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Mr. StabilityThe wrongness of Brent Scowcroft's realism.

By Christopher HitchensPosted Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2005, at 1:47 PM ET

Scowcroft longs for the "peace" of Saddam's regimeThe sole point of the non-findings of the Fitzgerald non-investigation, into the non-commission of non-crimes and the non-outing of a non-covert CIA bureaucrat, is (as Messrs. Kerry, Krugman, Rich, and others keep reminding us) that it might even yet trigger the long-awaited inquest into the Iraq intervention. I very strongly hope that there is a full-dress post-mortem into this country's Iraq policy, though I am not ready to assume that "inquest" or "post-mortem" are the correct terms for it. Let's just say a serious blue-ribbon, bipartisan, full-out inquiry. This inquiry, however, could hardly be confined—as Kerry, Krugman, and Rich so obviously hope—to the years 2001-05.

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At the very minimum, the starting point of such a retrospective should be the decision, in 1991, to confirm Saddam Hussein in power after his expulsion from Kuwait and to keep his population under international sanctions. Another place to begin might be the apparent "green light," given by the Carter administration, for Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran. Real specialists and buffs might wish to start with the role of the CIA in the 1960s military coup—or coups—that brought the Baath Party to power in Baghdad in the first place.

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This not the first time Bush 41's national security adviser—and one of his best friends—has grumbled publicly about Bush 43's Iraq policy: William Saletan covered the 2002 dust-up between Dick Cheney and Brent Scowcroft over Scowcroft's anti-war Wall Street Journal op-ed. Last week, Fred Kaplan wondered why all these policy critics who served Bush père didn't speak out against the war a year ago. Timothy Noah didn't think Scowcroft's criticism was as bad as the shiv John Sununu, chief of staff to George H.W. Bush, sank into Dubya's back. Bloggers react to "Scowcroft on the attack" here.

Jeffrey Goldberg's widely discussed essay on Brent Scowcroft's politics, published in The New Yorker of Oct. 31, makes an ideal starting point. It reminds us, for one thing, that the root-and-branch opposition to regime change in 2003 came not from the left, but from the right. There were many vocal leftists on the streets at that moment, as we all remember, but their slogans were so puerile (a war for Halliburton and all that) as to make them ignorable. Far more to the point were the arguments made by conservatives and "realists" to the effect that the status quo in the Middle East was preferable to any likely alternative. My impression is that Mr. Goldberg paid out enough rope to Gen. Scowcroft to allow him to hang himself, most especially at the critical stage where the old reactionary proudly announced that the pre-existing status quo had meant: "Fifty years of peace."

I had not known until I read this article that Scowcroft was a Mormon, and this may have no importance. His willingness to believe anything could well stem from another source. He takes the view that the status quo is preferable to any forcible change, and also preferable to any change at all. For example, he warns that if Mubarak leaves or loses power in Egypt, he will be replaced by "bad guys" and sectarians. If this is true, then it must surely mean that the current "stability" of Egypt is illusory as well as undemocratic. He says that the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon is the prelude to civil war, not independence: "[T]he sectarian emotions that were there when the Syrians went in aren't gone." Hardly a persuasive argument, then, for the healing effect of a Syrian presence that lasted 29 years. (One should not forget that Lebanon's current phase of crisis began when Bashar al-Assad tried illegally to extend the term of a minority Christian president.) Meanwhile, in Damascus, the lovely status quo appears, by some alchemy unknown to Scowcroft, to be engaged in destabilizing itself. Death-squad regimes, it might be argued, have a tendency to do this.

Scowcroft, sounding "realist" enough, announces to Goldberg that he is "a cynic about human nature." Well, so would I be, if I were a former partner in the firm of Kissinger Associates who now runs his own consultancy, introducing unpleasant regimes to the corporations that love them. But "cynicism" of this kind often masks a certain naiveté. Those who elected to keep Saddam in power in 1991—Scowcroft prominent among them—imagined that they would keep him in a "box." Instead, Saddam turned the sanctions regime into a racket that hugely augmented his own power and wealth, while the sanctions themselves killed innumerable people and created an immiserated underclass in Iraq that is the source of many of our present woes. And, perhaps more important, would have become the source of many woes. Like all of his co-thinkers, Scowcroft appears to imagine that the Saddam regime would just have continued, in its cynical way, providing some version of predictability and stability. Whereas it is as clear as day that the regime was crumbling and would have imploded with ghastly results that would have given many openings to "bad guys." You can say that this has happened anyway, as it has, but realist statecraft often involves the realization that there are no good options. That realization ought to prompt, surely, some reflection on the policy that led to an option-free outcome. That was exactly the mistake that the "realists" made with the Iran of the shah, whose implosion came to them as if out of a clear blue sky.

