Free Republic

Brent Scowcroft was a great American, as was Lawrence Eagleburger. Both served our country well throughout their lives. Except once. June 4th, 1989, the Communist Party of China unleashed a slaughter and then round-up of activists and students who had bravely demanded a more democratic China. Less than 6 weeks later, while bodies of students were still in Beijing morgues, Scowcroft and Eagleburger, encouraged by James Lilly, and of course with the full backing of then President George H. Bush, undertook a secret mission to Beijing to let the butchers know, “we’ve got your back”. Alternative historical timelines are somewhat...

Brent Scowcroft, the former Air Force general who served as the national security adviser under Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, has died at the age of 95, according to a statement from The Scowcroft Group. Scowcroft is best known for his tenure in the Bush administration and his handling of the Persian Gulf War and remained one of the nation's most prominent elder statesmen and well-known experts on international security matters.

Newly released State Department emails help reveal how a major Clinton Foundation donor was placed on a sensitive government intelligence advisory board even though he had no obvious experience in the field, a decision that appeared to baffle the department’s professional staff. The emails further reveal how, after inquiries from ABC News, the Clinton staff sought to “protect the name” of the Secretary, “stall” the ABC News reporter and ultimately accept the resignation of the donor just two days later. Copies of dozens of internal emails were provided to ABC News by the conservative political group Citizens United, which obtained...

Wilsongate: Motive, Means, and Opportunity The Buried Story Behind PlamegateBy Fedora Introduction Since Robert Novak mentioned Valerie Plame’s CIA background in July 2003, the media has focused on trying to trace the leak of Plame’s name to the White House, but has devoted less follow-up to another newsworthy angle in Novak’s original story. Novak wrote: The CIA's decision to send retired diplomat Joseph C. Wilson to Africa in February 2002 to investigate possible Iraqi purchases of uranium was made routinely at a low level without Director George Tenet's knowledge. . . Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife,...

Al Gore’s campaign against global warming is shifting into high gear. Reporters and commentators follow his every move and bombard the public with notice of his activities and opinions. But while the mainstream media promote his ideas about the state of planet Earth, they are mostly silent about the dramatic impact his economic proposals would have on America. And journalists routinely ignore evidence that he may personally benefit from his programs. Would the romance fizzle if Gore’s followers realized how much their man stands to gain? Earlier this year Gore experienced a notable public relations debacle. The Tennessee Center for...

Speculation is mounting (except, of course, among the “professional” press), as to the identities of six of the eight individuals included in the Libby subpoena to The New York Times (see Clarice Feldman’s piece here). The Times deemed the identities of only two of the parties worthy of release, former CIA director George Tenet and former White House Spokesman Ari Fleischer. The names of the other six remain elusive

THE Iraq Study Group report was released into a sea of unrealistic expectations. Inevitably, it disappointed hopes for a clear path through the morass of Iraq, because there is no “silver bullet” solution to the difficulties in which we find ourselves. But the report accomplished a great deal. It brought together some of America’s best minds across party lines, and it outlined with clarity and precision the key factors at issue in Iraq. In doing so, it helped catalyze the debate about our Iraq policy and crystallize the choices we face. Above all, it emphasized the importance of focusing on...

NEW YORK - Iran's hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad broke away from events at the U.N. General Assembly to hold an informal question-and-answer session with high-powered members of America's most prestigious foreign policy think tank — despite objections from some Jewish groups and the Bush administration. The Council on Foreign Relations said afterward that Ahmadinejad had engaged in a "protracted punch and counter-punch" with 19 members for about 90 minutes in the conference room of a New York City hotel late Wednesday. But it said the controversial Iranian leader had offered no new policies or opinions other than those he has...

Scowcroft Skeptical Vote Will Stabilize Iraq Friend of Bush Family Joins Pessimists By Dana Priest and Robin Wright Washington Post Staff Writers Friday, January 7, 2005; Page A12 Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser for President George H.W. Bush and a leading figure in the U.S. foreign policy establishment, said yesterday that he has grown pessimistic about prospects for stability and democracy in Iraq, a view increasingly expressed by other foreign policy figures in both parties. "The Iraqi elections, rather than turning out to be a promising turning point, have the great potential for deepening the conflict," Scowcroft said. He said...

The next feud between America's freedom and democracy hawks and old United Nations diplomats will likely develop this week with the release of a much-anticipated report. Ordered by Secretary-General Annan, it was prepared by a panel of 16 former world movers and shakers now in their 70s, who will undoubtedly be hailed at Turtle Bay as wise men, and derided elsewhere as has-beens. Men who held previous posts like Russian foreign minister and Saddam champion Yevgeny Primakov, British U.N. envoy David Hannay, or current Arab League chief Amr Moussa, are not going to excite anyone looking for fresh insights into...

