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# Posted 8:27 PM by Ariel David Adesnik

SCOWCROFT, TAKE ONE: Inside the Beltway, Brent Scowcroft's nasty remarks about this President Bush have been big news. Unfortunately, the New Yorker has refused to post on its website the article by Jeffrey Goldberg in which Scowcroft goes for the jugular.

Thankfully, my girlfriend came down from NYC to visit me this weekend and brought me a copy of the magazine. In theory, I could have purchased it at a newsstand, but I refuse to pay newsstand prices. Anyhow, I will now depart briefly from the blogosphere in order to read the general's remarks. In the meantime, I recommend Jim Taranto's response to Scowcroft, posted on Tuesday:

War is Peace

The Washington Post reports on a New Yorker interview with Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser in the Ford and Bush père White Houses:
Scowcroft, in his interview, discussed an argument over Iraq he had two years ago with Condoleezza Rice, then-national security adviser and current secretary of state. "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. The article stated that with a "barely perceptible note of satisfaction," Scowcroft added: "But we've had fifty years of peace."
Now let's see. Between 1953 and 2003, here are the Mideast wars we can think of off the top of our head: the Six Day War, the Yom Kippur War, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War, the two Palestinian intifadas against Israel, the Algerian Civil War, the Yemen Civil War and two Sudanese civil wars. That doesn't even count acts of terror against non-Mideastern countries, from the Iranian invasion of the U.S. Embassy to the attacks of 9/11.
What do you call someone who describes this as "50 years of peace"? A "realist."

Heh. And let me just add two wars that Jim forgot: The Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Suez in 1956 and the Lebanese civl war/Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the early 80s.

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