There’s an interesting conversation over at Matthew Yglesias’s place, prompted by Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in the new Atlantic, in which he seems to suggest (I haven’t had time to read the piece myself yet; but I am interested in the tenor of the conversation about the topic) that the only foreign policy alternative Bush could turn to other than the neocons’ was the realists’, as represented by the reprehensible (my characterization, not Goldberg’s) Brent Scowcroft [e.a.]:

I’ve seen a lot of bloggers mine Jeffrey Goldberg’s Atlantic article on the future of Iraq for the hilarious section where he reports that Norm Podhoretz doesn’t know what a Kurd is, but I thought I might say something about a more serious issue Goldberg raises. In particular, this near the end:

It is true that the neoconservatives’ dream of Middle East democracy has proved to be a mirage. But it’s not as though the neocons’ principal foils, the foreign-policy realists, who view stability as a paramount virtue, have covered themselves in glory in the post-9/11 era. Brent Scowcroft, President George H. W. Bush’s national security adviser and Washington’s senior advocate of foreign-policy realism, told me not long ago of a conversation he had had with his onetime protégée Condoleezza Rice. “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 50 years, and so on and so forth. But we’ve had 50 years of peace.” Of course, what Scowcroft fails to note here is that al-Qaeda attacked us in part because America is the prime backer of its enemies, the autocratic rulers of Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

The other thing Scowcroft fails to note, of course, is that just because “we’ve had peace,” there hasn’t been peace in the region for 50 years.

Some of Yglesias’s commenters agree with me:

But Scowcroft’s point of view at least reaches a minimal standard of coherence.

What? Scrowcroft’s point of view is asinine. “We’ve had 50 years of peace”? Really? Which 50 years were those?

For a “realist”, Scrowcroft sure has some pretty unreal notions of “peace”.

Posted by Al | January 24, 2008 2:35 PM

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I actually have to agree with Al. 50 years of peace, if you don’t count all the wars and stuff.

Posted by Ginger Yellow | January 24, 2008 3:55 PM

Moreover, this was a point driven home in August 2002 by none other than Bill Keller, today editor of the New York Times but at the time a columnist for the paper.

August 24, 2002

The Loyal Opposition

By BILL KELLER

If candor counted for as much as courtesy, the author note under Brent Scowcroft’s now famous op-ed in The Wall Street Journal last week, the one arguing against war with Iraq, might have said something like this: ”Mr. Scowcroft, the former national security adviser, now makes his living advising business clients, some of whom would be gravely inconvenienced by a war in the Middle East. And by the way, he thought Saddam Hussein was finished after the gulf war in 1991.”

The fact that the Scowcroft Group, his consulting and access-peddling firm, advises global corporations does not mean his motives are impure, and the fact that, like the president he served, he underestimated Saddam last time does not necessarily mean he is not worth listening to now.

But in the debate over the next round of war — a debate that is now, thank heaven, bursting into full flower – it is worth considering what baggage the critics bring, especially when they wear the badge of statesman. The histories, interests and attitudes of the war skeptics are as relevant as whatever psychodrama President Bush may be playing out by finishing off his father’s archenemy, or whether the drive against Iraq represents some dubious alignment of American interests with Israel’s.

It would be nice if this conversation would continue rationally, because, if you’re really interested in what happened leading up to the decision to topple Saddam, why the Iraq mission didn’t work, and what a better foreign policy might look like, bashing the neocons only takes you so far.