Bush and Rice didn’t listen to Brent Scowcroft… maybe Obama will

Tony Karon

• Last Updated: January 04. 2009 9:30AM UAE / January 4. 2009 5:30AM GMT

The current problem in Gaza may have been avoided had the current Bush administration paid attention to its elders, foremost among them Brent Scowcroft.

As National Security Adviser to the first President Bush, Scowcroft helped run a US foreign policy that genuinely balanced Israeli and Arab interests and initiated the Madrid Peace talks that presaged the Oslo process.

He is also credited with nurturing the young Condoleezza Rice from academia into the foreign policy establishment, although once she became National Security Adviser and then Secretary of State to Bush the Younger, Rice ignored the advice of her erstwhile mentor – to catastrophic effect.

Scowcroft, the quintessential realist, could not restrain himself in August 2002 as the current administration prepared to invade Iraq. Despite his loyalty to the Bush family, he publicly warned in a Wall Street Journal article that attacking Iraq was strategically misguided, and would leave the US isolated and weakened politically, and would require a long-term occupation that would undermine US efforts against terrorism.

He also warned that the US should not march into the Middle East without having resolved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His warnings went unheeded. In 2004, he told London’s Financial Times that he had warned Rice that Ariel Sharon’s plan to withdraw from Gaza would be accompanied by an entrenching of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank through the completion of the “security wall”. Which is exactly what happened.

Scowcroft could not contain his exasperation when Israel blundered into war in Lebanon in 2006, and the response of the Bush administration was to slow international efforts to impose a ceasefire, instead urging Israel on to seek a military defeat of Hizbollah, an exercise as futile as it was bloody.

“Condoleezza Rice has stated that a simple ceasefire in Lebanon is not the solution to the current violence. She says it is necessary to deal with the roots of the problem. She is right on both counts,” Scowcroft wrote in the Washington Post. “But Hizbollah is not the source of the problem; it is a derivative of the cause, which is the tragic conflict over Palestine that began in 1948.”

Stabilising the region required a comprehensive solution to its conflicts, he argued, based on Israel retreating to its 1967 borders, negotiating modifications with a representative Palestinian government, which included Hamas, and embracing the 2002 Arab League peace proposals and the deployment of international forces to guarantee border security.

Scowcroft could just as easily have been writing about the current clash in Gaza; indeed, he has suggested in the past week that it is essential that the US abandon its self-defeating refusal to talk to Hamas. But Condi Rice again ignored her tutor, seized by a fantasy in which Arab “moderates” would unite with the US and Israel to wage war against Hamas, Hizbollah, Syria and Iran. Condi Rice, in other words, is a bad student of Scowcroft.

Last June, in the hope of easing the burden on the ordinary people of Gaza, and to give itself a break from Israel’s attacks from the skies, Hamas sought a ceasefire with Israel, brokered by Egypt, that it believed would result in opening the crossings to end the economic stranglehold that denies a decent life to all Gazans.

Israel didn’t see the truce that way, imagining – bizarrely – that a purely military ceasefire could coexist with an economic chokehold designed to destroy Hamas through collective punishment.

Whether wise or not, Hamas resumed its rocket barrage in the hope that creating a crisis would force Israel to accept new truce terms that included lifting the siege and extending the agreement to the West Bank, where Mahmoud Abbas today is effectively kept in power by the Israeli military’s actions against Hamas.

Hamas was never simply going to cooperate with US, Israeli and Egyptian schemes designed to weaken its hold on power. So the crisis we’re seeing now in Gaza is a product not simply of Hamas’s militancy, but of the failure of an ill-conceived strategy to oust it from a position it originally won at the polls.

One fatal flaw in Rice’s idea of a united front against the likes of Iran and Hamas is that Israel shows no inclination to give the Arab moderates what they need: an end to occupation, and a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders, which leaves them, like Abbas, politically marginalised.

The Bush administration’s strategy to forcefully remake the Middle East has failed at every turn – as Scowcroft predicted it would, and many thousands of ordinary Arabs have paid the price of that failure.

But what’s the relevance of Scowcroft now that the Bush administration is clearing its desks? Well, his most important acolyte, right now, is a certain Barack Obama, whom he has coached in matters of national security over many months. The President-elect is an enthusiastic admirer of the soft-spoken realist, who engages with things as they are rather than the way he’d like them to be, and has appointed a number of Scowcroft proteges to key positions.

But there are others competing for Obama’s ear with different ideas. And, as the Condi Rice example shows, being tutored by Scowcroft is hardly a guarantee of acting sensibly. Still, the Middle East was reminded last week of just how important it is that Obama prove to be a better pupil than Rice.



Tony Karon is a New York-based editor and analyst who blogs at Rootless Cosmopolitan www.tonykaron.com