July 05, 2004
William F. Buckley—“Unpatriotic Conservative”?
By Sam Francis
Well over a year ago, neoconservative David Frum unleashed an unpleasant gob of spit in National Review accusing a number of veteran conservative writers (including me) of being "unpatriotic conservatives" [NRO, March 19, 2003] because we opposed President Bush's war with Iraq.
Today Mr. Frum ought to rewrite his article. The founder and editor of National Review himself, William F. Buckley Jr., has declared that he would not have supported the war either had he known then what he knows now.
Mr. Buckley's confession came out in the New York Times last week, when he announced his retirement from the magazine that, in its first issue of November 19, 1955, boasted it would "stand athwart history and cry stop." [National Review Founder to Leave Stage, June 29, 2004, By David D. Kirkpatrick.]
Today, nearly fifty years later, it has conspicuously failed to do so, but Mr. Buckley is to be congratulated on at least having the intellectual honesty to acknowledge he was wrong about supporting history's unfortunate double time into Iraq.
"With the benefit of minute hindsight," he told the Times, "Saddam Hussein wasn't the kind of extra-territorial menace that was assumed by the administration one year ago. If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war."
That makes Mr. Buckley as much of an "unpatriotic conservative," by Mr. Frum's standards, as Pat Buchanan, Joe Sobran, Chronicles magazine, Robert Novak, me or any of the other unusual suspects he lumped into the unpatriotic category.
The only difference is that we didn't have to wait until more than 800 Americans and an untold number of Iraqis were dead, billions of dollars wasted, and half the planet despising us to know what would happen. ....
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