Illustration by Bob AulNational Review, the bedrock conservative magazine founded by George W. Bush's fellow Skulls and Bonesman William F. Buckley, rarely finds itself out of step with the current administration. But a recent issue carried an editorial titled “An End to Illusion” that described the Bush administration as having “a dismaying capacity to believe its own public relations.” When it comes to Iraq, the editorial blasted the Bush White House for possessing “an underestimation in general of the difficulty of implanting democracy in alien soil and an overestimation in particular of the sophistication of what is still fundamentally a tribal society and one devastated by decades of tyranny.” National Review's conclusion seemed to be a call for the U.S. to butt out: “It is Iraqis who have to save Iraq. It is their country, not ours.”
