“DON’T ATTACK SADDAM,” read the headline of a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Thursday, August 15, 2002. The twelve-hundred-word opinion piece argued that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would be “very expensive” and have “very serious” and “bloody” consequences. It cautioned that a campaign against Iraq would divert the United States from the real war against terrorism for an “indefinite period” and that such a war, if conducted without full international support, would strain relations between the United States and other countries. And without “enthusiastic international cooperation,” especially on intelligence, it was by no means clear the United States could win the global war against terrorism.1
The op-ed argued that Saddam Hussein was first and foremost a “power-hungry survivor” who had little cause to join with Al Qaeda and that he could be deterred just like other aggressors. It warned, too, that should the United States attack Iraq, the ensuing war could “swell the ranks of terrorists,” sidetrack US foreign policy from grappling with the more important Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and possibly “destabilize Arab regimes in the region” (the irony being that “one of Saddam’s strategic objectives” was precisely such destabilization).
The argument—which proved to be sadly prescient—echoed those made by other opponents of the war, chiefly on the political left. Which is what made the identity of its author so startling. The op-ed had been written by a retired US Air Force lieutenant general, a former military assistant under President Richard Nixon, and the US national security advisor under presidents Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush—the seventy-seven-year-old Brent Scowcroft.* He was a long-standing, loyal Republican, a highly regarded Washington insider, and a man widely admired for his judiciousness and discretion.
By most measures, Scowcroft’s op-ed seemed grossly out of character. It rejected the war plans being formulated by President George W. Bush, who was the son of Scowcroft’s close friend and former boss and who had himself appointed Scowcroft as the chairman of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB, pronounced piffy-ab). It directly criticized Scowcroft’s protégée, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, who’d worked under Scowcroft from 1989 to 1991. And it sharply challenged the views of other friends and former associates of Scowcroft, including Vice President Dick Cheney (secretary of defense under George H. W. Bush) and deputy national security advisor Stephen Hadley (Scowcroft’s colleague in the Ford and Bush administrations and a former principal of the Scowcroft Group, Scowcroft’s consulting firm). For a man known for his quiet diplomacy—the consummate Washington insider—this act of public disagreement was a shocking gesture. No wonder Leslie Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former editor of the New York Times editorial page, called the op-ed “very brave.”2
Scowcroft immediately became the most serious critic of the Bush administration’s plans to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The editorial opened the door for other foreign policy experts, including former secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger, former national security advisor Samuel “Sandy” Berger, Senator Richard Lugar, and Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni, to come out publicly against the administration. Other military leaders spoke out in Army and Navy professional journals, and former secretary of state Henry Kissinger and former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski each offered muted criticisms of the “how” of the administration’s plans, though not of the “why.” Ten days later, former secretary of state James Baker wrote an op-ed cautioning against any rash action directed at Iraq and urging that the United States “do it in the right way.”3
A front-page article in the New York Times the day after Scowcroft’s op-ed called it evidence of a deep split within the Republican Party, and a lead story in Time magazine questioned whether the GOP was at war with itself.4
The White House fought back. The Bush team’s philosophy on dissent was a simple one: “Either you’re for us or you’re against us.” Scowcroft had crossed the line. Vice President Cheney gave two prominent and strongly worded speeches articulating the administration’s position, and Bush’s other senior advisers, White House supporters, and surrogates published their own op-eds, appeared on television and radio, held press conferences, gave interviews, and made public appearances in which they emphatically reasserted the need to remove Saddam from power, all implicitly rebutting Scowcroft’s arguments.
Most media coverage and most of the American public soon rallied behind the president, and on March 20, 2003, the United States went to war with Iraq.
If any man ever had the right to proclaim “I told you so,” Brent Scowcroft, in the disastrous aftermath of the invasion, would have had that right. But he never said it—not even after the weapons of mass destruction claimed as justification for the attack proved illusory, not even after the Bush administration grossly mismanaged the invasion and the occupation, and not even after the US presence grew increasingly unpopular at home and around the world, with casualties climbing and the cost in dollars skyrocketing. Nor did Scowcroft distance himself from the Bush administration—even after Bush declined to renew Scowcroft’s term as chair of the PFIAB in 2004. Instead, he slowly reestablished his ties with the administration, and in February 2007 he testified before the US Senate to defend the administration’s proposed troop surge in Iraq.5
Rather than denouncing the war and rejecting the administration that had attacked him for daring to dissent, Scowcroft quietly assisted the Bush White House during its second term in office. President Bush revamped his foreign policy team and attempted to restart the Middle East peace process. He and secretary of state Condoleezza Rice began to work more closely with other countries on issues of mutual concern. And after the 2006 midterm election, Bush appointed Scowcroft’s former deputy national security advisor and good friend Robert Gates as secretary of defense.
