could of swore I read that in the FT over the weekend!! unless its a re-run
could of swore I read that in the FT over the weekend!! unless its a re-run
You did, Sean. It's current news.
new content copyright ?2001 pbs online & wgbh/frontline.
photo copyright ?2001 reuters newmedia/corbis images
<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Do a Google search on "Scowcroft" and "Iraq" and you get 28,000 entries. What is clear is that Scowcroft - a friend of the administration - has made it clear over the years that he thinks Iraq was wrong. To prove you wrong...once again:Originally posted by travelinman:
new content copyright ?2001 pbs online & wgbh/frontline.
photo copyright ?2001 reuters newmedia/corbis images
Brent Scowcroft Calls Iraq War ?overreaction?
by Andrew Rice
9/6/2004 weekly edition of The New York Observer.
On Aug. 30, as Republicans gathered in New York to celebrate their "war
President," retired Lt.-Gen. Brent Scowcroft sat with a reporter in his
Washington office, giving his analysis of the direction of his party?s
foreign policy, weighing in on Iraq, Iran and the rest of the world, and
lobbing a few rhetorical mortar shells in the direction of the White
House, which is located just a few blocks away from his office.
"Look, I?m a friend of this administration," Mr. Scowcroft said. "I love
the father. So do I want to do things which complicate [matters for]
them? No. But do I feel that there are some things that it?s important
to get out? Yes."
From these "things," a distinct picture emerged of the Presidency of
George W. Bush according to Mr. Scowcroft: one which is equally indebted
to the advice of a shadow cabinet of neoconservatives, the President?s
evangelical brand of Christianity?which has given him a feeling of
manifest destiny about conquering terrorism in the Middle East?or the
father whose one-term Presidential destiny he is at pains not to live
out himself.
It?s because of the influence of these forces on the President that Mr.
Bush may have "overreacted" to the threat of Al Qaeda and other
terrorist groups, said Mr. Scowcroft, and that the "preoccupation with
terrorism" meant that "we are maybe not paying enough attention to other
problems in the world that have nothing to do with terrorism, but are
really significant." Mr. Bush had squandered opportunities to avoid war
in Iraq, said Mr. Scowcroft, who also speculated that the Bush
administration had exaggerated the threat of weapons of mass destruction
because it provided "the only reason which you could use to propel a war
[in] a particular time frame." He fretted that the ongoing fighting in
Iraq made it impossible for the administration to confront nations much
closer to actually acquiring nuclear weapons, like Iran. Most of all,
Mr. Scowcroft reiterated his skepticism about the prospects for gunship
democracy in the Middle East?outlining the kind of realism for which
George W. Bush?s father was known around the world.
"It?s not that I don?t believe Iraq is capable of democracy," said Mr.
Scowcroft. "But the notion that within every human being beats this
primeval instinct for democracy has not ever been demonstrated to me."
All this he offered as he sat amid mementos of a career that has spanned
three decades and five Republican administrations. His framed
Presidential Medal of Freedom hung on one wall; a bronze bust of Jim
Baker sat near the door. Displayed above his desk was a framed
black-and-white photo of a younger Mr. Scowcroft, napping aboard Air
Force One. It was signed by his close friend, former boss and
ideological doppelg?nger, George Herbert Walker Bush.
Mr. Scowcroft?s true-blue G.O.P. decoration scheme only underscores the
strangeness of his position. For in addition to holding a number of
official titles?former National Security Advisor, chairman of a
Presidential advisory commission on intelligence issues, head of a
high-powered lobbying group?Mr. Scowcroft has acquired this most
unlikely sobriquet: Republican dissident. It all started two years ago,
in the lead-up to the Iraq war, when Mr. Scowcroft penned a column for
The Wall Street Journal entitled "Don?t Attack Saddam." In it, he argued
that there was scant justification for attacking Iraq, and that doing so
would "seriously jeopardize, if not destroy" President?s Bush?s wider
war on terrorism. For a few weeks, Washington was atwitter. Colin Powell
called to thank Mr. Scowcroft for providing war skeptics some "running
room." Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol lambasted him as a member of
an "axis of appeasers." Amateur analysts divined Oedipal overtones. As
Mr. Scowcroft himself puts it, he was widely seen as a "stalking horse"
for the current President Bush?s father, who always chased his politik
with a shot of real.
