Brent Scowcroft, the first President Bush’s national security adviser, has been trying to warn this Bush White House about Iraq for a long while. He was right, but the administration ignored him.
In August 2002, Scowcroft said a U.S. invasion of Iraq could “turn the whole region into a cauldron and, thus, destroy the war on terrorism.” Almost a year later, he said, “I’m a skeptic about the ability to transform Iraq into a democracy in any realistic period of time.”
As time has passed, Scowcroft has been even less inclined to hold back. Now he’s laying it all on the line.
The national security adviser under the first President Bush says the current president acted contemptuously toward NATO and Europe after Sept. 11 and is trying to cooperate now out of desperation to “rescue a failing venture” in Iraq and Afghanistan.
[…]
Scowcroft said the Bush administration’s “unilateralist” position was partly responsible for the post-Sept. 11, 2001, decline of the trans-Atlantic relationship.
“It’s in general bad,” he said. “It’s not really hostile, but there’s an edge to it.”
Early on, he said, “We had gotten contemptuous of Europeans and their weaknesses. We had really turned unilateral.”
Although slightly diminished since then, the unilateralist policies remain fundamentally little changed, Scowcroft said. Recent overtures to cooperate in Afghanistan and Iraq with the United Nations and NATO was “as much an act of desperation as anything else … to rescue a failing venture.”
I know exactly how the White House will probably respond to this. The spin will be that Scowcroft has concerns but he still has endorsed Bush’s presidential campaign. The idea is, these officials, no matter what they think of Iraq, think Bush should be president. But I look at the inverse — even Bush’s high-profile political allies think the president has pursued reckless unilateralism and consider the war in Iraq, upon which Bush gambled his presidency, is a “failing venture.”
Bush says the only thing that matters is who Scowcroft is going to vote for. Nonsense. If this is what his friends are saying about his presidency, it’s a stark reminder to the rest of us of just how inept the administration really is.