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.
The Chinese commies OWN Washington, both sides of the aisle.
At least your screen name fits.
At Academy Awards last year, they booed Michael Moore when he spoke against the war"
He was booed by the GALLERY while accepting an Oscar from an applauding Academy of Loony Lefty Hollywooders...
Oh, no doubt. When the hard work has been accomplished a number of conservatives that have abandoned the President when it was rough will wish to seek credit. They won't be able to as we'll remember everthing they said.
Heard on the news that there will be a board of directors-type heading the National Review-wonder if Rush is going to be one of the members??
Truly baffled by Buckley's remarks-makes ya think he is ill. And George Will is a puss from way back. Any man worth his salt would have resigned from ABC even before Steffy came on board.
(snip)I'm with Reagan - he beat the communists without invading the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe -(snip)
We could have beat them 35-40 years earlier if we would have listened to Patton.
Torie, I agree with you. I did not mean to say Buckley made his statement for that reason. "That reason" being giving cover - making it OK for conservatives to say the Iraq war would not have been worth it, or some such.
I believe, whatever he meant, he was sincere. I meant that these "pronouncements" - as someone here has been calling them - by Will and Buckley could come to a good effect. I really think we should tone down the rhetoric. Out there in the campaign, the election must not come down to whether folks become convinced that Saddam had WMDs and conspired with al Qaeda. Even though I think those things, this election can be won without convincing all of the electorate of them.
If you are so all-knowing, and if your examples are correct you are good, who will win on Nov. 2 and by how much?
Also...Powerball numbers for this week please?
LOL...let's just forget it,shall we? :-)
It's worse than that...old time conservatives cut their teeth on old Republican party isolationism...
Yes it is very sad how he became totally unwatchable. He was getting weird even before the marriage. Probably trying to please her so she would not split.
You mean this??
"Bush takes away our freedoms with the "patriot" act,...
Bushbots: It's for our own good! Remember 9/11,..Remember 9/11,...Remember 9/11,...Remember 9/11,...
Bush allows corporations to move overseas and still sell to America with no penalities,...
Bushbots: Strong super-companies are GOOD for America. There's PLENTY of jobs out there,...TONS of jobs,..REALLY,...
Bush takes us into a war with a country which was NO THREAT to us,...
Bushbots: It was for the (Iraqi)CHILDREN,...WMD? What WMD? We never said no such thing,..
Bushbots are just like the democrats with clinton: they will destroy their conservative values to support him; actually losing what it meant to be a conservative to get him elected.
Thankfully, more and more people are finally starting to see the truth about this "compassionate" conservative."
That was from the same post I was replying to. I didn't bother to refer to the last point. I accidentally repeated half of Merdoug's post at the end of mine when I posted before. You can review the original posts to ascertain this is true.
Gen. Schwarzkoff ran a good war, but got a lot of Iraq fighters killed when he worked out that stupid deal. That let Sadam kill all the people we promised we would help fight sadam.
26 million Iraqis don't have to watch a video of their daughters being raped.
Female students don't have to fear being raped by Saddam's sons, covering in honey, and fed to hungry lions.
Millions of Kurds aren't being chemically gassed.
Men aren't having their eyes gouged out, their limbs chopped off.
And we have buried Salman Pak.
God Bless America.
And what happened at Yalta ( FDR selling out Eartern Europe),happened fore at least two reasons....FDR was dying and his "helper" a card carrying Commie,pushed him to give "Uncle Joe" anything he wanted.
Wouldn't it be great if the NYT or WaPo would put your post on their front pages -- every single day until the election?
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