Just a few comments on fellow blogger David's earlier post on some conservatives' dire predictions on the GOP's political future due to Iraq. Of the three he mentioned -- William Buckley, David Brooks, and George Will -- the only one I really listen and pay attention to is Bill Buckley. David Brooks and George Will are very good writers and reasonable conservatives, but they both view the modern Republican Party and conservative movement through the lens of : "What would Reagan do?" And Ronald Reagan isn't walking through the door anytime soon.

William Buckley, however, is a different story. He was one of the original anti-communist Cold Warriors, and the National Review was founded in part to be the voice of anti-communism in modern politics. So he knows what's involved when one is fighting a murderous ideology in addition to armed forces. When he "turned against" the Iraq war I was disturbed and I read him carefully. But that happened almost three years ago, not recently. In fact, one of his first anti-Iraq War columns was written prior to the 2004 elections (Should We Have Gone To War?). Even stronger was a column that he wrote over a year ago, It Didn't Work, in which he states: "One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed."

In short, Buckley's Iraq War viewpoint is not new. And it's as wrong today as it was three years ago, or a year ago. Primarily because Buckley, as well as Brooks and Will, view the war through the same prism as the Democrats -- as an electoral and political problem within our own country, threatening GOP ascendancy -- as opposed to a problem that needs to be solved, not run away from.

That's not so say that there haven't been serious mistakes made. But going in wasn't one of them. Tell me exactly how -- with the sanctions programs disintegrating and with Saddam Hussein having bought off (Oil for Food scandal) Russia, France, and Germany -- diplomacy would have either removed Saddam or prevented him from restarting his weapons programs? Just as it was a forgone conclusion that after we didn't finish off Saddam during Gulf War I we would eventually have to go back in -- if we didn't go into Iraq in 2003 we would have probably have had to go in by now anyway.
The only way we could have avoided all out war with Iraq would have been if we could have assisted in pulling off a coup against him. We tried that, and failed, during the Clinton Administration in 1996 (the "zipless coup"). That was botched so badly by Clinton that even Scott Ritter complained about it. An aside - the reason why the CIA and the State Department hate Ahmed Chalabi so much is that he told the CIA that they were doing it wrong and would fail - just before the CIA did it wrong and failed! Had the CIA and the State Department upheld their part of planning for the post-war Iraq, and formed an Iraqi government-in-exile prior to the invasion with Chalabi that could have been moved into place after we got rid of Saddam, thus stabilizing Iraq until elections, we wouldn't be in the position we are in today. We could have continued to work within Iraq as a military operation seeking and destroying the enemy, as opposed to what we ended up doing - which was switching off to a political and diplomatic solution headed by Paul Bremer before we had secured safety for the Iraqis. Wars are won by the military, not by the diplomats. Paul Bremer was a diplomat.