Frank Martin writes:

The single dumbest statement I have ever heard in regards to the "war in Iraq" was made to me today, and here it is:

“The Bush administration has destabilized the middle east and stopped the "peace process"...”.

Frank responds by running the numbers that illustrate just how bloody the Middle East has been, long before either President Bush was sworn in, and rightfully concludes:

The Middle East was never “stable”, unless you consider a concentration camp or charnel house to be the model of stability on which you refer. .

For the last 60 years, the Middle East has been a meat grinder into which tyrants and dictators have fed their own people with little or no concern for being held accountable so long as they remained the clients of the western world.

Which was also the prevailing "realist" policy of much of the west from in the 1960s and '70s when it came to the Soviet Union. Once President Reagan declared them an Evil Empire, the clock was ticking on their demise.

It's possible to see the contrasting worldviews in action in two Washington Post articles that both concern Brent Scowcroft, Papa Bush's national security adviser. First on deck, Richard Cohen:

About six months after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, George H.W. Bush's national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, went to Beijing and met with China's "paramount leader," Deng Xiaoping. Scowcroft said he communicated the president's unhappiness over the massacre, to which Deng essentially said, Mind your own business. "And I said, 'You're right. It is none of our business,' " Scowcroft tells Jeffrey Goldberg in the current New Yorker. This raises an obvious question: How many have to die before it is our business?

That question is at the heart of the dilemma now facing American foreign policy. Scowcroft is a famous realist. Not for him any grand, noble causes. He is parsimonious with American lives and treasure, and he vocally opposed George W. Bush's intention to go to war in Iraq. He found out this was a different Bush with a different foreign policy. The younger Bush's was infused with moralism.

Next up, Glenn Kessler:

Scowcroft, in his interview, discussed an argument over Iraq he had two years ago with Condoleezza Rice, then-national security adviser and current secretary of state. "She says we're going to democratize Iraq, and I said, 'Condi, you're not going to democratize Iraq,' and she said, 'You know, you're just stuck in the old days,' and she comes back to this thing that we've tolerated an autocratic Middle East for fifty years and so on and so forth," he said. The article stated that with a "barely perceptible note of satisfaction," Scowcroft added: "But we've had fifty years of peace."

As Frank notes above, it was the peace of the charnel house.

(Hat tip on WaPo pieces to the Brothers Judd.)