Brent Scowcroft, who played a prominent role as national security adviser to Ford & Bush 41, was a Republican voice against the Iraq war, dies at 95

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"When the war drums against Saddam Hussein were echoing throughout Washington and pundits in the country’s largest newspapers were assuring people that U.S. soldiers would be welcomed in Baghdad with flowers and candy, Scowcroft counseled patience. Storming the Iraqi capital and overthrowing Saddam’s regime “would seriously jeopardize, if not destroy, the global counterterrorist campaign,” he wrote in an August 2002 column. There would be no more effective way to split the coalition against al Qaeda than to launch preventative military action in Iraq. According to author Robert Draper’s new account, To Start A War, Scowcroft spent his time at the Aspen Security Forum that year telling participants that regime change in Iraq would be neither cheap or easy. President George W. Bush would later phone his father, George H.W. Bush, complaining about the remarks. But as history has shown since, Scowcroft proved to be right on Iraq as he so often was on everything else

With Scowcroft now gone, foreign policy realists have lost their beloved dean. It’s this realist school of thought, constantly on guard against hubris showing its ugly face and cognizant of America’s strengths as well as its limitations, that is finally making a comeback after two decades of colossally expensive, fruitless, counterproductive endeavors.

It’s now the responsibility of Scowcroft’s contemporaries to fill his enormous shoes."
 

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