Krauthammer on Realism

He's not impressed:

Scowcroft's opposition to toppling Saddam is neither surprising nor new. Indeed, we are now seeing its third iteration. He had two cracks at Saddam in 1991 and urged his President Bush to pass them both up -- first, after Saddam's defeat in the Gulf War when the road to Baghdad was open, and then, days later, during a massive U.S.-encouraged uprising of Kurds and Shiites when America stood by and allowed Saddam to massacre his opponents by the tens of thousands. (One of the reasons for Iraqi wariness during the U.S. liberation 12 years later was the memory of our past betrayal and suspicions about our current intentions in light of that betrayal.)

This cold-bloodedness is a trademark of this nation's most doctrinaire foreign policy ``realist.'' Realism is the billiard ball theory of foreign policy. You care not a whit about who is running a foreign country. Whether it is Mother Teresa or the Assad family gangsters in Syria, you care only about their external actions, not how they treat their own people.

Realists prize stability above all, and there is nothing more stable than a ruthlessly efficient dictatorship. Which is why Scowcroft is the man who six months after Tiananmen Square toasted those who ordered the massacre; who, as the world celebrates the Beirut Spring that evicted the Syrian occupation from Lebanon, sees not liberation but possible instability; who can barely conceal a preference for Syria's stabilizing iron rule.