SKELETONS FIGHT TO GET OUT OF CLOSET AS WITCHES' BREW HEATS UP By Georgie Anne Geyer
Wed Oct 26, 7:23 PM ET
WASHINGTON -- If you wonder how journalists have puzzled through the twists and turns of this secretive Bush administration, let me tell you a personal story from three years ago that culminated in some stunning revelations this week.
It was August 2002, and the specter of war hung like a dark cape over the city. The radicals in the White House and the Pentagon had long before decided to invade Iraq, and Colin Powell was, with some anguish, agreeing to take their case to the United Nations. It was all only a question of time.
Meanwhile, one of the mysteries that haunted many of us was what Father Bush, the consummate foreign policy realist of the Eastern Establishment, was really thinking about his son's unilateralist and utopian ideas. It seemed obvious that the first President Bush would disagree with the son's policies, but he was, as always, immensely discreet.
It was at that point 1) that I was able to confirm from three excellent sources close to George H.W. Bush that he was, indeed, in serious disagreement with his son, and 2) that Gen. Brent Scowcroft, his close friend and former national security adviser, wrote a startling op-ed in The Wall Street Journal under the rather clarifying headline: "DON'T ATTACK SADDAM."
To me, Scowcroft's op-ed obviously reflected the feelings of his close friend, W.'s dad. I took a reasoned chance and wrote as much in a carefully qualified column. By chance, within a few days, I was at a conference where the general, whom I knew only professionally, was speaking.
After he left the podium, he walked through the crowd and suddenly swerved and walked over to me. He gave me a big kiss on the cheek and said, "That was a great column." Now, the general is a man of much decorum; he does not go around kissing stunned ladies on the cheek without purpose, and so I quickly got the message.
This week, which is chock full of so many revelations about the personalities and rationale behind the Iraq war, Gen. Scowcroft has finally told it all. In a fine article in The New Yorker, he tells writer Jeffrey Goldberg how opposed he was to the Iraq war; how instead of defeating terrorism, "Iraq feeds terrorism"; and how George W. has refused to speak to him over the last two years, despite his father's appeals.
"The real anomaly in the administration is Cheney," he is quoted as saying. "I consider Cheney a good friend -- I've known him for 30 years. But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore." And he characterizes the ideas of the neocons behind George W. and Cheney in the words of Arab scholar Bernard Lewis, whom he quotes as saying, "I believe that one of the things you've got to do to Arabs is hit them between the eyes with a big stick."
But even more interesting than Scowcroft's revelations is the fact that Goldberg apparently was able to get e-mail answers from Father Bush in Houston. At one point, he quotes the senior Bush as saying of his intimate friend and ideological comrade Scowcroft: "He has a great propensity for friendship. By that I mean someone I can depend on to tell me what I need to know and not just what I want to hear, and at the same time he is someone on whom I know I always can rely and trust implicitly."
Reading the piece carefully, one can see that even while the Father Bush references are elliptical, they also clarify his deep disagreements with W. over the war. Not surprisingly so, since he and Scowcroft are part of the realist school of foreign policy that believes in the prudent use of force for American interests. George W. and his neocons and Cheney are part of a new utopian Republicanism, which believes in spreading democracy through force.
At the same time this week, analysts were agog over other revelations from the top assistant to one of the men whose real feelings about the war, while known, have never been publicly expressed, Gen. Colin Powell.
Powell's chief of staff and a respected military officer himself, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, told the whole story at a meeting at the New America Foundation. The "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal flummoxed the process" in order to get us into war. "The case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes in the national security decision-making process," he said.
While the seconds-in-command were essentially speaking for their bosses, Washington was waiting on pins and needles to see whether White House aides would be indicted in the Valerie Plame CIA case, or whether even Vice President Cheney would be drawn deeper into that strange witch's brew of trouble. The web of secrecy and deliberate miscues we've all been subjected to over the last four years is beginning to unweave.
As for Iraq, Scowcroft, the man who in 1991 stood with then-President Bush against invading Iraq after the Gulf War, because we would become ensnared forever, now says: "This is exactly where we are now. We own it. And we can't let go. We're getting sniped at. Now, will we win? I think there's a fair chance we'll win. But look at the cost." |
