The Scowcroft article

I just read the print version of the much-anticipated New Yorker article on Brent Scowcroft's criticisms of Dubya's foreign policy: "Breaking Ranks: What Brent Scowcroft tried to tell Bush" by Jeffrey Goldberg 10/31/05 issue, published 10/24/05.

It was something of a let-down to me, especially after reading the long excerpts Steve Clemons posted Sunday: Brent Scowcroft breaks ranks... Washington Note blog 10/23/05.  So far as I can see, Clemons' post provides the newsworthy portions of the article.

The only thing the print article really adds is a fuller discussion of the distinction between the "realist" foreign-policy outlook and the "neoconservative" approach.  And that is well done.

There is also a 10/24/05 interview with Goldberg on the article available at the New Yorker Web site: The Republican Rift.  From the interview:

Obviously, Scowcroft doesn’t think we should have gone into Iraq in the first place. Is he also critical of how the war has been conducted? Does he believe that it could have turned out better, had different tactical decisions been made?

Scowcroft believes that Iraq was a sideshow to the war on terror, and that America should have focussed its attention on resolving the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians. Once the decision to go to war was made, he supported it, but with deep trepidation. He doesn’t specifically criticize the conduct of the war; what he says is that American policymakers need to think through very carefully the consequences of occupying Arab countries, which, he makes it clear, he doesn’t think the Bush Administration did. He also suggests that this might have been an impossible mission; as a realist, he is doubtful that democracy can be imposed by force.

Unfortunately, his discussion of "realism" versus the Bush II foreign policy is more muddled in the interview than in the article.  And I'm not sure exactly how significant it is even if Goldberg is correct when he says that "Scowcroft speaks for the non-neoconservative, non-evangelical, non-human-rights wing of the Republican Party - the businessside of the Party."

Within today's Republican Party, church and country club have become so intermingled I'm not sure what it means to talk about the Party's "business side."  It seems to me that in their Party, the Christian Right and the country clubbers are stuck with each other for quite a while.