Beyond this, Buckley recognizes, as Bush's defenders have not, that the trouble originates with the Iraq war, not with its opponents. When I asked him recently if Iraq is the Republicans' Vietnam, he said, "Absolutely." It is a serious admission for one who knows that Vietnam destroyed cold war liberalism and, with it, the Democratic Party's control of national politics. Iraq now threatens the right and the GOP, Buckley says, with the "identical" fate. [Emphasis mine -- RD.] No wonder, then, that in a July interview with CBS News, he said that if Bush were the leader of a parliamentary government "it would be expected that he would retire or resign." He has been somewhat kinder to Dick Cheney, whom he characterized in an interview last year not as a liar but as a dupe, who had "believed the business about the weapons of mass destruction" and then thundered forth so confidently on it. If, by contrast, Cheney knowingly misrepresented the facts, Buckley has privately acknowledged, Bush would be a candidate for impeachment.
I suppose now we'll hear from those on the right who'll whisper that the old man is going senile.
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Eventual confrontation? Any evidence of that?
No, Anon, there's no evidence whatsoever of a looming confrontation with North Korea or Iran. Sure, NK tested its intercontinental missles by firing them our way on the Fourth of July, and sure, Iran's president has talked about a world without America while his government is arming thugs who are killing American soldiers in Iraq, but to call such things evidence of aggression is to prove oneself to be a war-monger.
(And you still didn't answer my question, though I've already answered three of yours.)
Do you thus argue that it should have been avoided, so that Saddam could have continued to seek weapons that would have made an eventual confrontation even more costly? I reject the presumption that confrontation was inevitable. So, to answer your question, we should not have elected to go to war with a country that represented a very minor and CONTAINABLE threat.
That doesn't answer what we should have done instead: contain Iraq into perpetuity, while some of our so-called allies undermined that containment by abusing the oil-for-food program, and while Saddam continued to seek to upgrade his status as a threat? You clearly seem to think I'm wrong for the positions I take, but the positions you take seem to be deliberately vague.
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