Foreign Policy Realists
WFB writes about Brent Scowcroft, foreign policy realists and their war on the neocons. Scowcroft had this to say in the New Yorker:

Scowcroft has had no exchanges with Condoleezza Rice, he says, since a dinner nearly two years ago. They argued about Iraq. “She says we’re going to democratize Iraq, and I said, ‘Condi, you’re not going to democratize Iraq,’ and she said, ‘You know, you’re just stuck in the old days,’ and she comes back to this thing that we’ve tolerated an autocratic Middle East for fifty years and so on and so forth.” Goldberg reports, “Then a barely perceptible note of satisfaction entered his voice, and he said, ‘But we’ve had fifty years of peace.’”

Buckey responds:

A White House spokesman, called to comment on this assertion, said it was “odd.” “If you consider a) America’s 1991 war against Iraq (which General Scowcroft favored); b) the Iraq-Iran war (in which there were a million casualties); c) the conflict in the early 1970s between Jordan and the Palestinians; d) the civil war in Lebanon; e) the four wars between Iraq and Arab nations; and f) the attacks of September 11, 2001 (which were carried out by Islamic radicals who emerged from the broader Middle East)”—that’s something less than fifty years of peace.

Good read.
- posted by Base10 @ 11:45 AM