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.
Wow....thank you for posting that. Hadn't seen it. Good news.
When you make predictions, be prepared to measure them against tomorrow, which has not come yet.
At the lead-up to the war, I was extremely ambivalent about it, and had doubts that there was sufficient causus bellum under "just war" theory. After it happened, I supported it, because that is what one does when one's country is at war, barring exceptional circumstances.
Looking back on it now, sure...it's easy to say, "well, we haven't found many WMDs, and Saddam had pretty much dismantled his WMD programs, at least for the time being, so there was no real justification for our timetable."
But, that is not really fair, IMO, because our intelligence agreed with the intelligence from other countries...as far as they knew, he did have those weapons, was somewhat unpredictable, and did have contacts with terrorists, even if they may have been informal or infrequent.
A prudential judgment was made, based on the best information available, and so we went in. One must also consider that we did remove an awful dictator from power, and have set free a people who lived under his tyranny for a generation. That should count for something on the other side of the balance sheet, I'd say.
Believe me...I am no apologist for neocon warmongering. But, while the sentiment for war may have gone overboard in early 2003, it has gone too far the other way now, and too many people are assigning blame too widely to people that made difficult decisions at a difficult time.
Maybe the paleocons are like the America Firsters who didn't see the sense of siding with a Soviet despot who killed 30 million people against a German despot who killed 12 million.
Alright pal, what did you do with my friend Torie? :-}
Major fighting = formation fighting. We are certainly no longer fighting tanks and APCs or battle-lines. Now it's little hit and run raids and roadside bombs.
As for losses, well we haven't lost 3,000 like we did when we didn't show we'd respond and uphold our word. I think that's a fair standard to use before we even consider the losses major.
David Kay is on KGO radio www.kgo.com right now. He just said Iraq didn't have WMDs. The reason we thought they did, he said, is that some Iraqi defectors told us "what they thought we wanted to hear." Listen in - though your mind is pretty closed to facts, as I understand.
That potentially says volumes about you, I'm afraid. I will leave it at that.
Add another one to the bandwagon. 4 years from now, when the Middle East looks entirely different than it does today, with a free and democratic Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia... and all because of Dubya's and Blair's courage and leadership and the professionalism of the US Military and its Allies in the UK and elsewhere, expect the mea culpas to flow freely. That is, if Buckley is still alive to admit that he's an ass.
It is a terrible shame about Goldwater. He married a young very liberal woman in his later years,and his aging mind was influenced immediately. It was so painful to watch this pioneer conservative turn liberal overnight with pro gay and other radical leftist statements. Mclaughlin was another sad case of conservative off the reservation for "poon tang". He was a former Priest that suddenly married a younger woman,and almost immediately began spouting non- conservative drivel. He is a male version of Eleanor Rodham Cliff now,except he is decidedly more feminine looking.
I can still hear Baghdad Bob saying so convincingly that the Americans are being slaughtered and absolutely not in the city.
I can also still hear the North Korean government saying they have no nuclear program.
Why in the world are some people so ready to accept what others say on face value?
Interesting site. When some organization or media outlet I trust picks it up, and runs with it, I will get back to you. Why hasn't Bush mentioned it?
Actually, the very first prediction I made with regard to Iraq dates all the way back to 1990. While engaged in a discussion about the merits of the first Persian Gulf War, I responded to some jack@ss who called Saddam Hussein "worse than Hitler" with the following:
"If he's worse than Hitler, you're going to be terribly disappointed when the U.S. leaves him right there in Baghdad, and he ends up being the leader of Iraq long after George Bush is no longer President of the United States."
As far as I'm concerned, the only reason we needed to take out Saddam was that he repeatedly violated the cease fire provisions resulting from the first Gulf War.
He fired upon U.S. aircraft flying in the zone where they, by prior agreement, had a right to fly. That's it. Nothing more is needed. He chose to violate the cease fire agreement and demonstrated an intention and the will to continue hostilities.
Oh yeah and that little event in the '50s.
I was referring to Reagans part. :)
Well, tough sh!t. It ain't my job to make people feel good.
Most likely, four years from now, S.A. will still have ruling royals.
David Kay, the weapons inspector, is on www.kgo.com right now, in a half-hour interview. He says Saddam didn't have WMDs by the late 90s. The few shells we've come across are left over from the 80s and essentially harmless as degraded, he said. Tune in - although I know you're not open to facts that challenge your ideology.
Governments have NO right to tell a company/corporation where they have to be.You obviously have absolutely no idea what America is all about and yearn for SOCIALISM.
As to the rest of that manure you're spreading...take someplace else.You aren't a Conservative...just a Liberal who doesn't yet know he/she's a LIBERAL
And if more people desert the GOP,dear,there won't be enough of you to do anything other than to insure that the Dems takes over for the next several generations,or until Sharia Law replaces the Constitution and most Americans are murdered.
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