Politics & Power Quote by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Coming from William F. Buckley Jr., this isn’t dove-ish despair; it’s patrician triage. Buckley built a career policing the boundaries of American conservatism, usually with the confidence that American power, properly marshaled, could bend history. So when he writes that the objective in Iraq “has failed,” the sentence lands like a credentialed defection: not a protest sign, a stamped memo from inside the club. The intent is to make failure speakable in a movement that had treated doubt as disloyalty.

The craft is in his cold phrasing. “One can’t doubt” frames the conclusion as inevitable, not ideological. He doesn’t litigate every misstep; he declares the verdict and moves straight to “different plans,” the managerial euphemism that lets hawks pivot without admitting the premises were wrong. That’s the subtext: preserve strategic seriousness while conceding strategic catastrophe. “Objective” is doing a lot of work, too. It hints that goals were either unrealistic or quietly shifting, a nod to the war’s evolving justifications and the widening gap between rhetoric (liberation, democracy, WMD) and lived outcome (insurgency, sectarian violence, legitimacy collapse).

The sharpest phrase is “kernel… acknowledgement of defeat.” Buckley is calling out the American allergy to that word. He’s arguing that policy can’t change until language changes; you can’t recalibrate a war you still narrate as winnable. In the mid-2000s context - mounting casualties, Abu Ghraib, political backlash, and eroding public support - his line functions as a conservative permission slip: admit defeat, then plan like adults.