The Realist Who Got It Wrong
By Charles Krauthammer
Washington Post

Talk about living in a world of one’s own.

Now that Cindy Sheehan turns out to be a disaster for the antiwar movement — most Americans are not about to follow a left-wing radical who insists that we are in Iraq for reasons of theft, oppression and empire — a new spokesman is needed. If I were in the opposition camp, I would want a deeply patriotic, highly intelligent, distinguished establishment figure. I would want Brent Scowcroft.

Well, Brent Scowcroft isn’t chopped liver and his New Yorker article was a welcome addition to the volumes being written as to how, why and when this administration got things so very wrong. But Cindy Sheehan a disaster? Well, yes, but not for the anti-war movement. More for Bush. She got attention. The press actually covered her for a while. Getting the press to cover anti-war anything has been a near impossibility since the whole debacle started.

Krauthammer really doesn’t admire Scowcroft, though. Scowcroft, it seems, is a mean guy, whereas Krauthammer is all heart.

This coldbloodedness is a trademark of this nation’s most doctrinaire foreign policy “realist.” Realism is the billiard ball theory of foreign policy: The only thing that counts is how countries interact, not what’s happening inside. You care not a whit about who is running a 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.

He must draw his own line as to where tyranny ends and authoritarianism begins. Our best buddies, the Saudis, for instance, are regarded as rather harsh by some. Not by the Bush administration, however. We don’t want to be spreading freedom and democracy there. And never mind that we were contributing players in some of the worst atrocities of Saddam’s regime in one way or another. We’re not supposed to dwell on that.

It’s safe to say that Krauthammer is not a member of the reality based community and doesn’t want to be. Thing is, reality might bite, but it is the dimension we have to live in.