A Realist Robbed of Reality

Fire of Liberty

Aside from MSM pundits in D.C. salivating over yesterday's spat between the Dems and Republicans over pre-war intelligence on Iraq, Valerie Plame and Judge Alito, there has been a lot of buzz amongst these circles about Jeffrey Goldberg's recent piece in The New Yorker on how Brent Scowcroft has broken ranks with President Bush and the foreign policy of today's GOP. Goldberg notes in his long article how this rocked-rib devotee of a Cold War realism reminiscent of Nixon/Kissinger that favors security above all other things and simply looks the other way while rabid dogs run free in their dens in Syria, Iran, North Korea and elsewhere, wreaking havoc on its citizens. In fact he has an utter disdain for people like Ronald Reagan, Condi Rice, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and other advocates of a foreign policy that advocates ideas like freedom and democracy in areas that have been starved of G-d's given rights for far too long.

While the liberal pundits and anti-war crowd have hefted General Scowcroft upon their shoulders as their new saint for his outright condemnation on Operation Iraqi Freedom, there have been several others who have called the former National Security Advisor out and revealed a lot of deficiencies in his arguments on foreign policy. The first individual to dispute the former Air Force general and reveal several flaws to his policies is Pejman Yousefzadeh, a lawyer and blogger (Pejmanesque) in California, who has written a wonderful piece over at Tech Central Station. If your looking for a good piece that dismantles Scowcroft and his version of "realism," then Yousefzadeh's is the one to take a look at. While I'll leave it to you to read the whole article, I thought I'd share the part of the article that I felt chopped the Scowcroft mountain range down to a mere hills. Just look at a master at work:

And as for the comment about "fifty years of peace" in the Middle East, who does Scowcroft think he is kidding? Ever since the founding of Israel, there have been four separate full scale military conflicts between Israel and Arabs, not to mention the 1970 War of Attrition, the 1982 war in Lebanon (which included American military intervention) and two separate intifada conflicts. The 1973 Yom Kippur War caused the United States and the Soviet Union to intervene and threatened to further globalize the conflict. The United States made the decision to go to DefCon 3 (DefCon 1 would signal nuclear war) after the Soviets threatened to intervene on Egypt's side during the Yom Kippur War -- meaning that both sides escalated the conflict to the point where for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, the threat of nuclear conflict had become a real and terrifying possibility. Add to this sorry and bloody history the eight year Iran-Iraq war and the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and Scowcroft's boast about "fifty years of peace" is revealed to be empty and devoid of any serious understanding about the recent history of the Middle East.

What the "fifty years of peace" remark and its accompanying wistfulness really reveal is that Scowcroft is not, at heart, a realist. Rather, he is a status quo-ist, a sphere-of-influence-ist. Just as Scowcroft has in the past made a fetish of the virtue of multilateralism, he makes in the New Yorker article a fetish of preserving the status quo and foreign policy spheres of influence.

For example, Scowcroft mentions that while he "was not fond of the Soviet Union," he didn't think that the Reagan Administration's decision "calling the Soviet Union the 'evil empire' got anybody anywhere." Really? Reagan understood that attacking the legitimacy of the decrepit and brutal Soviet totalitarian system was precisely the right approach for anyone interested in undermining the USSR. He knew that the Soviets -- like all authoritarians and totalitarians -- were deeply sensitive to allegations questioning their legitimacy and by attacking the Soviets as "evil," Reagan was affirmatively undercutting Soviet power and influence abroad even as he engendered dissent within the Soviet Union and throughout the former Warsaw Pact. The fall of communism, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the liberation of the captive Warsaw Pact nations and the collapse of the Berlin Wall would tend to put the lie to Scowcroft's statement that denouncing the Soviet Union's brutality didn't "get anybody anywhere."

Also check out this piece by Charles Krauthammer and this one by William F. Buckley Jr. that also lays the sword to the arguments of the retired General and favorite of foreign policy experts in places like the Arab League, The New Yorker, NY Times and the high saint of the anti-war crowd that roams the colleges in the US and abroad.

I'd say that I fall into the foreign policy sphere known as Democratic-Realism, which bases a foreign policy on the idea of one's nation's national interest while also promoting ideas of democracy, liberty and freedom. Scowcroft's ideas on foreign policy died in the desert sands in the Middle East on September 11th.