BREAKING RANKS.(Brent Scowcroft)

At eight o'clock on the morning of August 2, 1990, President George H. W. Bush assembled his National Security Council in the Cabinet Room of the White House. Thirteen hours earlier, Saddam Hussein had sent his Army into Kuwait, and the Administration was searching for a response. Brent Scowcroft, the President's national-security adviser, has an unhappy memory of that first meeting. The tone, he says, was defeatist: "Much of the conversation in those early moments concerned the stability of the oil market. There was an air of resignation about the invasion."

Shortly before the National Security Council meeting began, General Colin Powell, who was then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told General Norman Schwarzkopf, "I think we'd go to war over Saudi Arabia, but I doubt we'd go to war over Kuwait." For the moment, at least, Powell's assessment reflected the President's mood. Minutes before the meeting, Bush had told reporters that he was not contemplating an armed response. Scowcroft had been listening to the President as he spoke to the press, and the comment immediately struck him as unwise. "Right at the beginning, I believed that it"--the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait--"was intolerable to the interests of the U.S.," he told me recently.

At the time, Scowcroft, a retired Air Force general, was notably hawkish on the Iraq question, more so than the Secretary of State, James A. Baker III, and perhaps even more so than Dick Cheney, who was Bush's Secretary of Defense. Scowcroft believed that if Saddam's aggression was left unanswered it would undermine the international rule of law; it would also, he thought, compromise America's standing in the world at a moment--the end of the Cold War--that was otherwise filled with promise.

Scowcroft is a protege of Henry Kissinger--he was his deputy when Kissinger was Richard Nixon's nationalsecurity adviser. Like Kissinger, he is a purveyor of a "realist" approach to foreign policy: the idea that America should be guided by strategic self-interest, and that moral considerations are secondary at best. But Bush and Scowcroft also spoke expansively about the possibilities for America in the Cold War world, about a New World Order built on benign but resolute American leadership and multilateral cooperation. The United States, Bush said in "A World Transformed," a book that he later co-wrote with Scowcroft, had a "disproportionate responsibility" to use its power "in pursuit of a common good." Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was a direct challenge to Bush's understanding of America's role in the world.

There were initial doubts among some of Bush's advisers. Colin Powell, like many military men shaped by the experience of the Vietnam War, was disinclined to send American troops into battle, and he cautioned the National Security Council against imprudent action. "My first questions had to do with defending Saudi Arabia, and the importance of having a clear political understanding first of what we were doing," Powell told me recently. "Brent immediately saw that the invasion had to be reversed. He was a little further forward on the need to do something."

Scowcroft argued unyieldingly for intervention, and his view prevailed. Within days, Bush announced, "This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait"--a burst of fortitude that commentators later attributed to a comment from Margaret Thatcher ("Don't go all wobbly on us, George," she reportedly told him). Scowcroft, whose modesty may be pronounced to the point of ostentation, loyally insists that the President arrived at his decision alone, but several of Scowcroft's former colleagues said that it was Scowcroft's firmness, along with Thatcher's prodding, that strengthened Bush's resolve to confront Saddam. Scowcroft is "not a blowhard," the senior Bush told me in a recent e-mail. "He has a great propensity for friendship. By that I mean someone I can depend on to tell me what I need to know and not just what I want to hear, and at the same time he is someone on whom I know I always can rely and trust implicitly."

In the six months leading to the war, Scowcroft became indispensable to Bush, subjecting war planners to sharp questioning, and debating those opposed to intervention. It is easy to forget, given the war's stunning speed and its low casualty count on the U.S. side (a hundred and forty-eight American soldiers lost their lives in the fighting), that there was a great deal of domestic opposition to Bush's plan, particularly among congressional Democrats.