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.
Iraq was involved in funding and training al-Quaeda for 9/11, and Iraq harbored terrorists and Iraq was going to continue making attacks on U.S. and help channel WMD to groups with intent to use them against us.
We absolutely had to take out Saddam.
Churchill would have been ashamed of you for not seeing the nose on your face.
I disagree. History will show this to be an uncommonly formative and positive change in the direction of world history.
We'll have to check back in ten or so years to see who was right. I'll sleep just fine in the meantime.
Unlike me -- a bona fide conservative who thought this invasion was a mistake from the first, and I wasn't afraid to say so (at the risk of being vilified by freepers).
What happened to Buckley's idealism about liberating the oppressed, and eliminating the butchers he spent his life opposing? What happened to his idealism in not even mentioning the essential rightness and nobility in giving Iraq the chance to become a civil society, even if in the end they do not avail themselves of the opportunity?
Where have all the flowers gone?
You mean the daily push polls that were taken during WWII when every gruesome American death was publicized by the traitorous media and the unpatriotic actors in Hollywood?
Its a Kerry kind of thing. Political mulligans for those bereft of convictions.
OK, so you, Buckley and Clancy are wrong. Works for me.
Actually, Hollywood supported this war - until recently, anyway. At Academy Awards last year, they booed Michael Moore when he spoke against the war. (I'm always up for booing Michael Moore - but in this case they were showing support for the war by booing him)
In fact, now that I think about Point #2 . . . I believe he made this comment somewhere around the first anniversary of President Bush's idiotic performance on the deck of the aircraft carrier.
Add Gen. Zinni and Gen. Schwarzkoff and some other smart generals.
Very good, except for the flowers thing. That was a bit over the top.
It pains me deeply to be in disagreement with WFB, but you are right, he is dead wrong. It amazes me, that the intellectuals are having trouble extrapolating out, President Bush's policy on Iraq.
So do you want a medal? Hell you deserve vilification.
It was deliberate. It works for me on several levels. :)
There is a diagnosis for this in abnormal psychology that escapes me right now.
ROFL!! Bill Buckley is still as sharp as a tack; and NOT for the reasons many here (and elsewhere) are suggesting, IMHO. For whatever it's worth, I hear Mr. Buckley whispering in my ear: "Fight harder".
George has been all hyper a time or two about the lack of WMD laying around. Some people forgot the Sadaam had many years to practice hiding things.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.