The Magazine Reader By Peter Carlson
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Buchanan's Right Jab
Okay, magazine readers, here's a quick quiz: What magazine has published the most scathing attacks on President Bush and his Iraq invasion?
If you guessed the Nation or Mother Jones or the Progressive, you may be right. Those liberal mags have pummeled Bush's war unmercifully. Vanity Fair has also weighed in with several attacks. But the correct answer just might be "the American Conservative."
Founded in 2002 by Patrick J. Buchanan, the TV talking head and former presidential candidate, the Arlington-based American Conservative is a vociferous antiwar voice from the Right. It opposed the war before the invasion in March 2003 and its opposition has escalated ever since.
The cover of the fortnightly's April 26 issue showed Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice with very long noses beneath the headline "Pinocchio Presidency." And the May 10 issue contains no fewer than six essays attacking the war. In the cover story, "The No-Win War," Christopher Layne, a fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, sums up the magazine's view: "Iraq has become a political humpty-dumpty that America cannot put back together, and the time has come for the United States to withdraw."
But the issue's most creative piece is a Jonathan Swift-style "modest proposal" by James P. Pinkerton, a former White House aide in the Reagan and Bush I administrations. What Iraq needs is a strong, no-nonsense leader who can restore order, says Pinkerton, and he suggests just the man for the job -- Saddam Hussein.
"Let's hope we can get Saddam back," Pinkerton writes. "Yes, it will cost us; we'll have to go back to giving him arms and money. But fortunately, Don Rumsfeld is still available for another Baghdad grip-and-grin -- just like old times."
Pinkerton is kidding. At least I think he's kidding.
His piece seemed like wild satire until our military commanders in Iraq announced that they were handing Fallujah over to one of Saddam's former generals and an army of Saddam's former soldiers. It's tough to write satire in times when reality is far weirder than anything a satirist can conjure up.