Garet Garrett's Revenge: Buckley Calls Iraq War a Failure

Fifty years ago, Bill Buckley led the charge for conservativism to abandon foreign policy noninterventionism. He denounced skeptics who warned about the dangers of becoming a world policeman. Now, in the closing years of his career, Buckley has lost his Wilsonian swagger and is actually making good sense on foreign policy:

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.''

.... `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.

Hat tip, Ralph Luker.