With the election of Democrat Barack Obama in 2008, Scowcroft continued to offer the White House advice. Secretary of state nominee Hillary Clinton, prospective UN ambassador Susan Rice, and president-elect Obama all consulted with Scowcroft during the presidential transition period and early in the presidency—Scowcroft’s impeccable Republican credentials and deep ties to the Bush family notwithstanding. President Obama appointed US Marine Corps Gen. James Jones, a friend of Scowcroft’s (and someone Obama didn’t know well), as his national security advisor.6
These twists and turns, which might seem strange in the career of a more conventional player of the Washington power game, reflect the unique role that Brent Scowcroft has occupied as arguably the United States’ leading foreign policy strategist of the last forty years. Over the period encompassing the last fifteen years of the Cold War, the years up to September 11, 2011, and the post-9/11 period through the final withdrawal of US forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, no other official or analyst has consistently had such a profound impact on the national security policy of the United States. For many in Washington, Brent Scowcroft is a pillar of the foreign policy community and a global strategist par excellence.
But he is a strategist with a small s. Scowcroft views the international scene the way a great chess player views the board: he has a clear objective, has analyzed the evidence available, and has charted a prudent course in pursuit of his goals while recognizing both the uncertainty of others’ responses and the often incalculable consequences that any action he might take could have. As one former colleague and friend put it, “one of his great skills . . . is [as] as strategic thinker. What I mean by that is . . . he instinctively does not look at any issue in a vacuum, as self-contained; every issue has tentacles. And he’s very good at (a) remembering that there are tentacles, (b) discerning them, and (c) tracing out their connections to other issues.”7
The strategist may not alter the nature of the game by formulating sweeping new theories of political change or grand summaries of the course of history—but he plays the game set before him, using the pieces available, with insight, skill, and occasionally brilliance. He recognizes the moving parts in a complex situation, sees how the pieces fit together, and devises the most appropriate response, considering not just the military element but also the economic and political aspects of a problem. “He’d see the necessary integration of the tools of American power, not just military power,” Lee Hamilton says. “And he had a keen sense of the limitations of military power.”8
Knowledge of other countries, of other political leaders, and of what has gone before is critical to understanding the properties and trajectories of those moving parts and how they mesh with the tools of American power. “This is where I believe in the importance of history,” Scowcroft says. The study of history has taught him about “how countries behave” and has helped him to remain objective about people, events, institutions, and forces—their origins, their likely interactions, and the possible future results.9
Of course, being a strategist in the realm of international policy ultimately involves more than just thinking strategically. A would-be strategist without access to the levers of power and the ability to wield them skillfully is merely an armchair theorist, like a military analyst who never leads a battalion or a campaign consultant who simply kibitzes from the sidelines.
We think of George Kennan as a great international strategist because of his 1946 “Long Telegram,” written while he was chargé d’affairs at the US embassy in Moscow, and his 1947 Foreign Affairs article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” published while he was director of policy planning under secretary of state George C. Marshall. These two writings provided the conceptual underpinnings that largely guided United States policy toward the Soviet Union for the four decades of the Cold War. By contrast, the decades Kennan spent writing at the Center for Advanced Study at Princeton and in retirement, when US policy makers all but ignored his analyses and prescriptions, may be significant and interesting to intellectual historians, but they add little to his résumé as a strategist.10
Similarly, Henry Kissinger is famous (if controversial) for his strategic vision—formulated in partnership with President Richard Nixon—in regard to détente and SALT, the opening of China, and the United States’ disengagement from Vietnam, as well as for the private advice he has given George H. W. Bush,* George W. Bush, and other US presidents. It is the moments when Kissinger helped shape the course of world history that elevate him to the status of strategist, however, and not the quality and volume of the analyses of US foreign policy that he has published in his many books and other writings.
