If Bush has Lost Buckley, He's Lost Everybody with a Brain (even Republicans)

Unfortunately, Bush is Too Stupid to Know It

In 1968, following the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, Walter Cronkite advocated during a broadcast of the CBS Evening News that it was time to admit defeat. Lyndon Johnson famously remarked, ""If I've lost Cronkite," replied President Lyndon Johnson, "I've lost middle America." Later that same year, President Johnson would refuse the Democratic nomination and watch Richard Nixon defeat Hubert Humphrey to claim the White House.

Well, George Bush is not running again (though, given his contempt for the Constitution, I suppose the amendment limiting him to two terms is suspect), but despite all that, his Iraq invasion and occuption plan has essentially jumped the couch just like Johnson's Vietnam. The boat didn't float. The dog won't hunt. We failed. Now, it's a matter of, to paraphrase John Kerry, how many more men and women will be asked to die for a mistake before we can get them home. And, also, about how many more billions of dollars of American treasure we'll piss away across the sands of Iraq before we say "Enough."


As Iraq now begins its final descent into civil war, into the completed form of misery and despair, any aspirations and illusions of "Freedom being on the March" or "America Standing Down as Iraqis Stand Up" [Factoid: today, the Pentagon announced that the number of Iraqi battalions capable of operating independently of US forces decreased from one to zero] can now be understood as what they were: naively shallow sloganeering at best, outright lies and dishonesty at worst.

Yes, we failed, but don't take my word for it. I'm a Democrat. And, as anyone now realizes, it's impossible for any Democrat to find fault in the policies of George W. Bush without being accused of partisan politics and hysterical posturing. The Left is simply not allowed to comment on the actions of the ruling Right.

No, I won't call it the goat-fuck it is. Let the intellgentsia of the Republican Right say it. Which brings us to the Cronkite reference. William F. Buckley is the definitive voice of conservative politics, is throwing in the towel, the Right's Cronkite, the most trusted man in conservative politics.


This just in: Buckley's calling the spade a spade and saying Iraq, the project, didn't work. And so, effectively, it's over. Because if George W. Bush has lost William F. Buckley, he's lost everybody but the Wingnuts and Bedwetters.

Iraq, mr friends, is now incontrovertibly DONE.


IT DIDN'T WORK
By William F. Buckley
The National Review
Friday 24 February 2006

"I can tell you the main reason behind all our woes - it is America." The New York Times reporter is quoting the complaint of a clothing merchant in a Sunni stronghold in Iraq. "Everything that is going on between Sunni and Shiites, the troublemaker in the middle is America."

One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed. The same edition of the paper quotes a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Reuel Marc Gerecht backed the American intervention. He now speaks of the bombing of the especially sacred Shiite mosque in Samara and what that has precipitated in the way of revenge. He concludes that "The bombing has completely demolished" what was being attempted - to bring Sunnis into the defense and interior ministries.

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.

The Iraqis we hear about are first indignant, and then infuriated, that Americans aren't on the scene to protect them and to punish the aggressors. And so they join the clothing merchant who says that everything is the fault of the Americans.

The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, elucidates on the complaint against Americans. It is not only that the invaders are American, it is that they are "Zionists." It would not 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' throats.

A problem for American policymakers - for President Bush, ultimately - is to cope with the postulates and decide how to proceed.

One of these postulates, from the beginning, was that the Iraqi people, whatever their tribal differences, would suspend internal divisions in order to get on with life in a political structure that guaranteed them religious freedom.

The accompanying postulate was that the invading American army would succeed in training Iraqi soldiers and policymkers to cope with insurgents bent on violence.

This last did not happen. And the administration has, now, to cope with failure. It can defend itself historically, standing by the inherent reasonableness of the postulates. After all, they govern our policies in Latin America, in Africa, and in much of Asia. The failure in Iraq does not force us to generalize that violence and antidemocratic movements always prevail. It does call on us to adjust to the question, What do we do when we see that the postulates do not prevail - in the absence of interventionist measures (we used these against Hirohito and Hitler) which we simply are not prepared to take? It is healthier for the disillusioned American to concede that in one theater in the Mideast, the postulates didn't work. The alternative would be to abandon the postulates. To do that would be to register a kind of philosophical despair. The killer insurgents are not entitled to blow up the shrine of American idealism.

Mr. Bush has a very difficult internal problem here because to make the kind of concession that is strategically appropriate requires a mitigation of policies he has several times affirmed in high-flown pronouncements. His challenge is to persuade himself that he can submit to a historical reality without forswearing basic commitments in foreign policy.

He will certainly face the current development as military leaders are expected to do: They are called upon to acknowledge a tactical setback, but to insist on the survival of strategic policies.

Yes, but within their own counsels, different plans have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgment of defeat.