Washington Post columnist Charles
Krauthammer thinks former general and national security adviser to four
presidents Brent
Scowcroft is "cold-blooded," an appeaser, an ally of Saddam Hussein,
indifferent to those suffering under dictatorships, and indecent to boot.
Why? Because Scowcroft has doubts about the U.S. government's ability to
transform Islamic countries into U.S.-style democracies, and because, like
many
other Americans, Scowcroft thinks the Iraq war has made our fight
against terrorism more difficult.
What drove Krauthammer, a trained psychiatrist, to his verbal fit of
rage? Apparently it was an article
that appeared in The New Yorker in which Scowcroft criticized the
neoconservative worldview and suggested America should take a more
realistic approach to its foreign policy formulations.
"What the realist fears is the consequences of idealism," Scowcroft
said. "The reason I part with the neocons is that I don't think in any
reasonable time frame the objective of democratizing the Middle East can
be successful. If you can do it, fine, but I don't you think you can, and
in the process of trying to do it you can make the Middle East a lot
worse."
Scowcroft believes democracy may eventually grow in the Middle East,
but it must bloom on its own and not be shoved down peoples' throats.
"You encourage democracy over time, with assistance, and aid, the
traditional way. Not how the neocons do it," he said. "How do the neocons
bring democracy to Iraq? You invade, you threaten and pressure, you
evangelize."
This was all too much for Krauthammer, who is already highly defensive
about America's growing quagmire in Iraq.
As one of the neocon media architects of the Iraq war, who used his
prominent Post column to disseminate pro-war propaganda (not
unlike the New York Times' Judy Miller),
he should be defensive. In April
of 2002, for example, he wrote:
"Time is running short. Saddam has weapons of mass destruction. He
is working on nuclear weapons. And he has every incentive to pass them on
to terrorists who will use them against us.
We must not be diverted from
our supreme national objective: defeating and destroying those who did
Sept. 11 and those planning the next Sept. 11."
Today he is lying about Brent Scowcroft.
"For realists such as Scowcroft, regime change is the ultimate taboo.
Too risky, too dangerous, too unpredictable," writes Krauthammer in a
column entitled "Enter
the Cold-Blooded Realist." Realists "care not a whit about who is
running a foreign country" or "how they treat their own people. Realists
prize stability above all, and there is nothing more stable than a
ruthlessly efficient dictatorship."
But it is the ruthlessly efficient dictatorships in Israel's
neighborhood that seem to primarily concern Krauthammer who, along with
William Safire and A.M. Rosenthal of
the New York Times, is a recipient of the Guardian of
Zion Award from Israel's Bar-Ilan University for "support
of the Jewish State in print over the years." Skeptics could be forgiven
for wondering whether Krauthammer is truly committed to removing all
dictators, or if he is simply committed to removing those dictators he
perceives as threats to Israel.
While Krauthammer proudly brandishes his Israeli patriotism (a quick
glance at archives
of his writing will reveal a firm commitment to both glorifying Israel and
agitating against its critics), he has little tolerance for American
patriots like General Scowcroft, whose primary concern is for the lives of
American soldiers soldiers Krauthammer would use as robots in pursuit of
his grandiose Middle Eastern vision. To Krauthammer, those who hesitate to
risk the lives of Americans in order to invade and occupy faraway Islamic
countries deemed a "threat" by hyperactivist ideologues are themselves a
threat to "decency" and civilization.
"Of course, Scowcroft's opposition to toppling Saddam is neither
surprising nor new. Indeed, we are now seeing its third iteration. He had
two cracks at Saddam in 1991 and urged his President Bush to pass them
both up.
It is not surprising that Scowcroft, who helped give indecency
a 12-year life extension, should disdain decency's return," writes
Krauthammer.
Hence, by suggesting it was not in America's best interests to remove
Saddam without a viable plan as to what would fill the vacuum other than a
lot of dead Americans and Iraqis, Scowcroft is not only an appeaser, but
an aggressor. He was, after all, an active ally of Saddam
Hussein for 12 full years. Or so Krauthammer wants his readers to
believe.
But if Scowcroft is an ally of Saddam for hesitating to sacrifice
American lives to accomplish his removal, then Scowcroft's best friend,
the first President Bush (a man Hussein allegedly tried to have assassinated)
must be Saddam's ally as well.
Noting that during the 1991 Gulf War he could have disregarded the UN
mandate and pursued Saddam into Iraq, Bush once said,
"We could have rode into Baghdad in 48 hours, and then all hell would have
been broken loose. And we would have been standing alone making a martyr
out of a defeated brute and tyrant
."
Now that's a realist argument if ever there was one. So for Krauthammer
and the neocons, that means Bush I, the president who expelled Saddam from
Kuwait, must also be an appeaser. And all his talk of not wanting to risk
American lives and make dictators look good by illegally invading and
occupying a sovereign country? That was just an elaborate ruse designed to
hide his cowardice, cynicism, and
indecency.
And therein lies the insanity, paranoia, and irrationality that mark
neoconservative thought. Those who oppose them are not only wrong, but
evil. If you disagree with neocon-formulated government policies, you must
have wicked ulterior motives. If you put the lives of American soldiers
before some abstract vision of a socially engineered Middle East, you are
selfish. And no one is beyond reproach. Even those who have patriotically
served their country like Scowcroft become sinister subversives if they
break with the neocon party line.
Given the neocons' roots
in the Left, it's no surprise that this kind of extreme reaction is
suggestive of how the communist ideologues in the Soviet Union targeted
dissidents, including former heroes of the Revolution. They were publicly
identified as traitors to the Party and summarily ushered off to the Gulag
or straight into the grave.
In the mind of a socialist, a big government program (formulated by the
right people) is the solution to every problem, and to challenge the moral
right of the statist elite to deny the self-determination of a sovereign
people, even to the extent of murdering them for their own good, is to
challenge a major tenet of their faith. This is why the Democrats are
having such a hard time coming to terms with the fact that the
intervention itself, not just its execution, is the problem in Iraq, and
why those on the socialist Right (like Krauthammer) are so defensive about
the collapse of their program and its exposure as yet another government
boondoggle. They would rather attack and demonize their critics than admit
their planning was flawed because that would mean their entire theory of
government is wrong.
And these are the people we are supposed to believe want to "liberate"
the Middle East? These are the people we are supposed to trust as
responsible stewards of a growing domestic security state? These are the
people our soldiers are supposed to blindly follow into war?
At 80 years old and with his connections, Brent Scowcroft probably
doesn't have to worry about being sent to Guantanamo for speaking out
against the Party. But if the neocons are allowed to run amok in
Washington much longer, future generations of dissidents might not be so
lucky.