Listeners to talk radio and readers of mainstream conservative publications and websites are by now thoroughly acquainted with what passes for debate on the Iraq war in those venues. All good, patriotic conservatives agree with President Bush's policies, and anyone who doesn't is a traitorous liberal. Rarely is the subject of conservative or libertarian opposition to the war raised – although Sean Hannity deserves credit for having Pat Buchanan on his radio show fairly regularly – and when it is, such antiwar types are deemed "unpatriotic." The only debate permitted in these quarters centers on tactics, not the fundamental morality of the war.
Even the president has framed the issue in this way. Speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on January 10, he said:
The American people know the difference between responsible and irresponsible debate when they see it. They know the difference between honest critics who question the way the war is being prosecuted and partisan critics who claim that we acted in Iraq because of oil, or because of Israel, or because we misled the American people. And they know the difference between a loyal opposition that points out what is wrong, and defeatists who refuse to see that anything is right.
In short, the only "responsible" debate involves nibbling around the edges of the war, discussing tactics; questioning the war itself is "irresponsible" and "partisan."
That was then; this is now.
William F. Buckley, Jr., for better or for worse one of the founding fathers of the modern conservative movement, has jumped ship on the Iraq project. In a column titled simply, "It Didn't Work," the founder and editor-at-large of National Review, the very magazine that declared all right-wing opposition to the war treasonous in a now-infamous cover story, bluntly stated: "One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed."
Buckley then elucidated on this a bit:
Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans. The great human reserves that call for civil life haven’t proved strong enough. No doubt they are latently there, but they have not been able to contend against the ice men who move about in the shadows with bombs and grenades and pistols.
That is, a civil war, which most observers not blinded by the Bush administration's prewar propaganda predicted without even consulting their crystal balls, has broken out among deeply divided groups of people who were previously held together only by force, as even Buckley cagily, without quite attributing this belief to himself, admitted. "It would not," averred Buckley, "be surprising to learn from an anonymously cited American soldier that he can understand why Saddam Hussein was needed to keep the Sunnis and the Shiites from each others' [sic] throats."
Now Buckley went on to urge President Bush – and, by extension, conservatives in general – not to give up on the idea of transforming some parts of the world into friendly democracies through military action, especially if we would just get over our hang-ups with firebombing and nuking civilian cities, as the Allies did in World War II. (I'll direct you to Justin Raimondo's column here for a fuller dissection of Buckley's piece.) Still, for the eminence grise of modern-day conservatism to declare explicitly that the Iraq mission has failed signals a potentially seismic shift in the terms of the debate. Now, perhaps, we can get down to the business of debating the policy itself, not just whether or not there was enough body armor for the troops.
Reaction to Buckley's column on the right was swift and, for the most part, predictable. The intellectual giants at FreeRepublic.com, ever tolerant of dissent from the Bush party line, responded with such thought-provoking gems as:
Buckley is getting old. Some weaken with age, some don't. It's sad though.
I haven't read any of Buckley's tripe for years. It's good to once again realize why every now and again.
Good thing Buckley isn't in charge. I don't like quitters.
He [Buckley] may have been the father of the 50s Conservative Movement, but he's one step in his grave now.
I remember when Barry Goldwater started goings [sic] senile.
And that is just a sampling from the first 50 responses; the Freepers went on to make another 344 similarly intellectual retorts.
Even Buckley's own magazine felt the need to distance itself from his comments, claiming that "declarations of defeat in Iraq" such as the column by their editor-at-large "are pre-mature. . . . Defeatism is self-fulfilling."
However, one very noteworthy conservative voice took a much less combative stand. Perhaps because he considers Buckley "like a surrogate parent in a way," Rush Limbaugh was much less quick to condemn Buckley's opinion as the ravings of a senile old defeatist. In fact, Limbaugh made what must have seemed a startling admission to most of his audience:
You know, a lot of people look at conservatism and see a monolith. You know, one conservative is the same as all, and as you know, as being a conservative, most of you are yourselves. There are many different derivatives out there of our so-called movement. I mean, you’ve got some great social conservatives who are protectionists. You have some other great conservatives who have one view on foreign policy that differs from the president’s. Some would say the president is not actually a conservative when it comes to foreign policy. (Emphasis mine.)
Stop the presses! A conservative has actually admitted that Bush's foreign policy, in the view of "some other great conservatives," does not itself qualify as conservative! This had to have come as a shock to the Dittoheads who have, for the past four or five years, been subject to Bush-worship of the highest order and the denigration of anyone who disagrees with Bush as a treasonous liberal.
Limbaugh went on to describe, in more or less perfect detail, the standard conservative foreign policy view of the pre-9/11 era:
Now, if you go back, the James Baker wing of foreign policy, and many – I could – who’s another? Well, Brent Scowcroft, who was one of the early opponents. . . . . Their brand of foreign policy can essentially be summed up like this: If there’s no vested, stated national security issue, then it’s none of our business to get involved – Pat Buchanan might fall into this, as a derivative, in a way. Doesn’t involve us, it’s none of our business, trying to bring democracy to people, if it doesn’t help us, is foolish. It’s a waste of time, it’s a waste of our army, it’s a waste of our treasure, and so forth.
This, by the way, would also be the foreign policy of George H.W. Bush, who wrote in his memoirs:
Trying to eliminate Saddam . . . would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. . . .We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. . . .[T]here was no viable “exit strategy” we could see, violating another of our principles. . . . Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.
Bush's secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, agreed:
I think that the proposition of going to Baghdad is also fallacious. I think if we were going to remove Saddam Hussein we would have had to go all the way to Baghdad, we would have to commit a lot of force because I do not believe he would wait in the Presidential Palace for us to arrive. . . . And once we’d done that and we’d gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and his government, then we’d have had to put another government in its place. . . .
I think it is vitally important for a President to know when to use military force. I think it is also very important for him to know when not to commit U.S. military force. And it’s my view that the President got it right both times, that it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq.
For Limbaugh and other conservatives and neoconservatives, however, "after 9/11, everything changed." No longer would prudence and a careful consideration of the limitations of military force enter into the picture when making foreign policy decisions. From now on it was pure Wilsonianism, making the world safe for democracy regardless of the cost in blood and treasure.
Thus a fair question can be asked: Whose principles have changed? The conservatives who held to the relatively restrained (but hardly isolationist) foreign policy they had espoused throughout the preceding decades, or those who believed that their principles, and not just with regard to foreign policy, had to be jettisoned after 9/11? Can anyone claim that the former are any less conservative or patriotic for not wavering in spite of immense pressure to jump on the Bush bandwagon? Are the latter truly conservative if they are so willing to make a complete turnaround in their stated beliefs because of one event?
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, a largely Bush-sympathetic newspaper, editorialized recently:
For Lyndon Johnson, it was Walter Cronkite. Will it be Bill Buckley for George Bush? LBJ felt he had lost the American people when the former CBS News anchor said victory in Vietnam was not possible. Now Mr. Buckley, the conservative icon, says "our mission has failed" in Iraq. Certainly the beginning of America's endgame in Iraq is upon us.
Let's hope the editors are right.
March 4, 2006
