greet the troops with flowers.
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.
Stop posting your daily dose of trash. Fact is there is a war and you are in the way of it being successfully fought. By banging on this drum, that the war was a mistake, you dump on our troops in Iraq. Just shut up and let the real men take care of business in Iraq. You also are doing Democrat's and John Kerry's dirty work by sowing doubt and discord.
OK, I'll just this one time answer you - - and then call it a day. Of course you called me a name. You think being likened to Michael Moore isn't name-calling? What if somebody likened you to Hitlery of Daschle or Kerry? That's name-calling in my book.
Interesting how some folks who insist we had to spend young Americans' blood to liberate Iraq don't believe in freedom of speech at home.
The album was the best thing I've ever been given to send to the troops!
I was on those threads too. I saw the same thing.
Looking at your posts the lats copuple of months, it is not calling you a name, but pointing out the obvious truth.
The guy's a plant. A DNC plant.
The only reason I respond is for the lurkers so they don't fall for his spin.
Thanks, P. I have called in the few freepers who were on those threads that I remember but I know one left home yesterday.
Call me a "Buckley," or a "Tom Clancy" or a "PJ O'Roarke" --- conservatives who recognize the Iraq invasion was a mistake. To recognize that doesn't make somebody one with the fat socialist slob.
Blah, when you post towards dogs, you start spelling like them.
Correct. Recognizing that doesn't do it.
But using the same pathetic antiwar talking points
does make you one with that fat socialist slob.
You must be one of those silly people who think we can simply buy oil from the Arab Muslims without being politically involved. No other nation acts this way. Not the French, not the Chinese, not the Russians.
They in their infinite hubristic inside the beltway mentality may think it was mistake, but they don't take your and michael moore's stance of twisting facts.
Some DNC plant -- I've never voted anything but Republican in 40 years of voting. I was posting on freerepublic against Clinton back before any of you were saying that people who didn't favor invading Iraq were traitors. (Because NOBODY was saying we needed to invade Iraq). The difference between me and you is, like Buckley, I recognize that 9-11 didn't make the invasion of Iraq a necessity, because Iraq wasn't behind 9-11. Unlike you, I still want us to capture Osama -- that's where our focuse should have stayed. REMEMBER OSAMA? Or do only "traitors" want Al Quaida destroyed and Osama captured?
Have you discussed these fantasies with your doctor?
I see your profile page says you met John Galt and decided he is wise.
Considering how recently you have signed up on FR, I think you do not know the fact about WMD and Iraq and John Galt that other freepers know.
Tread carefully.
Did you miss this one?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1162395/posts
one of the reasons we have to fight this war on so many fronts is because we allowed this terrorism to grow and spread to so many parts of the world for far too long.
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