Reply #13: Lt General Scowcroft painted a bleak picture of Iraq

[BrotherBuzz]

but the specific warning of a draft was by Zbigniew Brzezinski who spoke at the same function.

January 7, 2005 by the Los Angeles Times

Scowcroft Skeptical on Iraq Vote

The Election Threatens to Heighten the Risk of Civil War, the Former National Security Advisor Says

by Ronald Brownstein


The election scheduled this month in Iraq could further inflame the country's conflict and increase the risk of civil war, Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor to President Bush's father, said at a forum Thursday.

Rather than leading to stability, Scowcroft said, he feared that the election would further alienate Iraq's Sunni Muslim population and that it had "a great potential for deepening the conflict."

"Indeed, we may be seeing an incipient civil war at the present time."

In one sense, the comments from Scowcroft, a retired Air Force lieutenant general, were not surprising: He has long been a critic of the Iraq war. But his stark warning about potential civil war marked one of the most ominous assessments about the implications of the upcoming election from a high-ranking former official.

Scowcroft made his comments at a luncheon sponsored by the New America Foundation, a centrist, nonpartisan Washington think tank. At the forum, Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security advisor, also offered a grim prognosis for Iraq.

Brzezinski said the United States should meet its goals of producing a reasonably stable Iraqi government "if we are willing to put in 500,000 troops, spend $200 billion a year, probably have the draft and have some kind of wartime taxation."

The White House did not respond to a request for comment about the remarks.

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http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0107-03.htm