Strategy, then, inevitably has an operational component. For this reason, Scowcroft has observed that national security strategies will either “succeed or fail depending on whether they are implemented effectively. Too often a brilliant strategy can flounder for lack of resources or agencies’ commitment to implementing the president’s decisions.”11 Because of his skill at getting his strategies implemented, Scowcroft has helped to shape the national security policies of six US presidents—those of Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush most directly, but also those of Nixon, Reagan, George W. Bush, and Obama. That long-standing influence reflects the confidence officials throughout the government have in him and his credibility with other participants in the world of global policy.
Three qualities in particular have enabled Scowcroft to earn this credibility. One is his integrity in the cause of public service. He has been able to remain his own person even as he has been selfless in the service of the US Army, the Air Force, a series of US presidents, and the broader interests of the United States itself. He is careful in his use and analysis of information, thoughtful in his judgments of others, objective in his evaluation of evidence, and confident in his conclusions. He has an internal gyroscope with respect to his judgments regarding national security, as one colleague noted, one not readily influenced by factors external to the events and individuals at hand. He speaks truth to power, a longtime friend, Gen. Amos “Joe” Jordan, says—a quality, Jordan points out, that doesn’t always make him very popular. Scowcroft says what’s on his mind, Leslie Gelb observes, and he’ll speak up if he disagrees.12
A second crucial element in Scowcroft’s makeup is his ability to reach out to multiple audiences and diverse constituencies at the same time. This capacity to bridge professions, connect specializations, and link policy subsystems—to communicate with different “knowledge communities,” to phrase it another way—is what anthropologists sometimes call “multivocality.”13
Scowcroft has shown himself to be fluent in at least four foreign policy “languages.” As a retired Air Force general and an expert on weapons systems, strategic forces, and military organization, Scowcroft is heeded by military and Defense Department personnel, defense policy experts, members of Congress specializing in national security affairs, and Pentagon reporters. As a student of the history and theory of international relations, Kissinger’s deputy, national security advisor to two presidents and the author of articles, reports, newspaper op-eds, and books on multiple aspects of US national security, Scowcroft’s advice is followed by foreign policy experts, diplomats, journalists, and academics writing on the presidency, national security, and international relations. As a probing consumer of intelligence, a former intelligence officer, and former chairman of PFIAB, he is respected and trusted by officials in the intelligence community. And as the head of a successful international business consulting firm and a leader of prestigious boards that connect business and policy communities (such as the Atlantic Council and the Aspen Strategy Group), Scowcroft is heeded by policy makers and business leaders in the United States and overseas. The ability to understand and connect these varied disciplines is part of what makes Scowcroft unique.
The third quality that accounts for Scowcroft’s effectiveness is his quiet personality. Unlike many ambitious policy experts, military officers, and Washington politicians, he prefers to act without fanfare, often letting others receive the acclaim for initiatives he helped devise. He is also extremely discreet, always ready to listen but slow to talk, a quality that leads some to call him “secretive,” others very “compartmentalized” or “taciturn.” As one former colleague remarks, Scowcroft has “survived in Washington by forgetting an awful lot, or appearing to.” Such self-control is highly valued in the nation’s capital, and uncommon.14
These personal traits, together with the quality of his mind and his unusual work ethic, have enabled Scowcroft to be extraordinarily effective as a policy expert. There are “lots of very, very smart people” in the nation’s capital, another former associate observes, but “rarest of all in Washington is judgment”—especially “great judgment” like that consistently exhibited by Scowcroft.15
Despite his contributions as a strategist, Scowcroft’s low profile has been a hallmark of his life.16 Most journalists, historians, and analysts of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century US foreign policy have paid Scowcroft little direct attention, while writing at length about more outspoken public officials such as Dick Cheney, Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld. Even the biographies of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and George Bush do not devote much attention to Scowcroft’s contributions. And the same can be said of the many memoirs written by former presidents, members of Congress, cabinet officials, and other high-ranking office holders.
