Excerpts of "stunning" new attack on Bush by Scowcroft

[springhill]

Kind of stunning. Doesn't think Cheney is a neocon? Hmmm...........

Anyway, this was posted on Buzzflash:

Scowcroft on Iraq and Neocon Idealism

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 moral necessity to make the case for war, Scowcroft said, he would not let his feelings about good and evil dictate the advice he gave the President.

<snip>

Scowcroft's Frustration Communicating with Bush 43

Like nearly everyone else in Washington, Scowcroft believed that Saddam maintained stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, but he wrote that a strong inspections program would have kept him at bay. "There may have come a time when we would have needed to take Saddam out," he told me. "But he wasn't really a threat. His Army was weak, and the country hadn't recovered from sanctions." Scowcroft's colleagues told me that he would have preferred to deliver his analysis privately to the White House. But Scowcroft, the apotheosis of a Washington insider, was by then definitively on the outside, and there was no one in the White House who would listen to him. On the face of it, this is remarkable: Scowcroft's best friend's son is the President; his friend Dick Cheney is the Vice-President; Condoleezza Rice, who was the national-security adviser, and is now the Secretary of State, was once a Scowcroft protege; and the current national-security adviser, Stephen Hadley, is another protege and a former principal at the Scowcroft Group.

<snip>

According to friends of the elder Bush, the estrangement of his son and his best friend has been an abiding source of unhappiness, not only for Bush but for Barbara Bush as well. George Bush, the forty-first President, has tried several times to arrange meetings between his son, "Forty-three," and his former national-security adviser to no avail, according to people with knowledge of these intertwined relationships. "There have been occasions when Forty-one has engineered meetings in which Forty-three and Scowcroft are in the same place at the same time, but they were social settings that weren't conducive to talking about substantive issues," a Scowcroft confidant said.

http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/001024.html

[Dover]

1. "Stunning" ........ or not.

RM: This is totally in line with a 'clean flush' agenda. they dump Bush,
everyone in Washington and media-land reveals they didn't really like his
policies in the first place, and Americans believe that democracy has been
restored -- as they did when Nixon resigned.

If Bush were to scale back his goals in Iraq, that would be a retreat, a
failure -- not only for Bush, but for America's reputation as a tough guy
that you better watch out for. But if the whole situation can be blamed
entirely on Bush -- a rogue President who lost it, like Nixon -- then any
retrenchment will be seen as a well-intentioned attempt to clean up an
unfortunate mess. The Establishment survives, and all options are open as
regards policy shifts.

But then we'd be left with Cheney and Rumsfeld. Either they'd need to be
dumped as well, or else they could have 'changes of heart' -- they were only
taking orders and being good soldiers -- like the fearsome flying monkeys
who became like puppies once the wicked witch had been slain.

Brzezinski: "In a bipartisan setting, it would be easier not only to scale down the
definition of success in Iraq but actually to get out -- perhaps even as
early as next year. And the sooner the United States leaves, the sooner the
Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis will either reach a political arrangement on their
own, or some combination of them will forcibly prevail.

RM: Brzezinski knows full well that the U.S. will never vacate Iraq. We've
built, and are still building, very permanent military bases, establishing
just the kind of imperial infrastructure Brzezinski himself so eloquently
promotes. He never mentions in this article the elephant in the kitchen --
oil -- and he knows full well that the U.S. will never relinquish control
over those reserves now that control has been achieved. The PNAC document
says that the issue of Iraq transcends the issue of Saddam's regime;
similarly it transcends Bush's regime....> cont'd

http://tinyurl.com/7kh5g

[Erika]

2. W 41 knew there was no way we could win in Iraq

They don't like us or our form of government or religion. Having bimbos like Karen Hughes who don't even know the stats or the facts speaking for us only makes it that much worse. Our troops dying for no blanking reason other than Halliburton profits.

[Carolab]

3. Well, his statements supportive of the "democracy" ideal are deceptive.

No one buys that story. I am sorry to see him trying to advance it.