Scowcroft Rifted

So Mr. Brent is doing some CYA. At 80 years of age, he wants the final footnotes to state unequivocally he was not part of BushCo fiasco. In this New Yorker article Amy Davidson and Jeff Goldberg discuss Scowcroft's long friendship with Bush the Elder and his rift with Bush the Younger. I think we're supposed to believe Bush Elder and Scowcroft have had no input or influence on Bush the Younger.

Davidson asks Goldberg : "Why is Brent Scowcroft worth writing about now? He’s been out of government for some time." Not really a loooong time. As Scowcroft is head of the PFIAB (President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board). The PFIAB was created by Eisenhower for the purpose of providing the president with ample, accurate and timely intelligence. Scowcroft currently chairs the board in overseeing intelligence agencies, including the CIA, various military intelligence groups and the Pentagon's National Reconnaissance Office. That may not be government enough for Davidson but it is for me.

"And he’s (Scowcroft) the best friend of the father of the current President, and the mentor of the current Secretary of State, so it’s worth exploring why the Administration of George W. Bush doesn’t listen to his advice on Iraq and other subjects." I say it's worth exploring why "rift" is a 4 letter word for CYA.

I might swallow Scowcroft's not guilty plea but I keep remembering the "incubator story" which helped launch the first Gulf War for Bush the Elder. In the fall of 1990, Congress and the American public were swayed by the tearful testimony of a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, known as Nayirah. The girl testified before a congressional caucus and elsewhere, that as a volunteer in a Kuwait maternity ward she "had seen Iraqi troops storm her hospital, steal the incubators, and leave 312 babies "on the cold floor to die … In the weeks after Nayirah spoke, President Bush senior invoked the incident five times, saying that such "ghastly atrocities" were like "Hitler revisited."

The truth – "Nayirah was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington and had no connection to the Kuwait hospital. She had been coached – along with the handful of others who would "corroborate" the story – by senior executives of Hill and Knowlton in Washington, the biggest global PR firm at the time, which had a contract worth more than $10 million with the Kuwaitis to make the case for war."

"We didn't know it wasn't true at the time," Brent Scowcroft, Bush's national security adviser, said of the incubator story in a 1995 interview with the London-based Guardian newspaper. Hmmmmmm sounds like Kuwaiti brown babycake to me. They haven't changed tactics have they?

Goldberg has a good deal of praise for Scowcroft's honesty, principles, integrity. (For a moment I thought I was reading an Armstrong Williams piece, you know - bought and paid for.) Goldberg also stresses the younger Bush administration not listening to dissenting analyses (such as Scowcroft's). He adds that in the first Gulf War, Bush the Elder's decision not to enter Baghdad now seems prudent rather than wimpish. Although it's been written Bush the Elder had every intention of going in for Saddam but Colin Powell and others convinced him such a mission would be unwise war and a political folly. Bush the Elder had to resign himself to wait another 10 years for the family patsy to folly for him and cronies.

The article goes on with the funniest explanation I've heard yet regarding the "rift" among republicans. Goldberg describes two types of republicans walking around today : "realists" and (not kidding) "idealists." Yes, republican "idealists." One way to put it is that the realists didn’t go after Saddam, because it didn’t seem tenable. The idealists went after him, because he’s such a loathsome man. Bush the Younger is an idealist. Initially I laughed at that one but I suppose if Hitler could be considered an idealist in that other races were loathsome, then Bushite republicans could be idealists in that other regimes are loathsome.

(And to think – when I was younger I considered the New Yorker a quality, brainy magazine and kept copies around my apartment to impress older intellectual friends.)

Bush the Elder, Scowcroft, and many of the now very aging pols knew well that there would be no domestic support for a bigger War. In this 1998 article the two men explain why they didn't remove Saddam in the first Gulf War. They had 7 years after Gulf War I to hone and pen such wise explanations. They state " First and foremost was the principle that aggression cannot pay." Was not the Contra-War and Panama aggressive? (For a glimpse into Scowcroft's honesty, see this item during the time he served on the Tower commission, the Iran-Contra "investigation." Scroll to "Deceiftul Dinner." Sometimes perjury is just doing "what's good for the country.")

They know damn well aggression pays if they convince the public to buy it. But a major "attack" coupled with an imminent threat against the US would be needed to sell it. These old boys play long and dirty, and have fall guys if things gets sloppy. Enter Bush the Younger, whom the groomers wiped off about the same time they recognized Gulf War I was not going to be the big grab they were after in 1992.

In the world of the ruling class what else would a son like Bush be good for? Every deal and dollar he made was through daddy and daddy's old friends. The boy couldn't find oil in Texas. Every endeavor he's attempted has been half-ass and part-time with others paving and paying the way. Bush will always be daddy's boy.

Scowcroft and Bush the Elder (and others) spent the 1990s planning how best to prop up the little dummy in their circle. Keeping themselves distant enough from the fan blades so if the it hits they smell like wise statesmen rather than Bush the Younger's council. And MSM backs the propaganda with stories of "rifts" and the boy not heeding the dissenting opinions from daddy and daddy's old friends. Bush the Younger may be dense and slow-witted but he knows who made him. Bush the boy has existed only through being keenly and deeply loyal to family and friends – and now has "rifted" them at the most important time in his life and career. Sure he did, and those strings on his back don't belong to daddy.