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In our youth--before we learned how the world really works--we read and even occasionally believed conservative godfather William F. Buckley. While it's been a long time since we did either, we've always respected him, if only out of nostalgia. But in a National Review article published yesterday he lost us forever.

In a piece that will undoubtedly be cited by gloating anti-Bush forces everywhere, Buckley declares defeat in Iraq, and urges a "concession that is strategically appropriate". But rather than acknowledge the inevitability of this defeat--which proceeded exactly as predicted by those who knew--and accordingly assign blame to those who charged us foolishly into disaster, Mr. Buckley concocts both a false dichotomy and a dangerous delusion.

The false dichotomy is the pretense that President Bush's neocon fool's errand in Iraq was the pursuit of legitimate US foreign policy "postulates"--which, Buckley claims, "govern our policies in Latin America, in Africa, and in much of Asia"--suggesting that not going to Iraq was never an option. Nonsense.

Leaving aside that Buckley's postulates, "that the Iraqi people...would suspend internal divisions in order to get on with life in a political structure that guaranteed them religious freedom" and "that the invading American army would succeed in training Iraqi soldiers and policymakers to cope with insurgents bent on violence" have little to do with our foreign policy anywhere--let alone in Latin America, Africa, and Asia--they hardly comprise the only option for dealing with Saddam Hussein. Nor, more importantly, do they begin to explain how dealing with him had anything to do with our struggle against Islamist terrorists.

Of course, not even Mr. Bush himself has successfully explained that, so one can forgive Mr. Buckley for falling short-- though not for the wishful hubris of claiming that the administration "can defend itself historically, standing by the inherent reasonableness of the postulates." The postulates are only reasonable in the mind of the gentleman who conjured them, in hindsight, from the aether, and the administration of George Bush will be able to defend itself historically only if the National Review is put in charge of "History" after Dick Cheney suspends Congress.

The dangerous delusion is that these "postulates" cover and excuse the administration's invading Iraq under false pretenses, and that its decision to deceive the American public in order to accomplish the invasion was anything other than the worst act by any presidential administration in history. This despicable, unprecedented abuse of power Mr. Buckley would have us believe represents "the shrine of American idealism". It is not.

The "shrine of American idealism" is found in the honesty and integrity of its democratic institutions. It's found in the rule of law. It's in the idea that we can trust our government to act as we would act--truthfully, openly, legally, and in the best interests of all those who would be free from the conniving machinations of would-be despots, and the disreputable rationalizations of their apologists.