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Oppose the Iraq War? You Must Be a Racist

Rick Brookhiser is one of the better writers left at National Review. But he’s no less a neoconservative camp follower than, say, Rich Lowry. On his blog (and in his new book), Brookhiser says that Bill Buckley’s opposition to the Iraq War must be ascribed to a touch of racism: Bill spent much of 2005 […]

Rick Brookhiser is one of the better writers left at National Review. But he’s no less a neoconservative camp follower than, say, Rich Lowry. On his blog (and in his new book), Brookhiser says that Bill Buckley’s opposition to the Iraq War must be ascribed to a touch of racism:

Bill spent much of 2005 and 2006 writing that the Iraq War was lost, over, a bad job. I give instances on p. 232 of Right Time, Right Place, and I could easily have given more. The fact is indisputable. What do we make of it? What I make of it is that it was a major failure of Bill’s judgment, as great as his support for segregation in the 1950s (see pp. 12, 33). I believe the two failures are linked by an indifference, inherited in the first instance, atavistic in the second, to the rights and well being of dark people. 1950s Bill did not care that white people oppressed black people, 2000s Bill did not care that brown people tormented brown people.

How is Brookhiser’s claim here any different from the conventional liberal line that you’re a racist if you oppose affirmative action (for example)? Brookhiser elides the difference between someone who may wish to see a dictator like Saddam toppled but does not believe it is the mission of the United States to go around destroying monsters and someone who doesn’t care at all. This is indistinguishable from the liberal canard that if you don’t support affirmative action, you don’t care about the advancement of blacks. I doubt that Brookhiser accepts that line of argument when it’s applied to quotas, but he’s happy to deploy the same bad reasoning against conservative critics of nation-building abroad. The argument is identical in form to the charges that liberal levy against all opponents of big government: do you not care about the poor if you oppose federal welfare? Do you want the uninsured to die miserably if you don’t support Obamacare?

(Of course, you could also oppose the federalization of civil rights, as Goldwater did, without being a racist, contrary to what Brookhiser and the P.C. left think. Perhaps I give Brookhiser too much credit — he may be less a neocon, even, than a plain-vanilla New York liberal.)

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