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.
Right you are, look what it did to Quedafy.
As I recall, the Liberals were screaming the war was over. They wanted G.W. to announce its end as it was deemed an asset to his popularity at the time. He waited weeks before doing so. Even still, great discussion occured on how to provide the *victory* speech without saying the war was officially over.
Let's not forget the context in how that event came about.
And so when he sought an alliance with al-Qaida over 10 years ago, he made a point of writing Allah Akbar on his flag and going to mosques.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
My second prediction was that the Iraqi people would welcome the U.S. as liberators . . . for about 48 hours. At which point that would do whatever they could to get us the hell out of there.
My third prediction was that the U.S. would take substantial casualties long after the "war" ended, and that the Bush administration grossly underestimated the duration of time in which these casualties would be making the news (the whole point was to get the thing over and done with long before the 2004 campaign).
My fourth prediction is that the notion of a "free Iraq" is preposterous, and that the nation will eventually split into three "statelets" that aren't even viable countries.
My fifth prediction is that the U.S. will end up playing one side against another in a civil war that will last there for a long time.
Cite the day he said that. I recall him saying something like that after the battle had begun and we'd taken the bridges intact - not before the war.
So Buckley would prefer the mass murdering tyrant Saddam still be filling his mass graves at a rate of 16,000/year today as we speak.
Disgusting.
That is an assumption. You are assuming a clandestine organized Iraqi and Syrian coordination and efficiency, and Syrian penchant for reckless risk taking, making them the next domino if caught out, that would surprise me greatly. If Syria was proved to be harboring WMD in some systematic way, Bush would go after them like a starving pit bull. Hopefully, we will both live long enough to find out one way or the other.
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Guess which country tops the list?
I opposed it, merely because had it gone through, we'd be suffering in an Algore Social Utopian Nightmare right about now.
"Political mulligans..."
I like your analogy
Oy use the spell checker or hire a typist.
That's like saying 9/11 was no big deal because we kill 3,000 human beings in abortion clinics in this country every 17 hours or so.
Fresh agitprop here!
The paleocons are like the America Firsters, who tacitly supported Hitler in their isolationism. The Firsters were, of course, dead wrong as history has proven.
Maybe Bush will issue a bill of particulars about Syria before the election. He certainly should, if he has the goods. I doubt that he does. I suspect, a lot of the WMD were never made. Saddam just thought they were. He was being ripped off. Just a wild guess.
Nope it is the damned truth. People get killed in war and we are getting a hell of a lot better at being the ones doing the killing.
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