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I never suggested that there was unanimity among the neocons about all the interventions of the last 20 years. The real problem is not even the intervention but the nation building that follows. This is where our troops are misused and wind up dead. Scowcroft does support nation building, which is a huge mistake and what separates him form Reagan (and Palin).

Getting the Mideast Back on Our Side.

http://www.scowcroft.com/html/gettingthemiddleeast.html

I think it is hilarious that you think Reagan’s appointment of Scowcroft to a meaningless board is evidence that there was no hostility. (He was a close friend of Reagan’s vice President; that in itself would qualify anyone for a position on a board or commission).

Scowcroft had been a been a military and visor Deputy National Security Advisor to Nixon and National security Advisor to Ford. Such a resume makes his absence from any significant position in the Reagan administration stick out like a sore thumb.

Scowcroft was also appointed by Reagan to the Blue Ribbon Commission on Defense Management. Every president has only so many big name positions to go around, and Scowcroft had a lucrative private job in the Reagan years. One doesn't have to assume that Reagan hated Scowcroft to explain why he didn't offer him one of the few top-level positions.

But your point here, that Scowcroft was one of the dreaded neo-cons, really doesn't hold up. Check out Frustrated Scowcroft Assails Neocons, Cheney. Scowcroft was a bit more skeptical of Gorbachev than Reagan and he was interested in nation-building, but he was not a neocon in the way that word has come to be used.

"Nation-building" is an ambiguous phrase. If you find yourself victorious in war, you will have to do something to rebuild or lose the peace, but that doesn't meant that you go to war to rebuild other people's nations. You've only got to look at Scowcroft's comments on Iraq to realize that he wasn't for nation-building in the second sense. He didn't want to go to war to remake Iraq, but once we were there were we really going to just pull out and let things go back to how they were?

It's kind of a silly argument. It's hard to say who is and who isn't a neocon. For some people a neocon is a One World liberal internationalist, for others it's a Go It Alone interventionist cowboy.You might even call Scowcroft's associate Kissinger a neocon, though I doubt anyone else would. It's hard to say just what the objective meaning of the word is anymore.

But the idea that you're a neocon if you try to clean up after wars but you're not a neocon if you get us into all kinds of foreign wars to begin with brings a smile to the face. The possibility that Scowcroft was a neocon for wanting to organize the peace and Rumsfeld wasn't a neocon because he was so careless about what would happen afterwards, is also hard to agree with.

I see that Palin has let two of her advisors go. Maybe it means a change in her orientation. But until recently the idea that she wasn't a neocon or was hostile to neoconservative ideas would have been unproven or even laughable.

I can't help thinking of Bush who went from condemning "nation-building" during the campaign to embracing it with a vengeance after he was elected. That's a good lesson in not taking politicians at their word. Maybe she'd be different, but I wouldn't count on it.