Word: scowcrofts
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Last December, a few weeks before the smart bombs and cruise missiles began to rain down on Baghdad, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft posed a question: "Can the U.S. use force -- even go to war -- for carefully defined national interests, or do we have to have a moral crusade or a galvanizing event like Pearl Harbor?" Put another way, Scowcroft was asking whether a nation traumatized by its defeat in Vietnam had grown up enough to accept its leadership responsibilities in the murkier world that emerged with the end of the cold...
...return to Scowcroft's question: depending on who is drawing them, the lessons of Vietnam fall into two categories. To Bush, America's defeat showed that if the U.S. goes to war it must go to win -- with overwhelming force instead of gradual escalation. To his critics, the message was that America must not go to war without the solid support of Congress and the people. In the gulf, both propositions were put to the test, and both were vindicated: the U.S. accomplished much, if not all, it set out to, at a gratifyingly low cost in lives and treasure...
...break for Gates came in 1974, when he was assigned to work at the White House on the National Security Council. His boss, then as now, was an Air Force general named Brent Scowcroft. Over the next 17 years, Gates deftly hopscotched back and forth from the White House to CIA, winning kudos from Democrats and Republicans alike...
...Bush before he attended funerals of foreign leaders. When Gates was appointed deputy CIA director in 1986, he asked Bush to swear him in. After Gates moved to the Bush White House in 1989, he, unlike previous Deputy National Security Advisers, was invited to attend almost all the meetings Scowcroft holds with Bush, including each morning's round of intelligence and national-security briefings...
...National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft was an unrelenting hawk during the Administration policy debates. "For Scowcroft," Woodward writes, "war was an instrument of foreign policy, pure and simple...