oceans and writing about it.
Mortality is the backdrop of both decisions, as the 78-year-old Buckley explains. In the Atlantic essay he describes his decision to abandon the sea as one of assessing whether “the ratio of pleasure to effort [is] holding its own [in sailing]? Or is effort creeping up, pleasure down? … deciding that the time has come to [give up sailing] and forfeit all that is not lightly done … brings to mind the step yet ahead, which is giving up life itself.”
There is certainly no shortage today of people saying the Iraq venture was wrongheaded. But Bill Buckley is Bill Buckley. And perhaps it is uniquely possible for a man at the summit or the sunset of life — choose your metaphor — to state so crisply and precisely what a clear majority of the American public has already decided (54 percent according to the latest Gallup poll): that the president’s Iraq venture was a mistake.
So with the formal end of the occupation now behind us, let’s take stock of the arguments for war and see whether any of them any longer hold up.
• The threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
To the best of our knowledge, the Hussein regime had no stockpiles of WMD on the eve of the war nor any ongoing programs to create them. An article this week in the Financial Times claims that Iraq really was trying to buy uranium from Niger despite all the evidence to the contrary. But new “evidence” appears merely to be unsubstantiated raw intelligence that was wisely discounted by our intelligence agencies at the time.
Advocates of the war still claim that Saddam had “WMD programs.” But they can do so only by using a comically elastic definition of “program” that never would have passed the laugh test if attempted prior to the war.
• The Iraq-al Qaeda link.
To the best of our knowledge, the Hussein regime had no meaningful — or as the recent Sept. 11 Commission staff report put it, “collaborative” — relationship with al Qaeda. In this case too, there’s still a “debate.” Every couple of months we hear of a new finding that someone who may have had a tie to Saddam may have met with someone connected to al Qaeda.
But as in the case of WMD, it’s really mock debate, more of a word game than a serious, open question, and a rather baroque one at that. Mostly, it’s not an evidentiary search but an exercise in finding out whether a few random meetings can be rhetorically leveraged into a “relationship.” If it can, supposedly, a rationale for war is thus salvaged.
The humanitarian argument for the war remains potent — in as much as Saddam’s regime was ruthlessly repressive. But in itself this never would have been an adequate argument to drive the American people to war — and, not surprisingly, the administration never made much of it before its other rationales fell apart.
The broader aim of stimulating a liberalizing and democratizing trend in the Middle East remains an open question — but largely because it rests on unknowables about the future rather than facts that can be proved or disproved about the past. From the vantage point of today, there seems little doubt that the war was destabilizing in the short run or that it has strengthened the hands of radicals in countries like Iran and, arguably though less clearly, Saudi Arabia. The best one can say about the prospects for democracy in Iraq itself is that there are some hopeful signs, but the overall outlook seems extremely iffy.
Surveying the whole political landscape, it is clear that a large factor in keeping support for the war as high as it is is the deep partisan political divide in the country, which makes opposing the war tantamount to opposing its author, President Bush, a step most Republicans simply aren’t willing to take.
At a certain point, for many, conflicts become self-justifying. We fight our enemies because our enemies are fighting us, quite apart from whether we should have gotten ourselves into the quarrel in the first place.
But picking apart the reasons why we got into Iraq in the first place and comparing what the administration said in 2002 with what we know in 2004, it is increasingly difficult not to conclude, as a majority of the American public and that founding father of modern conservatism have now concluded, that the whole enterprise was a mistake.
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Many people like Buckley are missing the point. The invasion of Iraq was not about the publicly stated reasons. The whole thing was basically tounge-in-cheek. It was about kicking a little Middle Eastern ass to make a point. If we were going to flex our muscle there was no better candidate than Iraq. The arabs perceived us as not finishing the job there or Somolia or Vietnam. The liberation of Iraq was about getting in the faces of the muslim world and saying "Dont #@$ with me!"
The reason the terrorists hit us on 9/11 is because they perceived us as weak. Iraq was more about making a statement, than any direct reason the media has obsessed on. I have no problem with it.
Both Buckley and Will forget one thing: that wars seldom have a conclusion. What has been set in motion cannot be called back nor will we ever know their final outcome. The Spanish American War was precipitated by the sinking of the "Maine." Knowing now it was probably caused by an accidental fire that caused an explosion in the ships magazine, not by a Spanish mine and certainly not deliberately by the Spaniard, means that it was just one in a whole chain of events leading inevitably to the expulsion of Spain from Cuba. I say to them: enjoy the ride; you will soon realize how irrelevant your conclusions are.
BTW, during his two terms Reagan was supporting Saddam Hussein in fight against Islamists.
Good Lord, you are trying to rewrite history, right on this thread. You've conveniently forgotten the QUAQMIRE of Iraq in the first three weeks.
Bill Buckley choosing to ride into the sunset as an appeasing irrelevancy.
Reminds me of the liberal postions taken by Senator Barry Goldwater at the end of his public life.
Too tired out to fight the libs, so they join 'em.
Scr*w 'em.
Intellectuals. Hah.
Actually, I'm a realist. And since I'm an engineer by trade, I'm an optimist by nature.
So if I express doubts about something beforehand, you would do well to ponder them.
No Clinton wagged the dog in the Sudan and Afghanistan but he bombed Iraq twice, once after the assassination attempt on Bush 1 and when Iraq kicked out the inspectors. Neither of those were tied to Monica. Get your facts straight.
In Will's case, it was hindsight. In my case, it was foresight (to a large extent).
And FR has quite a few;unfortunately.
The bloom is gone. The pedals have fallen.
Either way, a trip to the optometrist is in order for both of you.
Good that Buckley and Will finally came around. Too bad it took them so long to do so
I assume you do realize that we fought two wars against the communist and were involved in a few others with that aim in mind. Those who say Reagan won the cold war with firing a shot are ignoring history.
FWIW, I adamantly opposed the war until it began.
Then, I supported it whole-heartedly. I still do.
IF the USA remains united in the cause, the operation will prove a resounding and long term success: dealing the terrorists a devastating blow and greatly increasing the security of our nation.
But, if nitpicking, backbiting, and seditious dissent hold sway, we are in for a failure more tragic than Vietnam.
The success or failure of this mission rests entirely on the will of the American people. If they are told over and over and over and over and over that the war was a "mistake," and if they learn to believe that, we will fail. And we may never again hold the upper hand in the war on terror.
But, that's okay, I suppose, as long as some can say "I told you so."
I guess we were supposed to bomb the home country of the 9/11 bombers. Makes perfect sense to destroy our 80-year old strategic trading partnership with the House of Saud because some of it's inhabitants hate the West.??
I agree that we should have gone in Afganistan. THAT'S where the enemy was. The war in Iraqi was NOT for the war on terror. It was a war that took ADVANTAGE of our war on terror. If it was to try to install a government that WE can work with, then we shouldn't have been fed that other BS about "helping the Iraqi people", "saddam is a threat to us" blah blah blah. Bush should have just said "Hey. We're going to take over this evil government because we want to manipulate what goes on in the middle east to our advantage."
If George W. Bush had known in May 2003 that there was any chance in hell that the events in Iraq of the last 12 months would unfold as they have, do you think he would have even dreamed of that silly "Mission Accomplished" act on the deck of the aircraft carrier?
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