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Brent Scowcroft Echoes Obama: We Need To Talk To Enemies

I agree!

HP-Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush and a retired Air Force general, said on Monday that he agrees with the position, stated mainly by Sen. Barack Obama, that the U.S. would benefit from having direct talks with the leaders of its most distrusted adversaries.

“Absolutely,” said Scowcroft, when asked by The Huffington Post whether he thought the next president should meet with the likes of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “It’s hard to make things better if you don’t talk.”

Scowcroft, widely considered to be one of preeminent foreign policy minds in the United States, was appearing at an event with Henry Kissinger at Georgetown University. His take on U.S. diplomatic outreach comes as Obama’s position — to meet with our enemies even without preconditions — has gotten the Illinois Democrat routinely criticized as naive and inexperienced from his Democratic and Republican rivals. Scowcroft declined, when asked, to directly assess the foreign policy platform of any of the presidential candidates. But he briefly outlined what he thought was the best steps forward in Iraq.

“Our goal in Iraq is to leave an Iraq that produces more stability in the region and not chaos. And that’s going to take time,” he said. “[It will take troop presence] for a long time…I think gradually security is improving and as it improves we can reduce troop levels. But what we need to do is provide an environment in which their political evolution continues.”

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Posted by JohnKonop on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 3:45 am | under Uncategorized | |RSS 2.0 feed | Comments and pings closed. |

3 Responses to “Brent Scowcroft Echoes Obama: We Need To Talk To Enemies”

  1. JohnKonop says:
    April 29, 2008 at 7:50 pm

    Senior Iraqi government official assassinated in Baghdad

    BAGHDAD — An Iraqi official says a roadside bomb has killed a senior government official in northern Baghdad.

    A spokesman says Tuesday’s roadside bomb hit Dhia Jodi Jaber as he left his home in his car.

    The spokesman Abdullah al-Lami says Jaber was a director general at the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs. He was in charge of the ministry’s projects and reconstruction department. His son also has been lightly injured in the blast.

    Insurgents often target government officials and institutions in a bid to disturb the government’s work.

  2. JohnKonop says:
    April 29, 2008 at 7:52 pm

    Wolfowitz: U.S. Was “Clueless On Counterinsurgency”

    Paul Wolfowitz, in his first public remarks on the Iraq war in years, said the American government was “pretty much clueless on counterinsurgency” in the first year of the war.

    The former deputy secretary of defense said yesterday that the force sent to Iraq was adequate for fighting Saddam Hussein’s military, citing the speed with which American troops toppled the regime. But Mr. Wolfowitz said no one in the Bush administration anticipated that Saddam would order his security services to wage an insurgency after their formal defeat on the battlefield.

  3. captain_menace says:
    April 30, 2008 at 10:23 pm

    “no one in the Bush administration anticipated that Saddam would order his security services to wage an insurgency after their formal defeat on the battlefield.”

    That’s funny. According to commanders on the ground over there, the Iraqi army was practically begging to help out as a policing force. Bremer proceeded to disband the Iraqi army, AND THEN they began to wage an insurgency.

    Wolfowitz was one of the architects of the invasion. What a jerk.

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