Right at the end: William F. Buckley's last gift to conservatism may have been his opposition to the Iraq War.
The American Conservative › March 24, 2008
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Right at the end: William F. Buckley's last gift to conservatism may have been his opposition to the Iraq War.
Soon after Bill Buckley died, William Kristol published a column called "The Indispensable Man" in the New York Times. He celebrated Buckley as the founder of the conservative movement, and his tone was not only celebratory but affectionate. And surely Kristol was right: Buckley was indispensable. Without his leadership there would have been no conservative movement. Yet at the end of his life, Buckley believed the movement he made had destroyed itself by supporting the war in Iraq.
The central foreign policy initiative of the Bush administration had two rationales: eliminating Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and, by establishing democracy in Iraq, turning the country into a beacon of liberty in the Middle East. Both National Review and Kristol's Weekly Standard followed Bush on Iraq and continue to do so. But Kristol must have known that Buckley had grave doubts about the war. Buckley published three syndicated columns about Iraq, all of which were reprinted in National Review. The first argued that it is doubtful that an effort "hugely greater in scale and more refined in conception" would produce the desired resu...See the full content of this document
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