Today, the episode is largely consigned to history. Mr. Scowcroft was
ignored, America went to war, and many of the dangers he had warned of
came to pass. But Mr. Scowcroft remains relevant?because of who he is,
and what he represents: the foreign policy of the first Bush
administration, with its emphasis on allies and thank-you notes, Great
Power gamesmanship and sober-minded (critics say "amoral") calculation.
For much of this second Bush administration, Mr. Scowcroft?s school?the
foreign-policy realists?has been sidelined, as neoconservatives strutted
the halls of the Pentagon, spinning visions of a Middle East remade at
gunpoint. Now, with Iraq turning into a gruesome slog and despair
mounting in conservative circles, realism is suddenly in vogue again?and
Mr. Scowcroft is looking like a prophet. In Washington, turning a man?s
name into an adjective is the highest form of flattery. It is a measure
of how radically the country has changed these last four years that
Senator John Kerry?s foreign-policy advisors happily call themselves
"Scowcroftian."
"It?s curious," Mr. Scowcroft said. "I think back to my days of graduate
school during the Cold War: I was attacked by many of my
friends?probably primarily Democratic?for being a hard-liner, a hawk, so
on and so forth. I think I have maintained a pretty consistent
philosophy. Now I?m being attacked from the right for being a wussy
liberal."
W.?s Destiny
"The President has said?I think he told [Bob] Woodward?[that] he doesn?t
feel that he has to reach beyond the experts that he has gathered around
him. That he has every perspective he needs in order to make his
decisions. He does not have a kitchen cabinet or that kind of thing,
which was so popular with other Presidents that we?ve seen, who always
went outside to their old cronies. This President just doesn?t do that,
and it?s just part of his personality."
And which "other Presidents" was he referring to? Well, Mr. Scowcroft
says he doesn?t like to make explicit comparisons between the George
Bush he served and the George Bush who is President now. "I have views,
but I don?t like to talk publicly about them," he said.
He prefers to couch his criticisms in political analysis and implied
comparisons. "This administration has been pretty sharply divided on
foreign policy," he said. "If you look at many of the things the
President said when he was running for election in 2000, they are fairly
dramatically different from the way the administration has behaved. A
humbler foreign policy, for example, greater consideration for our
allies, shying away from peacekeeping, nation-building?all of those have
been reversed. Now the nation-building part not through choice, but it
leads one to speculate: Why the shift? Because he had a different view
of the world after he became President.
"It?s possible that the transformation came with 9/11, and that the
current President, who is a very religious person, thought that there
was something unique, if not divine, about a catastrophe like 9/11
happening when he was President. That somehow that was meant to be, and
his mission is to deal with the war on terrorism. Now that?s a perfectly
rational explanation?but there were signs of a change even before 9/11."
Mr. Scowcroft suggested that some of Mr. Bush?s more bellicose moves
were about politics rather than policy. "I?m not sure how much the
President is driven by the [neoconservatives] and how much he is driven
by wanting to be re-elected?maybe more than most Presidents do?because
his father was defeated. And I think it?s not impossible that, freed
from that demand, he might behave somewhat differently."
In other words, even at this late date, Mr. Scowcroft sees some reason
to hope that this son, like most sons, will eventually evolve into his
father.
To describe Mr. Scowcroft and the elder Mr. Bush as friends is to
understate the case?some say they share a brain. Mr. Scowcroft first
came to prominence in the 1970?s, when he was a deputy to Henry
Kissinger, and first became National Security Advisor under Gerald Ford.
But it was during his second stint in the job, under George H.W. Bush,
that he really came into his own. The two men were so close that after
Mr. Bush lost his re-election campaign, they wrote a joint memoir of the
administration?s foreign policy, describing the same events in
alternating passages.
