Buckley: Iraq War a Failure and President Bush Isn’t A True Conservative

President Bush ran for office as a “compassionate conservative.” He continues to cultivate his conservative base, even issuing his first veto this week against embryonic stem cell research. However, of late his foreign policy has come under fire from some conservatives, including from the father of modern conservatism, William F. Buckley. Andrew Sullivan recently has stated that, ” the failure is as much intellectual as political. Today’s Republicans have abandoned limited government conservatism, fiscal prudence and foreign policy pragmatism for a form of fundamentalist, spendthrift authoritarianism at home and utter recklessness abroad. It will take a very long time before this country – and conservatism as a political tradition – recover.”

Also, Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele’s Republican Senate campaign acknowledged yesterday that he was the anonymous candidate quoted by a Washington Post political reporter as saying that being a Republican was like wearing a “scarlet letter” and that he did not want President Bush to campaign for him this fall. The campaign made the disclosure after a day of speculation in the blogosphere and among political reporters about which Republican Senate candidate had made the disparaging remarks reported by Dana Milbank in the Washington Sketch column in yesterday’s Post. Steele criticized the Iraq war effort and Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina and said congressional Republicans have “lost our way,” according to Milbank’s report. Asked whether he would invite Bush to campaign for him, he replied, considering Bush’s low approval rating in Maryland, “to be honest with you, probably not.”

CBS news anchor Thalia Assuras recently sat down for an interview with Buckley about his disagreements with President Bush, a discussion that is also presented on video:

“He’s practically always with me,” Buckley says.

Buckley finds himself parting ways with President Bush, whom he praises as a decisive leader but admonishes for having strayed from true conservative principles in his foreign policy.

In particular, Buckley views the three-and-a-half-year Iraq War as a failure.

“If you had a European prime minister who experienced what we’ve experienced it would be expected that he would retire or resign,” Buckley says.

Asked if the Bush administration has been distracted by Iraq, Buckley says “I think it has been engulfed by Iraq, by which I mean no other subject interests anybody other than Iraq… The continued tumult in Iraq has overwhelmed what perspectives one might otherwise have entertained with respect to, well, other parts of the Middle East with respect to Iran in particular.”Despite evidence that Iran is supplying weapons and expertise to Hezbollah in the conflict with Israel, Buckley rejects neo-conservatives who favor a more interventionist foreign policy, including a pre-emptive air strike against Iran and its nuclear facilities.

“If we find there is a warhead there that is poised, the range of it is tested, then we have no alternative. But pending that, we have to ask ourselves, ‘What would the Iranian population do?'”

Buckley does support the administration’s approach to the North Korea’s nuclear weapons threat, believing that working with Russia, China, Japan and South Korea is the best way to get Pyongyang back to the negotiating table. But that’s about where the agreement ends.

“Has Mr. Bush found himself in any different circumstances than any of the other presidents you’ve known in terms of these crises?” Assuras asks:

“I think Mr. Bush faces a singular problem best defined, I think, as the absence of effective conservative ideology — with the result that he ended up being very extravagant in domestic spending, extremely tolerant of excesses by Congress,” Buckley says. “And in respect of foreign policy, incapable of bringing together such forces as apparently were necessary to conclude the Iraq challenge. “Asked what President Bush’s foreign policy legacy will be to his successor, Buckley says “There will be no legacy for Mr. Bush. I don’t believe his successor would re-enunciate the words he used in his second inaugural address because they were too ambitious. So therefore I think his legacy is indecipherable”

At 81, Mr. Buckley still continues to contribute a regular column to The National Review, the magazine he founded 51 years ago.

Reported By Thalia Assuras For:
CBS Broadcasting Inc.