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.
Yes,that's it and that's what confused me no end.
Sorry about that. I can understand why it would have. :-)
Right. And I don't think voters are swayed by the elliptical argument that "stopping mass murder" doesn't count since it wasn't the primary reason given.
I have seen from the beginning that the whole justification thing is garbled by what can only be described as a failure to call evil by its name.
True, USA does not invade and regime-change every tinpot dictator who is evil and murders people. But when doing so will, one way or another, result in a tremendous gain in the security of American interests, we sure as hell will.
Yes, I know. His whole attitude toward Israel is weird.
They are more than welcome to. I have a whole list of arguments just like that when people tell me they don't support the war.
Last week I had people who were for Kerry in tears remembering 9-11 and how important it is to re-elect Bush and keep America safe.
That's what he's saying - in hindsight. And he's right - except.
He's right about the WMD. Saddam was looking. He was frustrated. His corrupt regime was full of incompetent losers.
Except - what if the WMD ARE found, in Lebanon or Syria? Foresight, required?
He's right about oil. The price is at an all-time high, almost. If we'd know that . . .
Except - what if Saddam had threatened Saudi? Who knew his military was so hollow? or that he buried his air force in the desert? Nobody knew that. What would have happened to oil prices if Saddam had moved on Saudi? Would the Saudis have won - maybe? Or would the west be hurtin - bad? and for years to come?
You know, he's right. But he could be wrong. He's been in the past. He's been spot on, as well. I'm sorry to see he's getting old. We all do. His passing the NR on to others is really marks the end of an era in this country, known not for his recorded history or the news he made, but for how the historians and 'newsians'/reporters had to work around him, and Schlafly, without giving them the least public mention or notice. But they really knew they, and many others, were there. That seems, to me, sort of the 'freeper' mission, as well, as least as I read the messages, here.
Aggghh! I hope we are all standing far away from that wind that he is wissing in. LOL!
No conspiracy, frankly it's overt. MFN with the biggest supplier of arms to terrorist nations. MFN with a communist country that sudsidizes its industry. MFN with a nation that's using its surplus for the largest military buildup since Japan did it in the 1905-1920 era. MFN with a nation that has a 300% higher tariff on imported goods than we do. We've sold out to the commies for the slave labor.
Now please reread the Buckley quotes.
Josh Marshall entitled his hit piece to give the impression that he and William F. Buckley are of like mind. Marshall can only wish he was on the same playing field as Buckley.
Buckley is quoted "if I knew then what I know now," "in minute hindsight," etc.
It's that simple, yet some seem bent on including themselves under Josh Marshall's delusions of grandeur.
You hit the nail on the head. The Dems with their media hacks decided that the best way to damage Bush would be the constant drumbeat of negative spin. WWII would have been "lost" if the casualty rates of D-Day, Iwo Jima, and the like had never been offset by the good news from the front. The sad fact is that nearly all the conservatives who have changed their view on the war, base their opinions on the news from the liberal media, and not from being in Iraq personally.
The DOD estimated 3000 dead 15 months ago. The media predicted worse, but once we won the "war," the media changed gears and set up standards of perfection that can never be met.
Great article. Thanks for posting it. I think it's a very unbiased, and truthful.
The nexus between SH, Iraq, terrorism and WMD was and remains such that to not attack it would have been a bad mistake.
The deal that GHW Bush and Shwarzkopf cut in '91 resulted in more mass graves.
Given that nexus and those mass graves, had Dubya not attacked Iraq, I would not have voted for him again.
Most of us,long ago,took to calling churchy CHAMBERLAIN;it's so much more fitting.
354 was meant for you NCB.
Water under the bridge now...we're all square. :-)
"No. I believe very strongly that Saddam had relations with al-Qaida. And these relations started in Sudan. We know Saddam had relationships with a lot of terrorists and international terrorism. Now, whether he is directly connected to the September atrocities or not, I can’t vouch for this. But definitely I know he has connections with extremism and terrorists."
In December Dr. Allawi commented on a recently discovered Iraqi intelligence document placing lead 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta in Baghdad two months before the attacks.
"We are uncovering evidence all the time of Saddam's involvement with al-Qaeda," he told the London Telegraph. "But this is the most compelling piece of evidence that we have found so far. It shows that not only did Saddam have contacts with al-Qaeda, he had contact with those responsible for the September 11 attacks."
Never get downwind of a man flying his mast upwind. :-}
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