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.
Does anyone here have an actual link to Buckley's original op-ed?
As people age, they often become very different from what they once were.
I think it very possible to disagree with an individual and yet, "respect them. Or has simple civility become wholly impossible? Bill Buckley has dedicated his entire life championing the conservative movement and the cherished ideals that make our ideology great; I find it distasteful that so many on this forum are willing to forego civility because of a disagreement he has over foreign policy. It is quite childish, actually.
Two points:
1. I regard the war for civilization against radical Islam to be the defining issue of the new century. One either understands this, and is prepared to wage war a l'outrance, or one does not, and is, therefore, objectively in league with the enemy. It has been a while coming for me, but I simply cannot see how any rational citizen of a country that is part of Western civilization can fail to realize we are at war with radical Islam. I simply cannot respect those who do not, can not, or refuse, to understand that we are truly engaged in a war to the death. One cannot reason with such people, one cannot even talk with them. They bury their heads in the sand or cover their ears and go LALALALALALALA! Therefore, it becomes impossible even to socialize with them.
This is a graver issue than Nazism or Marxism. No decent person would associate with Nazis or Marxists, and no decent person should associate with those who do not support the war.
2. The fact that we are dealing with those who are beyond the pale does not mean we should be uncivil, in the sense of common politeness and ordinary good manners. However, it does not mean that we need to have any respect for their views whatsoever, regardless how how well they have served in the past. Marshall Petain was a great French general who led the French against the Germans in WWI who deserved respect for that; he was also the collaborator of Vichy who deserved nothing but contempt. Benedict Arnold was a successful American general before he betrayed our cause to the British. The former services do not exonerate the subsequent villany.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
As I say, I was SO MAD at SH that night...I truly would have joined, just to blow him away myself.
When I achieve great wealth, I intend to start the JDFAPM - James the Dachshund's Foundation for the Abolition of Puppy Mills!
Small animals are so innocent and there's so much that goes on that they don't understand and are so helpless to defeat. It breaks my heart.
Nor do I understand the zzzzzz comment above, except to say perhaps ignorance IS bliss.
For some.
Other than that, exactly correct. Bravo!
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