Brent Scowcroft, military assistant to President Nixon, and National Security Advisor to Presidents Ford and H.W. Bush, continues his attack on the bush foreign policy and Iraq War in an interview by Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Yorker (not available without subscription). In The Washington Note, Steven C. Clemons provides excerpts (here) from the interview: A principal reason that the Bush Administration gave no thought to unseating Saddam was that Brent Scowcroft gave no thought to it. An American occupation of Iraq would be politically and militarily untenable, Scowcroft told Bush. And though the President had employed the rhetoric of...

Now that Cindy Sheehan turns out to be a disaster for the antiwar movement -- most Americans are not about to follow a left-wing radical who insists that we are in Iraq for reasons of theft, oppression and empire -- a new spokesman is needed. If I were in the opposition camp, I would want a deeply patriotic, highly intelligent, distinguished establishment figure. I would want Brent Scowcroft. Scowcroft has been obliging. In the Oct. 31 New Yorker he came out strongly against the war and the neocon sorcerers who magically foisted it upon what must have been a hypnotized...

Mr. Stability The wrongness of Brent Scowcroft's realism. By Christopher Hitchens Posted Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2005, at 1:47 PM ET Scowcroft longs for the "peace" of Saddam's regime The sole point of the non-findings of the Fitzgerald non-investigation, into the non-commission of non-crimes and the non-outing of a non-covert CIA bureaucrat, is (as Messrs. Kerry, Krugman, Rich, and others keep reminding us) that it might even yet trigger the long-awaited inquest into the Iraq intervention. I very strongly hope that there is a full-dress postmortem into this country's Iraq policy, though I am not ready to assume that "inquest" or...

Two of America's foremost political veterans, who have served at the White House, warned Thursday the world is shrinking and nations that once were on the outside looking in are now seeking their own special relationship with the United States. Brent Scowcroft, former national security adviser to two U.S. presidents, and Howard Baker, Tennessee's favorite-son U.S. senator and President Ronald Reagan's chief of staff, said it is not in America's best interests today to become too sentimental about past special relationships. The country shouldn't turn its back on friends, they said. Scowcroft and Baker, a former U.S. ambassador to Japan,...

The punditry world is abuzz with talk of a recent New Yorker article (no link available) by writer Jeffrey Goldberg, who has interviewed Brent Scowcroft, the former national security advisor for the Ford Administration and the Administration of George H.W. Bush. In a number of passages in the piece, Scowcroft takes on the current Bush Administration over the issue of Iraq, something for which he has earned applause from many Democrats and other Bush critics. But when one reads the entire New Yorker piece, one finds that Scowcroft's critique is directed at foreign policy idealism in general. And it's a...

Did United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan hightail it to Moscow to check in with his handpicked UN reform man Yevgeny Primakov within weeks of William Safire’s New York Times expose on alleged scandal in the Oil-For-Food Program? The first of Safire’s groundbreaking Oil-For-Food investigative stories ran in mid-March, 2004. Here’s Annan’s Moscow itinerary as documented by The Russian Federation: "Annan arrived in Moscow on Sunday, April 4, 2004 where he had an early working dinner with Evgeni (sic) Primakov, former Prime Minister of the Russian Federation." On the following day, Annan visited the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, where...

Did United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan hightail it to Moscow to check in with his handpicked UN reform man Yevgeny Primakov within weeks of William Safire’s New York Times expose on alleged scandal in the Oil-For-Food Program? The first of Safire’s groundbreaking Oil-For-Food investigative stories ran in mid-March, 2004. Here’s Annan’s Moscow itinerary as documented by The Russian Federation: "Annan arrived in Moscow on Sunday, April 4, 2004 where he had an early working dinner with Evgeni (sic) Primakov, former Prime Minister of the Russian Federation." On the following day, Annan visited the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, where...

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has just rebuked Iran for failing to cooperate fully with international inspectors who are examining whether Tehran is meeting its nonproliferation commitments. How concerned should we be about this development? What does it mean? By its own admission, Iran has been taking steps to develop the capability to enrich uranium, one of the two methods used to produce weapons-grade fissile material. While Iran says its activities are solely for peaceful production of nuclear power and are permitted by the Non-Proliferation Treaty, once enrichment capability exists, a major barrier to producing a nuclear weapon virtually...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 — The Republican and Democratic leaders of the Congressional investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks plan to issue a final report next week calling for the appointment of a new cabinet-level director of national intelligence who would outrank the director of central intelligence, government officials say. But the Congressional leaders have agreed not to assign blame to any individual government officials for the intelligence failures before Sept. 11, and instead will emphasize proposals for changes to make sure that such devastating attacks never happen again. The final report, summing up the joint panel's nearly yearlong inquiry into...

This dithering and equivocation regarding the real threat Saddam poses for America is like Clinton nostalgia; WJC would rather not deal with the difficult and dangerous issues, so he simply ignored them. He figured he could initiate some studies, waste time by ordering Gore to head some bogus commissions, and try to deflect attention away from the Middle East as the source of the terrorist threat, using the hyped up bogey man of right wing militias to get an added political boost out of bombings like OK City. These "moderate fence sitters" who counsel Scowcroft like reticence, even temporary ones...