Realists Lambaste Neo-Cons

Brent Scowcroft, one of the pillars of the Republican foreign policy establishment and best friend of George H.W. Bush, has dropped a few tons of highly destructive ordnance on George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and others on the White House war team. In this week's New Yorker, the former national security adviser's usual wry and elliptical style turned to blunt, unmistakable disdain for the policies and "decision-making process" that this Bush administration has deployed.

Scowcroft's remarks followed an even more incendiary speech at the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank, by former State Department chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson, who has worked closely with Colin Powell for more than 15 years. Wilkerson said that the statutory national security process of the US had been taken over by a "secretive, little-known cabal led by Vice-President Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld."

Scowcroft and Wilkerson are heavyweight Washington insiders who carry the imprimatur of legitimacy because of their extremely close relations respectively with Bush Sr. and Powell. And their candid remarks come at a time when the White House is struggling to confront likely indictments against the Vice-President's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and the President's deputy chief of staff and chief political adviser, Karl Rove, for their roles in revealing the covert status of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson.

A serious White House scandal is raging and some political hands are ready to settle scores, particularly with neo-cons and their fellow travellers, who Scowcroft and Wilkerson believe led the US into an unnecessary war that has devastated America's power and status in the world.

For Scowcroft and Wilkerson, the biggest fault of this administration is closing itself off from the advice of those with experience and those with dissenting views. At the start of the Bush presidency in 2001, there was a clear rift between ideologically driven neo-con forces represented by the likes of former deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz, former No.3 Pentagon official Douglas Feith and Libby and the more staid calculators of national interest such as Powell, his deputy Richard Armitage and--at that time--Rice. Neo-con ideologues such as Richard Perle and William Kristol lurked inside as well as outside the administration for their moment to wrest the helm of foreign policy away from realists.

(Neo-conservatism has been described as "muscular Wilsonianism", or the export of democracy via a variety of aggressive means, including force. As former White House speechwriter David Frum has put it: "Neo-conservatives believe that America can no longer ignore what happens inside countries, like realists do: we must have a role in keeping bad stuff inside other countries from harming us.")

September 11 ended any pretence of realist control of foreign policy. Strident, pugnacious nationalist impulses joined up with the robustly moralistic strategists and knocked away those such as Scowcroft who oppose any action that does not defend US interests. The Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz cabal became an anti-realist movement that reacted emotionally and without clear-headed, sober assessments of the costs and consequences of an invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The Bush doctrine of preventive war and regime change became the bumper sticker on a neo-conservative-inspired US unilateralism bent on twisting the world to its will. The problem with that strategy, as realists such as Scowcroft tried to counsel, is that US resources are constrained and other nations do not easily subordinate themselves to US edicts and preferences. Costs and consequences are the most important benchmarks to realist thinking. Neo-cons ignore costs and think instead of idealistic visions without regard to what it takes to achieve them.

The US over-extension in Iraq, the handicap that the Bush administration now faces if its highest ranking apparatchiks are indicted this week, the hemorrhaging government budget deficit and the new benchmark of 2000 US soldiers killed in Iraq all have done much to demystify the neo-conservative foreign policy agenda. By exposing the naivete of the Bush foreign policy team and demanding accountability from those in the White House, Scowcroft and Wilkerson have nailed a dagger deep into neo-con ambitions. Wilkerson, in particular, as a key insider during the build-up to the Iraq war, sees this administration's foreign policy as "a complete disaster." Neo-conservatives have lost their legitimacy and standing.

Now, regrettably, the reality of a world in which America's mystique of power has been punctured and its military and financial limits exposed, allies won't count on the US as much and its enemies will be emboldened. Such is the legacy of the neo-conservatism that was buried this week in Washington.