[Peace-discuss] A liberal and a conservative abandon the war

[C. G. Estabrook]

	June 30, 2004
	JOSH MARSHALL
	Bill Buckley, you and I know the war was a mistake

"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...

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.

[Josh Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in
The Hill each week. E-mail: jmarshall at thehill.com.]