Home / Features / What I've Learned  December 17, 2008, 1:00 AM
Brent Scowcroft: What I've Learned  The elder statesmen speaks
out on the foretold failure in Iraq, his knowing silence with
the first President Bush, his fallout with old friend Dick
Cheney, and why Barack Obama shouldn't always listen to the new
cabinet.  By Mark Warren  More from this author  brent scowcroft
David Ake/AFP via Getty  The first President George Bush (left)
speaks with Scowcroft (center) and Secretary of State James
Baker (right) as they walk back to the White House in 1992.
Scowcroft was born in Ogden, Utah where his father's grocery
business served the Mormon communities in northern Utah.  The
end of the cold war marked a discontinuity in history. The cold
war was a very difficult period where, if we made a serious
mistake, we could blow up the world. Suddenly that world was
gone. There was no existential threat anymore. There was no
focused problem. There were a hundred problems, and most of them
we didn't even know were pr