Free Republic

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...

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...