A Pilgrim’s Digression

In a startling op-ed, It Didn’t Work, William F. Buckley has said that he believes Iraq is a failure, and that the people to blame are the Iraqis.

I found this article absolutely stunning. It was published on the 25th of February, so the talk radio circuit has had no time to comment on it, but it will be interesting what, if anything, Limbaugh and his cronies have to say about it.

Writing shortly after the bombing of the mosque in Samarra, Buckley says, “Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans.” Furthermore, Americans and our Iraqi proxies, are the ones taking the blame when these attacks occur because we are unable to stop the bombings.

As Buckley sees it, the chief premise upon which we invaded–that Iraqis would be able to work past their religious divisions and form a unified government–has proved false. Later, when the insurgency began to disrupt reconstruction efforts and destroy any comity that might have existed between Iraqis and Americans, George Bush laid down another premise that proved impracticable: quoting Buckley again, “the invading American army would succeed in training Iraqi soldiers and policymakers to cope with insurgents bent on violence. This last did not happen. And the administration has, now, to cope with failure.”

Strangely, Buckley does not suggest that we now abandon the premises upon which we’ve based our little adventure in Iraq. “To do that would be to register a kind of philosophical despair,” he says. “The killer insurgents are not entitled to blow up the shrine of American idealism.”

Maybe so, but terrorists don’t have to blow up that shrine. If Iraq does indeed come to be perceived as a Vietnam-like failure in nation building, as well as a failure to keep the enemy at bay, Americans have only themselves to credit with blowing up the shrine of American idealism.

We chose to invade Iraq. For some reason, Conservatives have a hard time adjusting to that uncomfortable fact. The Iraq War was unnecessary by any historical standard. It did not meet traditional standards of imminent threat, and so a new standard of “potential threat” had to be created from the thinnest evidence.

The Iraq War was a war chosen by us because it was perceived as in our interest. To now blame the Iraqis for our manifold mistakes, as Buckley certainly does by implication, if not explicitly, is like blaming a civilian for coming between police and criminals who are shooting it out in a residential neighborhood.

As if responding to Buckley, the opinion page of The Wall Street Journal printed an op-ed today titled Democracy Angst. Although not mentioning Buckley, the article aims at one of Buckley’s premises: that “the taste for freedom–and the ability to exercise it responsibly–is far from universal.”

While admitting cultural differences may account for the difficulty we have had in enabling a liberal Democracy to arise in Iraq, the Journal concludes by asking what other choice do we have but to proceed with our goal of promoting democracy, despite the setbacks we’ve faced?

No one has an answer to that question. Not Buckley. Not the President. Least of all the Democrats, who are so often derided for not devising an alternative that no one else can think of, either.

We are left with the frightening prospect of remaining steadfast simply because no better option presents itself. One wonders if we are not becoming like the autistic child who, faced with a frustrating challenge, butts his head against a wall relentlessly.

George Bush does “steadfast” very well. The question is whether he has the flexibility to discover alternatives to “steadfast.”

As Buckley writes, no matter what the President and his men will or will not admit publicly, “…within their own counsels, different plans have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgment of defeat.”