It could be worse than we think

And that would be pretty bad!

I've been making quite a few long posts lately.  Like the previous two.  So this one I'll keep short and encourage everyone to read this article by Sidney Blumenthal: Neocons take complete control Salon 12/30/04.  He writes:

... I have learned from numerous sources, including several people close to Brent Scowcroft, that Bush has unceremoniously and without public acknowledgment dumped Scowcroft, his father's closest associate and friend, as chairman of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. The elder Bush's national security advisor was the last remnant of traditional Republican realism permitted to exist within the administration. But no longer. ...

Bush has borne resentment against his father's alter ego since before Scowcroft privately rebuked him for his Iraq follies more than a year ago -- an incident that has not previously been reported. Bush "did not receive it well," said a friend of Scowcroft's. In "A World Transformed," the elder Bush's 1998 memoir, coauthored with Scowcroft, they explained why the then-president decided not to seize Baghdad in the Gulf War: "Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land." In the run-up to the Iraq War, Scowcroft wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal warning of the danger. Bush derided him, according to conservative biographers Peter and Rachel Schweizer in "The Bushes": "Scowcroft has become a pain in the ass in his old age," they quoted Bush. The Schweizers write, "Although he never went public with them, the president's own father shared many of Scowcroft's concerns." Despite his belief that the younger Bush's policies were disastrous, Scowcroft publicly supported him for reelection mainly out of loyalty to the father.

There's more.  It ain't pretty.

Tags: george w bush, iraq war, neoconservatives,