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.
That position is not ridiculous. In fact, it sounds like the position of someone who thinks he was conned into believing something that he always suspected wasn't true.
LOL.
The jury is still out on this one.
Meanwhile, there have been no new terrorist attacks on the US mainland.
In my eyes, that alone justifies Bush's war on terrorism as it unfolds in Iraq.
Invade Iraq(see the article); allow a massive invasion of third worlders who are now aggressively moving to take control; destroy our manufacturing, and they are now busy working on the destruction of our transportation industry;discriminate against their own people in work and in admissions to school; support those who attack the display of Christian symbols-said symbols being displayed for centuries;spend the country ever closer to bankruptcy; supporting the homosexuals while paying lip service to a marriage amendment. It goes on and on. Yet, where do we go Kerry is worse, by about one tenth of one per cent!
I don't care who you add. You and your crew are wrong. Speaking of crews, Buckley is obviously over the bar - he's given up sailing, so you can't put any stock in anything he says. He's beyond hope.
sign me - Dark Harbor 17 owner
Well, in 20 years, we can get out the Ouija Board, and maybe find out that his position has yet again changed.
Yeah, and out of 9/11 bombers almost all were Iraqis.
Well then you haven't been reading my posts since 1998. I'm more conservative - - on govt spending, taxes, pro-life, anti-Clinton, anti-Hillary, envirocrazies -- than many, many freepers. Yes, I disagree with Bush on his bonehead invasion of Iraq, but I have to vote for him, because of all those other issues (Even though he's spending too much). And Kerry? He's for the war - - he agrees with you -- so please don't say that because I opposed the invasion, I'm pro-Kerry. Show more intelligence than that.
I can't believe WFB dosen't see the BIG PICTURE.
Iraq, besides defaulting on inspections and the No-Fly-Zone for 10-odd years, is strategically located to Syria and Iran!
I like Bill Buckley, but from time to time he's just plain wrong.
You have to love these so called "true conservatives" (yeah, just like seminar callers on Rush and Hannity) that are so self rightous and think that there is no chance they could be wrong and anyone who holds a different view is to be slammed as "neocon", fascist, or worse.
I think it also didn't hurt to make an example of Hussein.
If true,he's lost his marbles and it's a damned good thing that he's retiring!
That is an idiotic rationalization. The only reason he knows for sure that there have been no WMD found in large quantities is that we invaded in the first place. Had we not invaded we would STILL be dealing with the pre-war intelligence that stated he had them. As to post occupation woes, NO one said it was going to be a damned cake walk and the moment the first sign of an insurgency cropped up the Democrats and Media IMMEDIATELY started with the Quagmire crap and the more they pushed it the harder the insurgents fought to make it so.
Hey WFB - thanks for 50 years of thoughtful ideas.
Bye Bye.
WHEN did Will think Reagan a fool? He worked on Reagan's election campaign team in 1980.
What should be American policy toward despots who give santuary to those who murder American citizens?
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