The American Spectator

The Spectacle Blog

Sounding rather embarrassingly like a swooning teenybopper fan of the latest mediocre boy-band, Steve Clemons breathlessly posts excerpts of a New Yorker profile by Jeffrey Goldberg featuring Brent Scowcroft's lastest batch of Deep Thoughts. The most telling bit (emphasis added):

The last time the two [Scowcroft and Condoleeza Rice] had dinner, nearly two years ago, it ended unhappily, Scowcroft acknowledged...

They also argued about Iraq. "She says we're going to democratize Iraq, and I said, 'Condi, you're not going to democratize Iraq,' and she said, 'You know, you're just stuck in the old days,' and she comes back to this thing that we've tolerated an autocratic Middle East for fifty years and so on and so forth," he said. Then a barely perceptible note of satisfaction entered his voice, and he said, "But we've had fifty years of peace."

That really is a remarkable statement. Take a look at this list of terror attacks against Americans; where do most of the perpetrators come from? Scowcroft's analytical framework is so totally inadequate to the problem of Islamist terrorism that he simply blots it out of his mind.

topics:
Islam, Iraq