Paterfamilias

I have often felt that the real story of this time will be written as a family history between a father and a son. If only Shakespeare were alive to write it.

Steve Clemons has excerpts of the New Yorker’s Brent Scowcroft article that has everyone on pins and needles. Scowcroft is 80 years old and has apparently decided that he should speak out clearly. And he does:

The first Gulf War was a success, Scowcroft said, because the President knew better than to set unachievable goals. “I’m not a pacifist,” he said. “I believe in the use of force. But there has to be a good reason for using force. And you have to know when to stop using force.” Scowcroft does not believe that the promotion of American-style democracy abroad is a sufficiently good reason to use force.

“I thought we ought to make it our duty to help make the world friendlier for the growth of liberal regimes,” he said. “You encourage democracy over time, with assistance, and aid, the traditional way. Not how the neocons do it.”

The neoconservatives — the Republicans who argued most fervently for the second Gulf war — believe in the export of democracy, by violence if that is required, Scowcroft said. “How do the neocons bring democracy to Iraq? You invade, you threaten and pressure, you evangelize.” And now, Scowcroft said, America is suffering from the consequences of that brand of revolutionary utopianism. “This was said to be part of the war on terror, but Iraq feeds terrorism,” he said.

The underlying narrative, however, is the subconscious rivalry between the father and the son, Scowcroft becoming the stand-in for 43’s resentment toward 41. You wonder how many of the tragic blunders of the last five years are the result of crafty neocons playing into Junior’s desire to gainsay his father:

Like nearly everyone else in Washington, Scowcroft believed that Saddam maintained stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, but he wrote that a strong inspections program would have kept him at bay. “There may have come a time when we would have needed to take Saddam out,” he told me. “But he wasn’t really a threat. His Army was weak, and the country hadn’t recovered from sanctions.” Scowcroft’s colleagues told me that he would have preferred to deliver his analysis privately to the White House. But Scowcroft, the apotheosis of a Washington insider, was by then definitively on the outside, and there was no one in the White House who would listen to him. On the face of it, this is remarkable: Scowcroft’s best friend’s son is the President; his friend Dick Cheney is the Vice-President; Condoleezza Rice, who was the national-security adviser, and is now the Secretary of State, was once a Scowcroft protege; and the current national-security adviser, Stephen Hadley, is another protege and a former principal at the Scowcroft Group.

[…]

According to friends of the elder Bush, the estrangement of his son and his best friend has been an abiding source of unhappiness, not only for Bush but for Barbara Bush as well. George Bush, the forty-first President, has tried several times to arrange meetings between his son, “Forty-three,” and his former national-security adviser to no avail, according to people with knowledge of these intertwined relationships. “There have been occasions when Forty-one has engineered meetings in which Forty-three and Scowcroft are in the same place at the same time, but they were social settings that weren’t conducive to talking about substantive issues,” a Scowcroft confidant said.

George H.W. Bush was a bastard in many ways. He was one of the first to bring the new generation of operative thugs into national politics. Lee Atwater ran his 1988 campaign. But his spawn took it to a new level. This is but one of many good arguments against monarchy and succession. Think of the average family Thanksgiving table and imagine that it’s the ruling elite of the most powerful country in the world.

I recommend that you read all of Clemens post and the New Yorker article when it is posted. This on top of the Lawrence Wilkerson speech from last week shows that things are breaking down in a most serious way for the Bush administration.

Lambert at Corrente notes that Wilkerson even predicts some very dangerous times ahead — not from terrorists, but internal revolution:

WILKERSON: We have courted disaster, in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran, generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina… we haven’t done very well on anything like that in a long time. And if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city [“Reckless Indifference to the Nightmare Scenario”] , or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence. Read it some time again. … Read in there what they say about the necessity of people to [inaudible – background voice] tyranny or to throw off ineptitude or to throw off that which is not doing what the people want it to do.

And you’re talking about the potential for, I think, real dangerous times if we don’t get our act together.

Shakespearean indeed.

Update: Matthew Yglesias makes the important point that this would have been oh so much more courageous if they had backed up the likes of Richard Clarke instead of waiting until Junior was tanking in the polls. And he points to this op-ed by Richard Holbrook on Wilkerson’s speech, which points out that Colin Powell is a putz.

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