This is what Scowcroft has wanted. He has deliberately avoided the attention of the mass media, and his rare forays into public view—whether through interviews, newspaper articles, books, or speeches—have always been designed with specific purposes or specialized audiences in mind. Only occasionally does he appear on national television, and rarely does he attempt to persuade the broader American public of his views. Neither does he trumpet his own accomplishments. Not until 2013, at the age of eighty-eight, did Scowcroft start work on his memoirs, and they remain unfinished as of this writing.17 As Condoleezza Rice observes, while her mentor and former boss is “one of the most important people in the second half of the twentieth century in terms of foreign policy . . . you would not pick him out of a lineup, right?”18
However, because of Scowcroft’s prominent role in US foreign policy, a study of his life offers an insider’s perspective on many of the critical developments of the last four decades. Many of the events in which Scowcroft participated helped to define the evolution of the United States’ international role: the opening of diplomatic relations with China, the US withdrawal from South Vietnam, the handling of the nuclear arms race, the Iran-contra scandal, the Tiananmen Square massacre and the emergence of China as an economic and political superpower, the reunification of Germany and the end of the Cold War, the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the establishment of the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA), and the United States’ invasion of Iraq and the start of the war on terror after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
A study of Scowcroft’s life also touches on other significant though less heralded events in US and world history: the reform of military education at West Point in the late 1940s, the British financial crisis in the fall of 1976, President Bush’s near-disastrous trip to China in February 1989, the failed coup against Panama’s Manuel Noriega in October 1989, the reforms of the intelligence community in the mid-1970s, and the growing role of former high-level US officials as international business consultants over the past few decades. By necessity, then, any book-length account of the life and career of Brent Scowcroft must include a history of US national security policy in the post–World War II era.
The Scowcroft story further provides a valuable perspective on the all-important matter of how American foreign policy is decided and carried out. We may speak of this as the NSC process, since it centers on the national security advisor and the staff of the National Security Council. It involves the recruitment and placement of personnel; the management of interagency relations; the determination of which governmental agencies or units and which officials are to decide, coordinate, and implement policy; and the handling of public relations between the presidency, Congress, and the media with respect to national security policy. This book accordingly reviews Scowcroft’s relationships with his bosses, associates, and subordinates who worked with him as part of the NSC process in shaping US national security over the past fifty years—and, in the process, sheds light on the influence of personal factors on the course of history. It gives particular attention to two former national security advisors, both friends of his. One is his immediate predecessor in office, Henry Kissinger; the other is his former protégée, Condoleezza Rice. How each performed as national security advisor and interpreted the NSC process illuminates the different roles that national security advisors may play across presidential administrations and brings Scowcroft’s own choices and actions into fuller relief.
Brent Scowcroft generally exercised his power in subtle, nonobvious ways, quietly influencing policy through the force of his insights and his talent for persuasion. Scowcroft’s strategic vision can nonetheless be discerned from his statements, his writings, and his actions both in and out of office.
First and foremost, he is deeply concerned with protecting and advancing American interests. He is what international relations theorists would call a realist. At the same time, he is an internationalist because he sees the United States and most of the rest of the world as having congruent and ultimately reconcilable interests and values.19 Yet Scowcroft also believes that the achievement of multilateral cooperation depends on strong US leadership in NATO, the United Nations, and other institutions. Finally, we can see Scowcroft as an optimist, because he believes that his voice matters and that reason can prevail in international relations. In this book, I try to show how these core values—realism, internationalism, nationalism, and a fundamental optimism—have informed what Scowcroft has done in his various roles, inside and outside government.
In late 2006, when I first approached General Scowcroft about writing his biography, he expressed some doubt. After a ninety-minute conversation at his Washington office—a meeting that was as much his interview of me as my interview of him—he said he would cooperate. He allowed me access to his academic records and his Air Force personnel files, and he helped me contact many of the people I wanted to interview, encouraging them to share with me what they knew. Most important, Scowcroft himself agreed to talk with me on a regular basis. Our on-the-record interviews—most by telephone, some in person—averaged between thirty and forty-five minutes, with a few running over an hour. They continued through early May 2014. I am deeply grateful to General Scowcroft for his assistance, as well as to the many others who gave generously of their time (see the acknowledgments).
Although The Strategist is an authorized biography, it is an independent work of scholarship and analysis (and in no sense a preview of Scowcroft’s own memoirs). General Scowcroft did not try to impose his own views on what I would write or otherwise dictate the content of the book. The interpretations, judgments, and conclusions are therefore my responsibility, as are any errors and omissions contained herein.
Bartholomew Sparrow
August 2014
* Brent Scowcroft’s name has no middle initial, and the first syllable of his surname rhymes with “snow.”
* George H. W. Bush, the nation’s forty-first president, was known as “George Bush” during his own political career, up to the mid-1990s. The text adopts the current usage.