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The elder Bush may not have been fully aware of it, but he was in the dark whistling while leaving surrogates like Scowcroft and Baker the task of publicly opposing the criminal insanity of attacking and occupying Iraq. H.W. Bush may or may not have tried privately, but it was a tragedy he did not speak out publicly.
Could Scowcroft Have Stopped the Invasion?
He didn't try very hard. There's no doubt he saw it coming. He had to be acutely aware that writing a Wall Street Journal op-ed "Don't Attack Saddam" on August 15, 2002 would not be enough to stop the war, even though Baker wrote a similar op-ed in The New York Times 10 days later. Cheney launched the juggernaut to war the next day with a major speech greatly exaggerating the Iraqi threat. After that, resistance from Establishment figures petered out.
Scowcroft's erstwhile protege Condoleezza Rice, the younger Bush's national security adviser, made it abundantly clear. The New Yorker article shows how Rice for whatever reason, she had drunk what Cheney, Bush, and Rumsfeld were serving.
"Rice's split with her former National Security Council colleagues was made evident at a dinner in early September of 2002, at 1789, a Georgetown restaurant. Scowcroft, Rice, and several people from the first Bush Administration were there. The conversation, turning to the current Administration's impending plans for Iraq, became heated. Finally, Rice said, irritably, 'The world is a messy place, and someone has to clean it up.' The remark stunned the other guests. Scowcroft, as he later told friends, was flummoxed by Rice's 'evangelical tone.'"
That was six months before the invasion. It's a pity that those who perceived the impending catastrophe and had the experience and credibility to shout that out, limited themselves to op-eds and head-scratching at Rice's inanities.
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