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.
It gave me more information on how you weight competing considerations, and about the quality of your judgment. That is a fact.
“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.”
If we knew then what we know now, we could have prevented the attack on the Twin Towers.
What is Buckley's point?
Do you have any proof that Saddam wasn't in the CBW weapons manufacturing and development business? Is there something you know that Bush should know? There's 20-odd years of evidence that Saddam had WMD's. He didn't account for most of it, doesn't mean he didn't have any. Libya had them, Syria has them, and North Korea definately has the means to develop WMD's. This is not a wild guess, the proof is out there if you just Googled for it.
(1) It didn't matter whether there were WMDs.
(2) There were WMDs.
All this said, we could assume that 20-20 hindsight might have resulted in different actions. We must even assume that this hindsight would result in more effective actions. What would they have been? Maybe, we would have used military threats and intense diplomacy to go direct to the terror masters and toppled the mullahs in Iran. Saddam would then have wilted under pressure from a pro-Western democratic Iran.
I'm just spittin' cheese here.
George Will thinks Ronaldus Magnus was a 'lightweight?'
Oh sweet Lord, that is rich! LOL
By the way, have you heard that the Europeans have new evidence that verifies that Niger indeed made deals to sell yellow cake to Iraq and 4 other despotic states?
LOL. It isn't that site you can't trust its NBC, ABC, CBS and the democrat party.
This is Buckley's opinion from the Ivory tower he has occupied on Mt. olympus for many years. The man has certainy been a mover in the conservative movement, but I have always been put off by his pronouncements (they can only be called that) and sometimes disagree with them.
This writer's arguments are off the wall, too. Suddenly, he, Buckley, and the media think the Bush Admin. should have known more than the CIA, the FBI, international intel, Clinton, the UN, etc. concerning WMD.
This has erroneously been called a war of preemption--our very first, but I don't buy that. Hussein DID invade a neighboring country--Kuwait, and that was after fighting neighboring Iran for years over some territory. When we ran Iraq out of Kuwait, Saddam
agreed to certain conditions and we did not destroy the Republican Guard and most of his army. He NEVER kept his word, but instead attacked the Kurds, shot at our planes, and indulged in fraud on the oil for food program. He deserved to be brought down, but we would still be waiting for the UN to do anything except talk during breaks from hauling their Iraqi oil money to the bank.
There seems to me to be believable indications that Iraq supported terrorists including Al Queda with many kinds of help-safe harbor, money laundering, rewards for homicide bombers, etc.
How was any of this very different from fighting Germany before they hit us on our home territory? How did it differ from invading Mexico?
vaudine
Well said!! If I were the soldiers I would hate these anti-war seditionists(is that a word) as much as they love and support the CIC George Bush.
Then why did he quit in a huff when some of his resources were diverted to tasks not related to WMD? Yes that was his stated reason for quitting.
No, I didn't know that, but I never gave a damn about the African cake thingie. No policy issue for me turned on it. It bored me to death.
Umm...hope that wasn't directed at me? I was replying to another but ITA with your post.
So THAT is what happened to McLaughlin? I had been wondering.
He may forget that and you may forget that but rest assured, I will remember it until the angel of death knocks on my golf cart.
I'm just dying to know.
What would have been your next move in fighting terror after Afghanistan?
Gee. I know.
We should have just sat by and did nothing as the puss-infection terror-harboring caldron that is the Iran, Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen triangle just came to its senses on its own, and willingly swore off its mission to gain nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons with which to attack America.
No, my friend. The invasion of Afghan would never have been enough to demonstrate our resolve.
Without our successful decapitation of Saddam Hussein, the 9/11 attacks would have been seen throughout most of the Arab world as a victory, one that would have excited their inner Jihadist juices to the point they would have collectively worked toward standing up to the US.
With our successful takedown of Iraq, we have lanced the boil that was Terrorism Central, and yes, the nexis of that terror operation was centered in Iraq.
PS: TERRORISTS DO NOT ISSUE SIGNED CONTRACTS WHEN THEY CUT DEALS WITH EACH OTHER TO LAUNCH ATTACK OPERATIONS AGAINST THE US.
In other words, if you are sitting around waiting for us to find some smoking gun of a document showing that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were in cahoots, you will be waiting for a long, long time, until perhaps a biological agent is dropped near your hometown.
Tough one.
I agree that it is going to be very, very tough to get these people to form a country.
But that was not the reason we went there. We went there to get rid of Saddam and his two sons, and end a threat you don't believe existed, but I do.
Now, that that is done, do you want to help, or hinder any hope they have? Or should you just get out of the way?
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