Scowcroft on W and Sharon

Brent Scowcroft, who was the first Pres. Bush’s National Security advisor (and therefore Condi Rice’s boss that time around) has weighed in again with publicly expressed views that directly challenge key aspects of W’s foreign policy.
In an Oct. 14 article in the Financial Times that I had missed, FT reporter Daniel Dombey reports that Scowcroft told him that W,

    is “mesmerised” by Ariel Sharon, Israel’s prime minister, and that the Bush administration’s recent co-operation with the United Nations and Nato in Afghanistan and Iraq is a desperate move to “rescue a failing venture”.
    Brent Scowcroft, a former national security adviser and close collaborator of former president George H. W. Bush, told the Financial Times that the US administration’s “unilateralist” stance had contributed to the decline of the transatlantic relationship…
    “Sharon just has him wrapped around his little finger,” Mr Scowcroft said. “I think the president is mesmerised.”
    “When there is a suicide attack [followed by a reprisal] Sharon calls the president and says, ‘I’m on the front line of terrorism’, and the president says, ‘Yes, you are. . . ‘ He [Mr Sharon] has been nothing but trouble.”
    Mr Scowcroft also cast doubt on Mr Sharon’s plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip, which last week Dov Weisglass, a leading Israeli adviser, said was intended to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state.
    “When I first heard Sharon was getting out of Gaza I was having dinner with Condi [Rice] and she said: ‘At least that’s good news.’ And I said: ‘That’s terrible news . . . Sharon will say: ‘I want to get out of Gaza, finish the wall [the Israelis’ security fence] and say I’m done’.”

(You can find a very similar analysis of the Gaza withdrawal plan in the piece I had in Boston Review about Palestine, last spring.)
That Scowcroft is speaking out in this way now, and to a leading European publication, has to be significant. His last major speakout was in mid-August 2002, when he ran an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal under the simple heading “Don’t attack Saddam“.
On that occasion, according to Bob Woodward’s book “Plan of Attack”, Scowcroft received two important phone calls shortly afterward…


One was from Colin Powell, who thanked him for having given him “some running room.”
The other was from Condi, “and they had sharp words.” Everyone knew then (and knows now) that Scowcroft is extremely close to Bush senior. Condi apparently told Scowcroft back then that his article “made it look as if the president’s father had weighed in. At minimum it was a slap at the president.”
According to Woodward (p. 160),

    Neither Scowcroft nor Bush senior wanted to injure the son’s self-confidence. [Oh, poor baby!] So Scowcroft largely shut up in public, though he did not change his view.

But now he’s broken his silence again? And just 19 days before the election? What’s happening?
According to the Thursday FT piece:

    Mr Scowcroft said he hoped that if Mr Bush were re-elected he would change course more fundamentally.
    “This is a man who’s really driven to seek re-election and done a lot of things with that in mind,” he said. “I have something of a hunch that the second administration will be quite different from the first.”

So it might be that he’s putting in a bid, now, for the policies to be changed after the election?
It might be that he’s trying to help W’s election effort by softening some of the harsh edges of his foreign policy?
In today’s WaPo, Glenn Kessler has a piece drawing on the FT piece. Kessler added,

    Scowcroft declined a request for an interview yesterday. When asked if he had been quoted correctly, his office responded with a statement: “He has been and is a supporter of President Bush and thinks he is the best qualified to lead our country.”

Well heck. What d’you expect him to say??

14 thoughts on “Scowcroft on W and Sharon”

  1. Your extreme bias in favor of the murderous Arabs and against the one tiny Jewish country, in which all citizens have equal rights paints you as a spiritual heir to the likes of Himmler and Streicher. May you be punished in both worlds for your support of cold-blooded murderers.

  2. Joseph,
    May you acquire rhetorical skills that do not defeat your purpose by relying on death threats and curses. In this life or in the next.

  3. Nice catch on Scowcroft. But reading the big NY Times Magazine article today about Bush’s faith indicates his plan to Sharon is to not be engaged in the process at all, effectively letting him off his leash.
    Tiny country beset by bigots, certainly, but by most estimates sitting on the world’s 5th largest nuclear arsenal, with support from the 1st largest.