"Do I know what the father thinks about most things? Yeah, I think so.
If I don?t, I?ve been sleeping for 30 years, because we?ve been together
a long, long time," Mr. Scowcroft said. "We talk about a lot of things,
and we talk about a lot of them very quietly. We have a wonderful
relationship, and I have to be very careful about the appearance of
speaking for him out of turn."
Indeed, Mr. Scowcroft quieted his criticism of the current
administration?s Iraq policy when it became clear that it was being
interpreted as paternal advice by proxy?perhaps even by the younger Mr.
Bush himself, who seemed spooked. ("I am aware that some very
intelligent people are expressing their opinions about Saddam Hussein
and Iraq," the President told reporters in Crawford, Tex., shortly after
Mr. Scowcroft?s column appeared. "I listen very carefully to what they
have to say.") Mr. Scowcroft said that the widely held perception that
he was doing the elder Bush?s bidding in voicing concerns about Iraq is
"not true." He said the two men have never even discussed his article.
Few people believe that, though, and Mr. Scowcroft said he?s resigned to
being viewed as Poppy?s familiar, calling it "a fact of life."
Springtime for Realism?
Early on in the administration, it appeared that Mr. Scowcroft and the
rest of the realists would exercise significant vicarious influence in
the administration via Secretary of State Powell, who has shown a
career-long reluctance to use military force in most circumstances, and
through National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, a Scowcroft prot?g?.
But Mr. Powell has mostly been marginalized, and Ms. Rice has often
sided with hawks like Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz in the struggle
for the administration?s soul. Mr. Scowcroft and Ms. Rice had bitter
words after Mr. Scowcroft went public with his criticism of the Iraq
war. Mr. Scowcroft says that he and Ms. Rice have since made up and now
talk regularly, but associates say that Ms. Rice has bitterly
disappointed her mentor. In public, Mr. Scowcroft takes care to praise
Ms. Rice for her "brilliant mind," but when asked to assess her job
performance, he said he would prefer not to comment. "Each National
Security Advisor sees his or her job in slightly different ways," he said.
But lately Mr. Scowcroft?or at least his point of view?has been making a
comeback. The New Republic recently declared that it was "Springtime for
Realism"; conservative intellectuals like Francis Fukuyama, William F.
Buckley and George Will have written despairingly of America?s
entanglement in Iraq. In recent months, talk within the administration
of creating a showcase democracy in Iraq has quieted considerably. Mr.
Bush, who once talked of smoking terrorists out of their caves, now says
the war he?s fighting may never be won?at least in any conventional sense.
Supporters of the President say that Mr. Scowcroft?s cautious way of
thinking about things?leaving Saddam Hussein in power, for instance?is a
relic of the past and dangerous to boot. Critics point to his
longstanding personal ties to the Saudis and to his business interests.
Mr. Scowcroft doesn?t disclose the clients of his consulting group, but
they are said to include oil companies and foreign governments.
The fact of the matter is, though, that Mr. Scowcroft has been proven
right about a lot of the things: He was skeptical about the existence of
Saddam Hussein?s nuclear program and of its relationship to Al Qaeda; he
warned that fighting a war in Iraq could prove a distraction to the rest
of the war on terror, creating animosity and hurting alliances. Two
years ago, the Presidential advisory board he heads recommended
centralizing the nation?s intelligence-gathering capabilities within the
C.I.A.?an approach Mr. Bush just recently endorsed. (How did the
administration thank Mr. Scowcroft?s commission? It was rousted from its
offices next to the White House and stuck in an less desirable office
building a few blocks away. Washington wags saw it as punishment for Mr.
Scowcroft?s apostasy. He blames renovations, not revenge.)
Of course, the language at the convention continues to equate the
multilateralism of the first Bush administration with a sort of
relativism or amoral opportunism. Critics point out that it was Mr.
Scowcroft, after all, who secretly went to China after the massacres at
Tiananmen Square to reassure Deng Xiaoping about America?s friendship.
