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To: SerpentDove
Is any criticism of GWB considered backstabbing?
Well.......yes. 457 posted on 06/29/2004 11:31:29 PM PDT by Texasforever (When Kerry was asked what kind of tree he would like to be he answered…. Al Gore.)
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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.
"add Buckley (along with Tom Clancy and a number of military brass) to the list."
I'm sure that even now President Bush is planning his resignation speech. How could he stand up to such formidable brainpower. Rumor has it he has had Wolfowitz Rice and Rumsfeld taken out and shot, now that churchillbuff has weighed in.
You're welcome.
Are you enjoying the show in here as much as I am? It's a real mud pit.
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To: SerpentDove
Is any criticism of GWB considered backstabbing?
Well.......yes. 457 posted on 06/29/2004 11:31:29 PM PDT by Texasforever (When Kerry was asked what kind of tree he would like to be he answered…. Al Gore.)
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Nope just giving the poster what he/she was looking for.
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Wondering if I have to stay up this late every night waiting ..."
"Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings."
~George F. Will
Can't agree in toto, HB. The tragedy is greater - Marshall is a middle-aged ignoramus.
Another voice of reason. Well said, AJC.
Have you been trying to reason with closet libs on other threads? They seem to be tracking you down and pouncing on you for no apparent reason. Did I miss something?
I predict a large meteor will hit planet Earth and after that no one will care who won the November election.
The Kerry prediction was based on knowing about the power of the Clintons and something about their pathology, and also knowing Kerry wanted it really, really bad, and had access to a lot of money.
The word went out to the media to sabotage Dean, who they had previously coddled, because Dean did not fit the Clinton plans. They tolerate Kerry, who kept McAuliffe at the DNC, as he had to cut a deal with the Clintons to keep himself from being sabotaged, although he's such a conceited p**** he probably doesn't realize that's how it came down. And they expect him to lose in November so Hillary can claim the nomination in 2008.
If Bush looks definitely beatable, Hillary may go on the ticket as Veep, or Kerry may have an unfortunate accident and she will step in to carry the party banner.
Kerry will have no qualms about using an ugly story against Bush as an October surprise if he isn't doing well to skewer Bush's base, just as Gore had no qualms about starting voter fraud prep in the Spring of 2000 and pulling out the DUI in the weekend before the election and contesting the election after the vote counts. Both are nakedly ambitious.
The media has great power and they are nakedly going to try to undercut Bush, because they are liberals who have been out of power (House, Senate, and Presidency) and HATE it, especially with FOX breathing down their exclusive right to brainwash the American public.
Everything being equal, Kerry would have the edge. But never underestimate the ability of a ponderous, pompous p**** to expose himself for what he is, and for some of the American electorate to catch on. Gore did that in the debates.
Bush and Rove are savvy and they know how important it is for the future of the country, the survival of the country and our economy, that they win. And they know they have to get out the vote and poll check like they did in 2002, even more so.
So, you have to balance the Clintons pulling strings against the media chomping at the bit, and Kerry's naked ambition against Bush's savvy. And then factor in that some news is manufactured, like the prison scandal, and some is real, like 9/11, and that the unforeseen real or manufactured events in the months before the election, can totally skewer things.
Everything being equal, I'd say Bush would narrowly lose because many conservatives are not to be trusted in a knife fight as you all have proven here on FR, but there is another factor.
Last election I believed Bush would lose because of voter fraud, so for the last months before the election I was on my knees begging God to have mercy on America and give us Bush, and on election night as the electoral count moved West and I told my husband we couldn't win without Florida, he began to cry and promised God he'd go with me to church once a month if God would just let Bush win, and two minutes later Florida was put back in the too close to call column.
In the final analysis, Sodom went under the fire and brimstone because they couldn't find 10 righteous men in the city.
Does America deserve Kerry? Maybe so. But after he drops his A-bomb on the President in the week before the election, will I be the only one left praying for America and for Bush?
If you've missed something,than so have I. :-)
I've never been banned.
Regards, Ivan
Many thnaks,Ivan. :-)
Yeah, right...whatever you say...(snicker)...perhaps we can just call them "time outs" then?...LOL...too, TOO, funny...
Therein lies the difference.
This war would have been waged by a democrat or a Republican. It was inevitable due to Iraq's collusion with certain power players.
But Bush is seen as too much the Evangelical Christian, so he's getting pushed aside.
He's still getting my vote.
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