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Scowcroft sticks to his
guns
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON -
The second-most frustrated man in Washington's foreign
policy establishment these days, next to Secretary of
State Colin Powell, must be Brent Scowcroft, the courtly
and self-effacing retired army general who served as
George Bush Sr's national security adviser.
Like
Powell, Scowcroft has consistently counseled the younger
Bush to pursue a cautious, multilateral approach in
carrying out his war on terrorism, especially with
regard to Iraq and the Middle East in general.
But his advice has gone virtually entirely
ignored as the unilateralist, pro-Likud hawks centered
in the Pentagon's civilian leadership and Vice President
Dick Cheney's office have consolidated their control of
policy since last December's successful military rout of
the Taliban in Afghanistan.
With the exception
of Cheney, many of the men who now appear to be
dictating policy - on both the scope of the war and the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as the general
unilateral thrust of US policy - served under Ronald
Reagan, but then left government or were forced out
under Bush's father.
Others, as in the case of
two of today's most influential players - Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Cheney's chief of staff, I
Lewis Libby - were retained but kept under a tight rein.
The significance of the fact that Scowcroft has
gone public with his advice on several occasions over
the past three months cannot be exaggerated. First, he
serves as chairman of the President's Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), a post that
guarantees him regular access to top-secret intelligence
and to Bush Jr's top foreign policy advisers. Normally,
PFIAB chairmen are discreet and hesitant to weigh in on
policy issues, at least publicly.
Second, he has
mentored two of the administration's top foreign policy
officials: Powell, whom he has known since they both
served in the Nixon White House 30 years ago, and Bush
Jr's own national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice,
whom George W took on at Scowcroft's personal suggestion
early in his presidential campaign.
Scowcroft
also worked closely with Rumsfeld under Gerald Ford, to
whom he also served as national security adviser, and
with Cheney, who was Pentagon chief in the first Bush
administration.
Third, and most important,
Scowcroft was and remains very close and extremely loyal
to Bush Sr, with whom he co-authored A World
Transformed, a 1998 book about their administration
of foreign policy from 1989 to 1993.
One of the
book's main themes is the importance of building broad
coalitions, both domestically and overseas, for
difficult policy initiatives, such as the Gulf War.
Scowcroft's loyalty to Bush Sr - and the fact
that Scowcroft is widely seen as the former president's
alter ego - makes his speaking out publicly about these
issues so remarkable.
"I see them as
indistinguishable on foreign policy," said Christopher
Jones, who teaches US foreign policy at the Henry M
Jackson School for International Studies at the
University of Washington in Seattle.
"For
Scowcroft to say anything that can be seen as critical
towards the administration is quite amazing," added one
former senior official who worked with Scowcroft in the
first Bush administration. "Frankly, I can't conceive of
him doing so without first talking with Bush's dad."
Apart from some offhand comments early in the
Afghan campaign, when he said he hoped that Washington
would intensify consultations with US allies, Bush Sr
has eschewed any substantive public comment about the
course of the war on terrorism. That has bolstered
speculation that he shares Scowcroft's concerns.
Scowcroft has expressed himself publicly on
three main issues since September 11: coalitions, the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the administration's
obsession with ousting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
In the early stages of the war, when Rumsfeld
and neo-conservatives were arguing that a multilateral
coalition could hamper a successful campaign by
constraining Washington's ability to achieve its aims,
Scowcroft took quite the opposite tack.
"Success
means a coalition, a broad coalition," he wrote in the
Washington Post. "The liberation of Kuwait wouldn't have
been possible without the development of a strong
coalition of countries that provided military bases,
staging areas, intelligence, isolation of Iraq and
strong moral and political support."
In May, as
violence between Israelis and Palestinians intensified,
Scowcroft took to the Post's op-ed page again to bolster
Powell's frustrated efforts to persuade Bush to rein in
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and launch a new,
multilateral peace process based on Saudi Crown Prince
Abdullah's peace offer and culminating in a viable and
independent Palestinian state.
In an
uncharacteristic show of boldness, Scowcroft went much
further in his article, setting forth a detailed plan
for achieving, first, a ceasefire to be overseen by an
international force including US troops, and then a
comprehensive settlement, largely based on
understandings reached by both sides at Taba just before
Sharon's election and consistent with a framework to be
agreed by an international conference.
More
recently, Scowcroft has spoken out on national
television to urge restraint in the rush toward war
against Iraq. Echoing the views of State Department and
Central Intelligence Agency experts and drawing on his
own experience under Bush Sr, Scowcroft warned that an
invasion of Iraq "could turn the whole region into a
cauldron, and, thus, destroy the war on terrorism".
Echoing advice from European and Arab allies,
Scowcroft said that Washington should work with the
United Nations to get arms inspectors into Iraq before
taking action because Saddam's refusal to comply would
at least give Washington a "casus belli that we
don't really have right now".
And, in what has
become a heresy to the neo-conservatives who now
dominate US policy, Scowcroft suggested that the success
of any future effort against Saddam Hussein depended on
progress in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In
each of the three cases, Scowcroft's advice has had
virtually no visible impact on the administration. In
fact, his very specific plan for Israeli-Palestinian
peace was totally rejected as Bush, within just a few
weeks, aligned US policy squarely behind Sharon.
In fact, each intervention by Scowcroft inspired
a host of attacks on his positions, sometimes by senior
administration officials, including Cheney and Rumsfeld,
and more often by the stable of neo-conservative
columnists and media, such as the Wall Street Journal
and the Weekly Standard. Think tanks such as the
American Enterprise Institute and the Project for a New
American Century, which are closely tied to the
administration hawks, also chimed in to condemn
Scowcroft.
Many of these same actors were among
Bush Sr's most violent critics 10 years ago when he
halted the Gulf War at the Kuwaiti border and refused to
carry it on to Baghdad. They were even more scathing
when Bush Sr withheld aid to Israel until it cooperated
in the search for an international solution to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
These are
precisely the same issues that Scowcroft - and, by
association, Bush Sr - are now most concerned about.
That George W has decided to line up with those who
excoriated his father 10 years ago says volumes about
how radically US policy has changed under his
stewardship.
(Inter Press Service)
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