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.
"There may have been a number of factors that were involved in that trip, but the decision to have the President make that trip was based specifically on this administration's need to take Hillary's Thanksgiving dinner in Afghanistan off the top of the news.
This isn't a complaint about Bush's trip to Iraq, mind you . . . I said at the time that I thought it was a stroke of political genious."
Actually I have never seen one bit of evidence that the two events were calculated by the administration. From my understanding the "idea" floated came long before the "sex" goddess Hillry went looking for her "commander-in-chief" stars.
The same holds for the origin of the "Mission Accomplished" sign, BTW.
But according to your profile, you're looking outside the country for a wife. Apparently you forgot you support open borders.
We have to fight this one step at a time. I stil say Iraq was the right thing to do.
You decided to start it with nopardons. That's where it began. Stupidity and willful blindness is not an effective tack to be taking, by the way.
More neat stuff. It is, and has been, in point of fact YOU who has been obsessed with following me down this thread's "vein" post by post by pathetic post.
Excuse me, who has the one who has been saying repeatedly that they can carry this on for hours, if not days? Not I, except in reply to you emphasising it in all caps. Even so, I'm only carrying on in reply as it goes against my principles to allow someone who thinks they can bully my friends off the hook.
Uh-huh...whatever you say, but the posts, for anyone interested, tell a rather different tale...all "yapping poodles" aside...LOL. What a deal...
You're a very delusional young man.
This is the richest part of your ongoing delusions, and the one that makes me guffaw the hardest...there was, and is, no "peace offer" on my part, to be sure, but go right on lying to yourself, if that makes you feel better.
You wish I was lying. Unfortunately your wishes do not make things so. You cannot wave a magic wand and automatically take back what you said nor how you said it. You were obviously looking for a way out of the impasse, ergo, trying to make peace - I told you precisely what I would accept. It's not my fault that you don't want to accept it, nor that you cannot come to terms with the fact that you did make a peace gesture.
you're a twit, and pretty much a liar, and here we are.
Come now, really. Your mask is slipping again, and what do we see underneath - the sneer, the arrogance, the condescending attitude. That plus your unwillingness to acknowledge the meaning of what you've said or indeed that you said it...blimey, Bill Clinton, is that you?
Jovial Cad wouldn't be a bad handle for Sideshow Bill.
Ivan
"That's my point. Your "understanding" of the Iraq trip is based entirely on information that came out after the fact -- with no substantiation other than what the media has been told by the White House.
The same holds for the origin of the "Mission Accomplished" sign, BTW."
Wait a minute, you have proof otherwise. I will willingly re-examine what I witnessed and read from the administration "IF" there is evidence to the contrary.
WHOSE ORIGIN. For those on that CARRIER their "Mission" was "Accomplished".
They weren't hammered day in and day out for 4 years with negative information about that war, either. Can you imagine the outcry if every night they had anti-war opinions hurled at them from their radios? They didn't have the visuals that we have now, or things may have been completely different! Think of how the citizens might have reacted seeing the footage from Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Normandy, or the Battle of the Bulge. They got to see a limited number of pictures in Life Magazine, or in their local newspapers, NOT run 24/7 on TV screens, as we have now.
If every illegal wants to marry an American citizen to get here LEGALLY, then I'm all for it. But then, that's not what you want, is it? You want slave labor to run your business so your wallet can get fatter.
See, this is the difference between me and most other folks on this thread.
A conservative is someone who instinctively distrusts his government. A Republican is someone who instinctively distrusts Democrats.
Count me among the former.
If a foreign head of state attempted to assassinate a former U.S. president, he should have been removed from power by whatever means necessary immediately. For this country to wait ten years before doing anything about it . . . well, that really explains why Osama bin Laden didn't think much about the ability of the U.S. to respond to his attacks, doesn't it?
Also because we let the UN dictate the parameters.
Most "conservatives" I knew at the time have nobody to blame but themselves for that -- because they made the mistake of using the "U.N. mandates" to justify their support of Gulf War I.
Now that is a great reply. Why should murder have meaning? It is Iraqis being murdered after all. (Just like the attitude about the Jews prior to Dec 7, 1941.
Oh, spare me this nonsense.
Captured on video.
Yep. But you have no idea about the context of those things. If the torture and murder you saw were the Ba'athist government's way of dealing with people like Zarqawi and al-Sadr, you'd probably have about 99% of the people here on FR wishing the U.S. would do the same thing.
Hey Meek,
Then we agree (I think).
You disagreed with the President on CFR, as I have. And you expressed your opinions forthrightly.
In other words, when you express your opinions out in the open, it's not backstabbing.
P.S. I've had my tagline a while.
But reasonable people weren't opposed to WWII -- we were fighting two countries that had declared war on us first, one of which did a sneak attack. The reason why there are some reasonable people (including some generals) who opposed invading Iraq is that the situations are far from parallel. Iraq didn't attack us; it wasn't clear then that Iraq was an imminent threat to us, and it's VERY CLEAR NOW that it wasn't.
So you're buying the line that we fought this war for Israel? Your claim that being opposed to this war equals being "anti-Israel" can only imply, logically, that you think we fought this war for Israel, or that Israel's interests were advanced by this war. That's interesting -- I've only heard that argument, before, from people who really ARE "anti-Israel".
Since you were addressed, please see post #654.
THX
SD
No, he meant it very seriously. In fact, his wife had to publicly disavow the statement. Remember, they are both NYers with many liberal (and probably gay) friends. Pat Buckley is extremely social.
And I'm not confusing him with Norman Mailer, another idiot. Buckley did defend a murderer - I'm almost sure the guy killed his wife.
He didn't have the capability to do that. So we've lost 100s of American lives on a needless expedition.
Additionally, there are some evil injustices which must be addressed and punished regardless of real or perceived political expediency.
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