Buckley Says Bush Will Be Judged on Iraq War, Now a "Failure"
Bloomberg 31 March 2006 William F. Buckley Jr.,
the longtime conservative writer and leader, said George W. Bush's
presidency will be judged entirely by the outcome of a war in Iraq
that is now a failure. "Mr. Bush is in the hands of a
fortune that will be unremitting on the point of Iraq," Buckley said
in an interview that will air on Bloomberg Television this weekend.
"If he'd invented the Bill of Rights it wouldn't get him out of his
jam." Buckley said he doesn't have a formula for getting out
of Iraq, though he said "it's important that we acknowledge in the
inner councils of state that it (the war) has failed, so that we
should look for opportunities to cope with that
failure." The 80-year-old Buckley is among a handful of
prominent conservatives who are criticizing the war. Asked who is to
blame for what he deems a failure, Buckley said, "the president,"
adding that "he doesn't hesitate to accept responsibility."
Buckley called Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a longtime
friend, "a failed executor" of the war. And Vice President Dick
Cheney "was flatly misled," Buckley said. "He believed the business
about the weapons of mass destruction." National
Review Buckley, often called the father of contemporary
conservatism in America, articulated his beliefs in National Review
magazine, which he founded in 1955. His conservatism calls for small
government, low taxes and a strong defense. Both Ronald Reagan and
Barry Goldwater said they got their inspiration from the
magazine. In the interview, Buckley criticized the so-called
neo- conservatives who enthusiastically embraced the Iraq invasion
and the spreading of American values around the world. "The
neoconservative hubris, which sort of assigns to America some kind of
geo-strategic responsibility for maximizing democracy, overstretches
the resources of a free country," Buckley said. While
praising Bush as "really a conservative," he was critical of the
president for allowing expansion of the federal government and never
vetoing a spending bill. The president's "concern has been
so completely on the international scope that he can be said to have
neglected conservatism" on the fiscal level, Buckley
said. Appraising Presidents Buckley also offered his
perspectives on other recent presidents:
Richard Nixon "was one of the brightest people who ever occupied
the White House," he said, "but he suffered from basic derangements,"
which precipitated his own downfall.
Ronald Reagan "confounded the intellectual class, which disdained
him." Every year though, Buckley said, "there is more and more
evidence of his ingenuity, of his historical intelligence."
Bill Clinton "is the most gifted politician of, certainly my
time," Buckley said. "He generates a kind of a vibrant goodwill with
a capacity for mischief which is very, very American." He doubted
that "anyone could begin to write a textbook that explicates his
(Clinton's) political philosophy because he doesn't really have one."
Buckley exalted in what he sees as the conservative success
stemming from his call a half century ago in the National Review to
"stand athwart history and yell stop." That, he remembered,
was when Marxism was widely considered "an absolute irreversible call
of history." The folly of that notion was demonstrated by the demise
of communism a decade and a half ago, he said.
Buckley said he had a few regrets, most notably his magazine's
opposition to civil rights legislation in the 1960s. "I think that
the impact of that bill should have been
welcomed by us," he said.
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