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.
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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.
Because we can smell you!
Oh, brilliant junior.
I knew you would appreciate that... But in all seriousness.... All you offer is negativity, so there is no sense in responding to your miserable existance. You whine and complain more than all my friends ex-wives put together.... in other words... you're a bitch!
Grampa Dave, maybe at least some of the below listed might be this article posters friends:
http://www.cpusa.org/
http://www.dsausa.org/
DSA's "Progressive Caucas" Links below:
http://bernie.house.gov/pc/
http://bernie.house.gov/pc/members.asp
The Enemy Within!!!!
As a Generation X conservative (I ain't no neo-con!), Bill Buckley has never had any relevancy to my positions.
The majority were in favor of the crucifixion.
So why don't you go on the record...do you believe there is a link between the Hussein regime and terrorism, or not?
Delsuion is your middle name.:-)
"...he was conned"
By whom? Please specify.
:-)
WFB is getting old. Look what happened to Cronkite. Not as sharp as the good old days.
He's off looking for really big words to counter my post to him, give him a while, his 14K modem needs some time to log on to Websters.com :-)
Is any criticism of GWB considered backstabbing?
Or is legitimate criticism allowed?
Well,if he eventually finds a really big word,he'll misuse it. LOL
And that Josh Marshall is, and always shall be, a fourth-rate partisan hack, for continued crimes against basic logic such as this column, in which he plays Nelson Muntz to Buckley's Homer Simpson. "He had to admit he was wrong! HA-ha!" Whatever, Joshie.
You know what the best part is about articles such as this one? That no matter what, Marshall is powerless to change history. He can spin as much as he wants, from now until the end of history. But every time he picks up a paper or turns on the TV, he's going to see Iraq rebuilding into a modern democratic society, the result of an overwhelming U.S. military victory. He can never alter the reality of what has occurred.
lonevoice: Excuse me? I have no idea what you're talking about.
I got it. May I explain? Your post that he's referring to (#121) says nothing. It's blank. In other words, it lists all the good reasons to vote for kerry. All none of them.
Well.......yes.
"To the best of our knowledge," Josh Marshall is an adolescent ignoramus. And William F'Buckley Jr. is still entitled to be wrong, at 78. Perhaps he hasn't noticed, at his advanced age, but the "Iraq war" is far from its ultimate denouement.
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.
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"Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings."
~George F. Will
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