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.
You are still wrong!
Regards, Ivan
David Kay has offered many different positions on many different things, including WMD over many years.
..... and not only that, but remember there have been some found with Sarin gas. There could STILL be WMD in Iraq and we just haven't found them yet. Strong suspicion that they were exported to Syria.And if Uncle Saddam destroyed the weapons, why did the "Genius" not show the evidence to the U.N. ? I'll answer that: he DIDN'T destroy them.
The jury is still out on "no WMD's in Iraq" or where they went to. Just because they're not found yet does not mean they didn't exist.
And you object to me objecting to this, and accusing me of cowardice? Excuse me?
Furthermore, you've approached myself and her on this thread with such a smug, arrogant, condescending attitude that you should be rebuked for it. You merely don't like the rebuke is all.
I dare say the cowardice is much more on your end than on mine - I am not going to accept any "peace offer" without you apologising for what you've said about her.
Ivan
hehe ! Sorry. I couldn't resist posting that silly pic.
And as for you looking forward to it - somehow I doubt it. As for me, I'll count posts if I have trouble sleeping later.
Ivan
More than a few conservatives are opposed to our men and women dying in Iraq while our borders are undprodected. The masses of illegal aliens invading this country pose a far greater danger. It's way past time to pull our ground troops out of Iraq.
No need to remind her, she does this 24-7.
Hey, guess what . . . this is exactly how life works. You don't have the option of going out and addressing every conceivable threat to your nation, because doing so would require you to topple every foreign government on the face of the earth and incarcerate about 6 billion people.
Did you forget that saddam pays terrorist homicide bombers in Israel?
That's a perfectly legitimate reason to deal with him in an appropriate manner. For Israel, that is.
Did you forget his plot to kill our President?
Another perfectly legitimate reason to deal with him in an appropriate manner, but not ten years after the fact. For the U.S. to use this as a rationale to invade a foreign country on these grounds without first throwing our former commander in chief in Leavenworth for dereliction of duty seems pretty lame.
Did you forget his gassing the Kurds?
If I remember correctly, that happened either before the first Gulf War, or in the aftermath of the first Gulf War when the Kurds were supposed to be under the protection of the U.S. (that was the basis of the whole "northern no-fly zone" in Iraq). It's interesting that you raise this point, because it explains precisely why most Iraqis were perfectly content to have the U.S. topple the Ba'athist regime, but wanted us to get the hell out of there within 24 hours after it was all done. We simply haven't been a very trustworthy "friend" of those people over the last 15 years.
Dipping people in acid? Lowering them into meat grinders slowly to torture them as he and his minions watched? Mass graves? The list of atrocities goes on and on.
After the first Gulf War, I would have hoped that this kind of crap would have ceased to have any meaning. If you remember, this was the kind of rationale that was used as part of the propaganda campaign to garner public support for that war. Remember all those stories -- complete with compelling testimony before Congress from alleged family members of victims -- about Iraqi soldiers running through Kuwaiti hospitals tossing babies out of incubators? All of those stories turned out to be utterly bogus, and the "family members of the victims" who testified before Congress were actually relatives of Kuwaiti diplomats who lived right here in the U.S.
That doesn't mean all the things you listed here are false; it simply means -- because of our track record in the past -- that these are nothing more than unsubstantiated stories that are largely irrelevant to the discussion.
She never did answer that. She's dreaming I'm stalking her. Hehehe.....
This isn't a complaint about Bush's trip to Iraq, mind you . . . I said at the time that I thought it was a stroke of political genious.
I wish Republicans had that one Democrat quality!
You might need this.
;^)
Rubbish - you've obviously been smarting over something she said to you in the past, otherwise you would have let it go long ago.
Again, you misconstrue me, Sir. I could really CARE LESS what you make of it all--
Contradicted by you spending hours continuing in this vein. If you didn't care what I thought or what she thought, you'd be truly non-chalant and let it drop. However, that is not what is occuring. A person who doesn't care, doesn't spend all day arguing as you do.
Another cute distortion of actual verifiable facts.
Distortion? Not at all - you are smug, arrogant and condescending. Period. As I've said, this "jovial" label is an altogether unconvincing mask for these qualities. It's not my problem that you cannot take a sufficiently good look in the mirror, or at your own words, and see the truth of it. You may run around in circles yapping like a demented poodle otherwise, but it doesn't change anything - I'm merely sketching out what is.
You're not? Really? Well, hell...(snicker)...one of the reasons why you won't be "accepting" any of my "peace offers" is because I didn't offer one
Rubbish again. You sought a way out of the impasse, hence the "peace offer". I told you what my conditions are and they have not changed.
Ivan
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