A New Yorker article last month on former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft landed like manna from heaven for some of the Iraq war's fiercest critics. Mr. Scowcroft, who was national security adviser to the first President Bush, has long disagreed with the younger Bush's foreign policy -- especially when it comes to the Mideast. In the lengthy article by Jeffrey Goldberg, Mr. Scowcroft turned his sights on the president's neoconservative ideals and argued that Iraq was a strategic misadventure inimical to U.S. national interests.

		Dan Dunsky is the producer of "Diplomatic Immunity," a foreign affairs television program in Canada (ddunsky@tvo.org).

For anti-war critics who never found it palatable to argue that Saddam was an innocent victim of U.S. imperial bullying, Mr. Scowcroft's arguments offer forceful intellectual ammunition.

Even the New York Times' Maureen Dowd -- who normally doesn't like to push her thoughts much past the "Bush lied" narrative -- is on board, recently suggesting that Mr. Scowcroft receive the Medal of Freedom for standing up to President Bush, Vice President Cheney, former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and everyone else responsible for "lead[ing] the nation into a morass."

But one wonders if Ms. Dowd and others really want to stand in Brent Scowcroft's shadow.

A retired Air Force general, Mr. Scowcroft first rose to prominence as deputy to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger in the Nixon White House. He was one of the earliest and staunchest backers of war against Iraq in 1991, not because of Saddam Hussein's depredations, but because, in invading Kuwait, Saddam had violated an international border. "I believed that [the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait] was intolerable to the interests of the United States," Mr. Scowcroft told Mr. Goldberg.

In other words, Brent Scowcroft is a realist.

Realism in international affairs is the idea that a country makes decisions about the world with a clear-eyed and cold calculation of its own national interests. Moral considerations -- what a country should do rather than what it must do -- are secondary, since good intentions detached from practical considerations can lead to terrible results.

Hans Morgenthau, one of the 20th century's most influential realist thinkers, said realism "aims at the realization of the lesser evil rather than of the absolute good." So, you don't go to war to change the world, but to defend your interests. And then only if the alternative to war is worse.

It's true, as Mr. Scowcroft's newfound friends believe, that following a realist foreign policy, the United States may not have gone to war in Iraq in 2003, though there were many realists outside the White House -- Henry Kissinger foremost among them -- who supported the war. But if those who now trumpet Mr. Scowcroft's views as proof of their own righteousness on Iraq want to be coherent and consistent, they should acquaint themselves with other recent consequences of realist international policy.

Following such a policy, the United States stayed away from the Balkans in the early 1990s while Yugoslavia disintegrated into ethnic and sectarian violence which ultimately led to the deaths of some 200,000 people. A cold calculation of the national interest likewise kept the United States out of Rwanda, Congo, and the Sudan as millions perished in those conflicts. On the other hand, it was realist policy that drove the United States into Vietnam in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Realist thought also dominated the thinking of George H.W. Bush in 1989 as the Soviet hold on Eastern and Central Europe collapsed. Fearing instability, Mr. Bush counselled caution, warning Ukrainians (in a speech believed to have been written by Mr. Scowcroft) against the dangers of "suicidal nationalism" and did not support the aspirations of the Baltic states to regain the independence they lost to Stalin in 1940.

In the Mideast, as retired U.S. Army intelligence officer Ralph Peters points out, "It was realists who tied the United States to the shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein and the Saudi royal bigots," to prevent the emergence of a single dominant regional power and to ensure the secure and stable flow of oil onto world markets.

It was Donald Rumsfeld -- the realist -- who shook hands with Saddam Hussein in 1983.

Much as anti-war types may hate to admit it, it is the neocons around the current President Bush who provided an ethical (as well as strategic) rationale for invading Iraq and deposing Saddam, based on what they perceived as the very real failures of two generations of American realist mideast policy.

George W. Bush summed up this attitude when he said, "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe -- because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty."

When I put this quote to one of America's foremost realist practitioners last year, he replied, "If you say 60 years of stability over democracy, that implies that previous administrations had a choice. And where is that true? What specific country would you say that is valid, where there was such a choice? Egypt under Nasser? Syria under Assad? Where exactly did we have that choice?"

However much truth there is to that statement, it's doubtful that Mr. Scowcroft's new friends would find much comfort in it.

So, before lining up behind Brent Scowcroft and his criticisms of this administration, ask yourself whether you really agree with him -- or whether you just want to have a clean conscience on Iraq.