Just over six years ago, as legend has it, George H. W. Bush weighed in on the invasion of Iraq that his son seemed hell-bent on pursuing, deputizing his old confidante Brent Scowcroft to deliver a very public warning to the president.
Mr. Scowcroft’s resulting op-ed, published in The Wall Street Journal and titled “Don’t Attack Saddam,” presciently decreed that any invasion “is certain to divert us for some indefinite period from our war on terrorism.” It fell on deaf ears in the White House, and the war commenced a few months later.
The elder Mr. Bush’s hand again seemed to be at work four years later, when, with public frustration with the war reaching its breaking point, James A. Baker took the reins of the Iraq Study Group, the bipartisan panel that proposed a strategy for withdrawing troops from Iraq and reengaging diplomatically with the rest of the Middle East. This, too, was ignored by the president.
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