As the president is putting the finishing touches on his foreign-policy team, one little-noticed fact is that he stripped his father’s national security adviser, General Scowcroft, of the chairmanship of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Mr. Scowcroft sided with Senator Kerry’s campaign two weeks before November’s election when he told the Financial Times that Prime Minister Sharon had “mesmerized” Mr. Bush, claiming that the leader of the Jewish state had his old boss’s son “wrapped around his finger.”

Last week, Mr. Scowcroft appeared with President Carter’s national security adviser to tell reporters that the upcoming election in Iraq would likely lead to a civil war, placing himself oddly askew of many of the region’s dictators who this week urged Iraq’s Sunnis to vote in the upcoming election.

If this sounds like the foreign policy of the Democrats, it’s because it is. One need only look at the op-ed pages to find out which side this Republican elder statesman is on. In the last week, none other than one of the shrillest critics of Mr. Bush, Maureen Dowd, and President Clinton’s erstwhile aide, Sidney Blumenthal, rushed to Mr. Scowcroft’s defense, saying the national security adviser to the elder Mr. Bush was fired for truth telling. In this case the truth that Mr. Scowcroft told was that it would be a bad idea to rid Iraq of the tyrant that he left in place back in 1991.

Messrs. Blumenthal and Scowcroft, along with Ms. Dowd, may disagree on a host of issues, but they all believe that a largely Jewish group of officials, known in the popular press as neoconservatives, has hijacked the president’s foreign policy, steering him into a needless war in Iraq. One might think that this bit of hokum would be retired after his re-election. How many times does the president have to talk about the forward march of freedom for his realist critics to learn that he means it and that a majority of American voters agree?

The president could, however, do more to clarify the matter for his enemies. While it is true that none of the so-called neoconservatives has been purged from the administration, many of his most loyal advisers have not been offered the kinds of promotions they clearly deserve. At the State Department, the president has chosen Condoleezza Rice, a protege of Mr. Scowcroft, to lead our diplomatic efforts. We hear that the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard Lugar of Indiana, told Ms. Rice bluntly not to nominate any neoconservatives for ambassadorships and posts at Foggy Bottom, apparently providing her with a blacklist of officials he would block from any consideration.

Meanwhile, strong and devoted public servants like Undersecretary of State Bolton; Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby; and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz must endure a torrent of anonymous leaks whispering of pending resignations. To win this war, it will not be enough for the president to sideline General Scowcroft without making clear that he will not tolerate Scowcroftism. To win this war, Mr. Bush will need to empower those individuals who infuriate his enemies in Washington.