Via Geraldine Sealey at Salon.com's War Room '04 blog: Brent Scowcroft, Old Man Bush's national security adviser during his presidency, is still criticizing Bush the Younger's foreign policy: Scowcroft lambasts Bush's unilateralism by Daniel Dombey Financial Times 10/14/04.
Scowcroft famously urged caution on the current President Bush over rushing into war with Iraq. Now he's criticizing him for alienating European allies and for being far too uncritically supportive of the reckless policies of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his rightwing Likud Party:
But speaking to the FT, Mr Scowcroft, 79, went a step further in attacking some of the president's core foreign policies. "Sharon just has him wrapped around his little finger," Mr Scowcroft said. "I think the president is mesmerised."
"When there is a suicide attack [followed by a reprisal] Sharon calls the president and says, 'I'm on the front line of terrorism', and the president says, 'Yes, you are. . . ' He [Mr Sharon] has been nothing but trouble."
Mr Scowcroft also cast doubt on Mr Sharon's plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip, which last week Dov Weisglass, a leading Israeli adviser, said was intended to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state.
"When I first heard Sharon was getting out of Gaza I was having dinner with Condi [Rice] and she said: 'At least that's good news.' And I said: 'That's terrible news . . . Sharon will say: 'I want to get out of Gaza, finish the wall [the Israelis' security fence] and say I'm done'."
He said that he sees Bush as turning away from some of "the extremes of neo-cons scoffing at multilateral organisations." But he also noted that Bush wound up having to go to NATO and the United Nations for help in Afghanistan and Iraq after treating them contemptuously:
He added that US unilateralism had diminished to some extent but that fundamentally little had changed. He said US engagement with the UN and Nato in Afghanistan and Iraq was "as much an act of desperation as anything else ... to rescue a failing venture".
He calls Bush's refusal of NATO's offer of making the mission in Afghanistan a NATO operation from the start, as opposed to a US operation with some allies in supporting roles, was a "severe rebuff" to the European allies. It's clear he doesn't mean that as a compliment. To the hardline anti-European factions within the Republican Party and the Bush administration, it would be a compliment to say that.
Sealey also references this 2002 speech by Scowcroft, which gives a good glimpse of some of the strengths and weaknesses of the Republican "realist" school of foreign policy, of which the 79-year-old Scowcroft is a major figure right now: 9/11 a Year On: America's Challenges in a Changed World, United States Institute of Peace Conference 11/05/02. On the constructive side, observations like this are useful:
What was going on in this period before 9/11? In particular, I want to mention two phenomenon developing contrarily but in some respects interactively. The first was globalization, primarily the facts rather than the policy of globalization but both are involved. ...
The contrary and yet associated phenomenon which is going on is the political tendency in some societies to break up into ever-smaller, more homogenous, more intolerant political entities. Perhaps the connection here is groups seeking purity against the onslaught of alien forces. In any case, this has been going on during this period and these, I believe, are a breeding ground, especially globalization, for terrorism.
We didn't see it, partly because we tended to see terrorism as regional or a response to specific grievances, not existential.
But this part gives good examples combines some solid observations with a couple of real whoppers (my emphasis):
For us, it was a huge discontinuity, partly because we didn't see it coming and partly because it was a huge departure. It was the first time in generations that Americans have felt vulnerable. It was new for us. Even in World War II, while Pearl Harbor was a horror, Hawaii was a long ways away, it wasn't a state yet, and for most Americans there was not the personal sense of vulnerability. That vunerability is new to us, almost uniquely in the world.
In addition, the perpetrators were non-state actors for whom the traditional notions of deterrence and retaliation either didn't apply or took very different forms.
Finally, there was the suicidal component which, in addition to the horror of it, is very difficult to combat.
The change in the United States was immediate. First the last vestiges of what we call the Vietnam Syndrome disappeared. There was virtually no objection to our sending forces into Afghanistan. We see American flags everywhere now, and none of them are burning. That is a dramatic change over the previous 30 years.
That vulnerability is new to us? Say what? This has been a favorite Republican meme, but it's basically ridiculous. Yes, 9/11 was obviously a traumatic event for the United States and many people were killed. The destruction was spectacular, and the demonstration of the country's vulnerability to terrorism was certainly strong.
But cartoonist Tom Tomorrow hits on the basic silliness of this notion when he refers to a similar comment by Bob Schieffer, moderating the third presidential debate: Worst...moderator...ever 10/13/04.
From the very first question: will we ever have a world as safe as the world we grew up in? You know, the world in which schoolchildren practiced "duck and cover" drills as a response to the threat of complete global annihilation? Yeah, that world was really safe, Bob. If only we could be that safe again.
The stupid comment about burning flags is also Republican-prick nonsense. However symbolically powerful it might be for them, flag-burning was always a fringe phenomenon. But his basic points were correct: 9/11 was a traumatic event; it signaled the need for a new focus on transnational terrorism ("non-state actors"); and, the suidice part deserved special attention.
Scowcroft also warned at that time that Bush's push for war against Iraq was diverting the US from the fight against Al Qaeda:
The Administration is no longer talking about terrorism with a global reach. That's important in several respects. There are all kinds of terrorists. They're all repugnant and we need to deal with them all. But we cannot deal with them all at once. By dropping the phrase that the President began with, terrorism with a global reach, we make all terrorism equal, and dissipate our ability to concentrate. It makes the problem, if we take it seriously, almost unmanageable.
The mess that the Bush adminstration has made of US foreign policy is really astonishing.
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