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.
Why are you calling the poster names and attacking him? He just posted the damn article/thread, he didn't write it. Sheesh!
and don't forget all the predictions of the battle of Baghdad turning into the Stalingrad of the Middle East...
Go read his addendum...he didn't "just post the article."
What did he add?
GWB, Karl Rove, et al. made a nice campaign commercial, didn't they? For the DNC, that is.
you bet...I wanna see that with the split screen of the handover in Iraq from Monday. Eat s--t you lefty scum...and get ready for four more years of Republican rule!
I added them to the list.
Even if he thinks this...why now? Just fade into the sunset.
Please go read it for yourself. I don't want you telling me that I misstated it,or something else. Why do you want someone else to do what YOU should have done to begin with?
They have NO idea. LOL
Agreed! :-)
So what did he do?
Read what? Can you be specific?
The reporters need to stand on LSD,waiting for a bus,in mid January or February.
Why was Germany our enemy in WWI & WWII? What imminent threat did they pose to the US? Why did Patton and other military leaders believe the Russians were our true enemy? And that we should have lined up the remaining Germans and gone after Russia before they had the bomb?
Hell, for that matter, why did we engage in wars with Mexico and Spain in the 19th century? Were we threatened? What was the point?
The bottom line is that we had to take the fight to the Middle East. It's clear that the election will be a referandum on Iraq. I'll believe the 'greater than 50%' believe Iraq was a mistake if Bush loses in November.
Let me help you with some of this. He endorsed the friggin piece, and said that folks should add Buckley along with him to the "traitor list." The whole thing was self absorbed and silly, but then the poster is self absorbed and silly. I don't need icons to assist me in defending what I believe. I just post my own reasoning. I don't need props, or want them.
Go to the begining of this thread and READ it.
Yeah. All those millions they were using to bribe in the corrupt oil-for-food program were just play money from old Monopoly games.
I'm with Reagan - he beat the communists without invading the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe - and a lot of those rulers were as evil as Saddam.
Reagan invaded a number of nations...and the Soviet Union already had the nukes. Besides that, you expected Bush to invite Saddam to the White House to sign peace treaties? That's the analogy you seem to be implying.
Another thing we can thank William Buckley for is Rush Limbaugh. His open idolatry of Buckley may be a huge part of his toughness and great success. Rush's father and grandfather also were great teachers and influences. Buckley was way ahead of his time,and maybe all the hate,and lambasting he took all those years for fellow conservatives and the movement is why he needs his medications now. The pioneers do take the arrows,and sadly some of those arrows took their toll. I hope he recedes from public,and enjoys whatever time is left for him,but we do not want his legend tarnished anymore. May God bless and keep him.
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