The elder Mr. Bush?s administration was stridently criticized for
sitting by while the Balkans sank into bloody civil war. But it?s a
measure of America?s yearning for those supposedly simpler days, when
Eastern Europeans were clamoring for our blue jeans, that the first Bush
administration is now held up by many as a sort of golden era.
Naturally, the people most proud of the administration?s record are
those who served it. And the fact that Mr. Scowcroft, the consummate
insider, is expressing his displeasure publicly is a measure of how much
those who served Bush p?re feel that Bush fils has trampled their legacy
in his march toward a preemptive war.
"One of the interesting issues is the degree to which the expertise of
the previous Bush administration has been drawn on, and my answer to
that question is: I think not much," said Lawrence Eagleburger, a former
Secretary of State under the first President Bush who has also been
critical of the current administration?s foreign policy. "I think
Scowcroft is one of those they should have been listening to. [But] I
think to some degree, the people that are closest to this President
viewed his father?s administration on foreign policy as excessively
multilateral."
"I think that there are still many, many people within the Republican
Party that do not buy into the ?mission? thing," said the Cato
Institute?s Christopher Preble, one of the founders of the Coalition for
a Realistic Foreign Policy, a group of intellectuals and policy wonks
who recently came together to preach pragmatism. "[They] are not
prepared to sign up for a messianic liberation-theology strategy in the
same way they were willing to do so during the Cold War, because the
threat we are facing today is very, very different."
Mr. Scowcroft put it a little differently. "You know, I think
fundamentally Americans side with John Quincy Adams: ?We go not abroad
in search of monsters to destroy,?" he said. "Things are always harder
than they look. Changing history, changing people, changing cultures is
a slow, evolutionary process?and I think we?ll find that out in Iraq."
You may reach Andrew Rice via email at: arice@o....
back to top
This column ran on page 1 in the 9/6/2004 edition of The New York Observer.
Fine, the article may be new but the information isn't.
<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">It came from a recent interview. Scowcroft has been consistent with his message.Originally posted by travelinman:
Fine, the article may be new but the information isn't.
"It all started two years ago, in the lead-up to the Iraq war, when Mr. Scowcroft penned a column for The Wall Street Journal entitled "Don?t Attack Saddam."
Heh, Trav's article supports Reason's article on Scowcroft. There are many other prominent Republicans that oppose President Bush - Fmr. Head of the Joint Chief of staff Crowe and so on & on...
Ex-Security Adviser Rips Bush Diplomacy
Sun Oct 17, 6:53 AM ET
WASHINGTON - The national security adviser under the first President Bush (news - web sites) says the current president acted contemptuously toward NATO (news - web sites) and Europe after Sept. 11 and is trying to cooperate now out of desperation to "rescue a failing venture" in Iraq (news - web sites) and Afghanistan (news - web sites).
Brent Scowcroft, a mentor to the current national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites), also said in an interview published in England that Bush is inordinately influenced by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (news - web sites).
"Sharon just has him wrapped around his little finger," Scowcroft told London's Financial Times. "I think the president is mesmerized."
Scowcroft said the Bush administration's "unilateralist" position was partly responsible for the post-Sept. 11, 2001, decline of the trans-Atlantic relationship.
"It's in general bad," he said. "It's not really hostile, but there's an edge to it."
Early on, he said, "We had gotten contemptuous of Europeans and their weaknesses. We had really turned unilateral."
Although slightly diminished since then, the unilateralist policies remain fundamentally little changed, Scowcroft said. Recent overtures to cooperate in Afghanistan and Iraq with the United Nations (news - web sites) and NATO were "as much an act of desperation as anything else ... to rescue a failing venture."
On Israel and Sharon, the former security adviser said Sharon calls Bush after strongly retaliating for a Palestinian suicide attack and says: "`I'm on the front line of terrorism,' and the president says, `Yes, you are.'"
Scowcroft said Sharon "has been nothing but trouble."
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