  4. It turns out Joseph hadn’t finished with me after he’d sounded off on the Comments board here. He then privately emailed me the rant that follows.
    Joseph, if you read this, I’d be interested to know what exactly it was, in the above post or elsewhere on the blog, that set you off so??
    He writes about Israel as the one state in the MidEast “in which all citizens are equal”. Joseph, are you serious?? Israel was established to be, and still is, “the state of the Jewish people”. I wonder how many of the 1 million Israeli citizens who happen not to be Jewish (mainly, because they are indigenous Palestinians) he has ever talked to??
    Anyway, here’s Joseph to Helena, part deux:
    Your unabashed support for the murderous Arabs (who don’t hesitate to kill women savagely raped or homosexuals), which your own Bible declares to be a ‘wild ass of a man’ (Genesis) and against the one true democracy in the MidEast and a state in which all citizens are equal speaks volumes on behalf of your Jew-hatred. Unfortunately for the likes of you, the Jews haven’t been around for 33 centuries to be done in by a bunch of moral dwarves (ie the Left).
    May God punish you for all eternity for your role in trying tolight a fire under the small and innocent Jewish nation who your own countryman were shouting “Go back to Palestine where you belong!!” as recently as my father’s lifetime.

  5. Scowcroft on George W.’s Middle East Policies

    Brent Scowcroft, the National Security Advisor to the first president Bush (and basically Bush I’s ideological soul-mate) publicly states that he thinks George W. Bush has taken American foreign policy horribly off-course when it comes to the Middle Ea…

  6. Sharon may have Bush mesmerized, but it is Saudi prince Bandar the one that flies directly to Crawford Texas, meets the Bushes socially behind closed doors, sends Laura and his wife shopping to the mall, and is all smiles with Bush at the baseball games.
    True that Sharon has no royal lineage, and is not sitting on one third of the proven oil reserves of the world, but the influence of the Saudi royal family is the ugliest and most sinister part of the saga, not an Israeli politician hardly holding on to his own fragile coalition.
    Many Israeli prime ministers came and went, Rabin, Barak, Netanyahu, Sharon just lately, none of them decent enough for the critics. At the same time the Saudi and Palestinian sides have not changed their actors, nor their corrupt methods. They just buy radio adds in the US, and pay James Baker to defend them from lawsuits.
    Bush and Sharon will be gone soon, but Prince Bandar and his family are sadly here to stay.
    With the Bushes having friends like Bandar, who the heck needs enemies.
    David

  7. My God! who in the hell is that Joseph? From which hole in the ground does he come out of?
    Scary…
    Helena, you’re doing a terrific job.

  8. i’ll back that up. keep it up helena, you are always a fantastic voice of wisdom and good sense. as for scowcroft, it’s hard for me not to have a soft spot in my heart for him. he’s expressed 1) concern over the relationship between the bush admin. and israel 2) opposition to the war in iraq. also, his appearance on da ali g show (don’t know if any fans read here) on season 1 really had him come off as a nice old man. now i’m sure i could be dissuaded from that opinion if i talked longer with him (after all, he has dinner with condi rice) but in the meantime, keep it coming brent!

  9. I love Ali G! Especially the interview with N-e-w-t G-i-n-g-r-i-c-h.. Remember that one?
    (Thanks for the kind words, too.)

  10. Israeli/Jewish loobies are the greatest threat to America. These disloyal bastards have once again pushed us to this war to serve racist theocracy of Israel.

  11. Sure Alex, we probably went to war in Afghanistan bribing our way for collaboration from reluctant moslem parties like Pakistan, the Northern Alliance, and some ex-soviet republics, not to remove the snake nest of Taliban/Al Qaeda but somehow to help Israel. You are smoking something.
    And we are in Iraq not for the oil, right? And the American bases being built in Iraq are to protect Israel? From what, there is no Iraqi army left.
    Israel a theocracy? You are wrong. And your insult sounds hollower over this anonymous medium than in a face to face setting.
    David

  13. Although I often disagree with Helena, I’ll add my vote of support for her thoughtful commentary, as well as my considered opinion that she is not even close to an anti-semite. Joseph is out of his mind. (So is Alex and his talk of “loobies,” but that’s another argument.)

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