The other great foreign policy blemish on the first Bush administration was its fatal indifference to events in former Yugoslavia. Here again, Scowcroft flatly contradicts himself without appearing to notice. He tells Goldberg that he was stationed at the embassy in Belgrade in 1959 and noticed that nobody referred to themselves as Yugoslav. "They always called themselves Serbs, Croats, Slovenians." Well, Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia were all semiautonomous parts of Tito's state, so there is no necessary contradiction there, but let's agree that even if he exaggerates Scowcroft is onto something. Several paragraphs later, however, he is quoted saying, "I didn't think it would break up." And—mark this—he is now speaking of 1991, when it actually was, quite visibly, "breaking up." So, all he is telling us is that he was badly wrong, twice. On the other hand, he thought it was a brilliant idea to intervene in Somalia just as the Bush administration was leaving office. Both of these messes were bequeathed to the Clinton administration, which scuttled from Somalia but belatedly proved Scowcroft wrong (again!) in the Balkans by showing that American force could end the bloodshed produced by tribalist fascism.

Realism of the Scowcroft sort presided over the Iran-Iraq war with its horrific casualties and watched indifferently as genocide was enacted in northern Iraq. It allowed despots free rein from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, and then goggled when this gave birth to the Taliban and al-Qaida. If this was "fifty years of peace," then it really was time to give war a chance.

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Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Photograph of Brent Scowcroft by Richard Ellis/Agence France-Presse.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

Scowcroft is the darling of the left now that he's criticizing Bush II's foreign policy, but I think people forget what Bush I's foreign policy was all about.

Bush I was the last of the realpolitik cynics, and people have forgotten the list of foreign policy disappointments under his watch. More specifically:

1) We let Yugoslavia boil over into massive violence, based on the Scowcraftian "realism" of leaving a "strongman" in place until he, um, isn't.

2) We sat there and listen to the Shi'ites and Kurds die, in the thousands and horribly, because Bush, having defeated Saddam, wasn't willing to actually depose him.

3) We were instrumental in supporting the many, many autocratic Arab regimes that now figure as exhibits 1-N in the "why they hate us" exhibits - Assad, Mubarak, Hussein (at least with regard to the Palestinians), et. al.

4) And, last but not least, we frickin' told Saddam that we didn't really care how he resolved his land dispute with Kuwait, right up until the point where we did care. Why not? After all, letting these strongmen have their way is the "realistic" path to peace…

--J_Mann

(To reply, click here)

…While it is necessary and just to critique the strain of "realism" that assumes the status quo in the Middle East was preferable to any likely alternative, we must reserve even harsher judgment for the surrealist fools who assumed that war and half-assed nation-building planned and implemented by crackpots and buffoons were preferable to any likely alternative, or even to any alternative way of spending thousands of lives and billions of dollars toward the betterment of the Middle East.

It has been noted by most observers of the war in Iraq that there are no realistic solutions to the current crisis. US troops are necessary to hold the country together, but the continued occupation is catalyzing the insurgency that is tearing the country apart. To quote Hitchens, "that realization ought to prompt, surely, some reflection on the policy that led to an option-free outcome" …

--ShriekingViolet

(To reply, click here)

I agree with Hitchens that foreign policy realism stinks. The only thing worse is everything else. The problem with "giving war a chance" is that war is actually realism that has metastasized. Realism is quite aggressive in that it involves manipulation of other nations, sometimes by the use of violence, like the no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq. It is called realism for two reasons: it is generally devoid of any type of idealism, and because it acknowledges the limits of our power. By contrast, the neo-cons, as has been often noted, are reformed liberals who are idealistic, and are willing to experiment with war to realize their goals. War is not only a continuation of politics by other means, but it is realism extended to its extreme.

Again, Hitchens is correct that the last 50 years of realism have been nothing to brag about (other than the small issue of the defeat of international communism, but I'll agree not to quibble). There are always unintended consequences to foreign meddling of any sort. Al Qaeda is a direct descendant of our policy of arming the Mujahadeen to defeat the USSR, which went a long way toward hastening the demise of the evil empire. However, the alternatives to realism are doing nothing or going to war…

--TychoBrahe

(To reply, click here)

(11/2)

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