To judge by the press, the world’s sagest and most influential foreign policy expert is a 77-year-old named Brent Scowcroft. Mr. Scowcroft’s argument against an American attack on Saddam Hussein was the lead opinion piece in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal. The New York Times made it its lead, front-page news article on Friday and Saturday and its lead editorial on Friday. The Times editorial called Mr. Scowcroft’s words “an extraordinary challenge to the Bush administration” and “the equivalent of a cannon shot across the White House lawn.”

All of which makes it appropriate to ask just who is Brent Scowcroft, anyway? The Wall Street Journal said “Mr. Scowcroft, national security adviser under Presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, is founder and president of the Forum for International Policy.” The New York Times didn’t even mention the Forum for International Policy, describing Mr. Scowcroft in a front-page news dispatch as “the first President Bush’s national security adviser” and as a Bush family friend.

Well, “national security adviser” and “Forum for International Policy” sound prestigious and high-minded. But neither the Times nor the Journal mentions that Mr. Scowcroft’s main business since 1994 has been as president of the Scowcroft Group, whose Web site describes it as “an international business advisory group.” The firm on Friday declined to disclose to The New York Sun the names of its clients, but its Web site says they include “industry leaders” and “foreign direct investors” in sectors that include “energy.”

Among the services the Scowcroft Group’s Web site says it offers is to “provide access to government agencies.” The company also says it offers “practical experience with the many regulatory and political institutions that affect the activities of companies abroad.” Let’s see — industry leaders and foreign direct investors in the energy sector, with activities overseas, being provided with “access to government agencies.” When this happens with respect to, say, Vice President Cheney’s energy task force, the New York Times goes into high dudgeon. But when it involves an appeasement line in the Persian Gulf, the oil interests get a total pass.

Scrutiny has been just as stunningly absent when it comes to Mr. Scowcroft’s non-profit front group, the Forum for International Policy. According to the Forum’s Web site, its 12-member board of trustees includes some real all-stars. There is Rita Hauser, the PLO-apologist whose law firm, Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, has racked up millions of dollars in legal fees over the years as a registered foreign agent of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. There is Kenneth L. Lay, the disgraced former chief executive of Enron. There is also John Deutch, who, as director of central intelligence for President Clinton, famously kept classified materials on an unsecure home computer and, who, as Michael Ledeen will report in his forthcoming book “The War Against the Terror Masters,” deliberately changed the CIA’s priorities so that warning of a potential surprise attack on America was no longer among them.

The Forum for International Policy is on the same floor of the same Washington office building as the Scowcroft Group, and the Forum’s tax return lists the Scowcroft Group as a “related” organization. The Forum and the Scowcroft Group also apparently share some personnel in addition to Mr. Scowcroft himself. The Forum’s August 2001 tax return lists Virginia Lampley as the nonprofit group’s executive vice president and treasurer; Ms. Lampley is also a founding principal and the managing director of the for-profit Scowcroft Group, according to the Scowcroft Group’s Web site. Similarly, Charles A. Gillespie Jr. serves as both a resident senior fellow of the Forum for International Policy and a principal of the Scowcroft Group. Arnold Kanter serves as both a resident senior fellow of the Forum for International Policy and a principal and founding member of the Scowcroft Group. Eric Melby serves as both a senior resident fellow of the Forum for International Policy and a principal and founding member of the Scowcroft Group. Kevin Nealer serves as both a senior resident fellow of the Forum for International Policy and a principal and partner of the Scowcroft Group. Daniel Poneman and Joel Shin also serve both as senior resident fellows of the Forum for International Policy and as “principal members” of the Scowcroft Group, according to the Web sites of the forum and of the Scowcroft Group.

There’s nothing wrong with a charity and a business being closely related. If Mr. Scowcroft prefers when writing op-ed articles to pass himself off as president of the “Forum for International Policy” — without disclosing the close ties between the Forum and the Scowcroft Group, with its unidentified “foreign direct investors” in sectors that include “energy” — well, we suppose that’s his prerogative. But for the New York Times, which made Mr. Scowcroft’s op-ed piece the subject of its lead, front-page news stories for two days running, not to mine this vein, that is a stunning lapse.

Beyond the question of Mr. Scowcroft’s current employer, there is the question of his own track record. He’s been a critic of the moral clarity that President Reagan used to lead America to victory in the Cold War. In one of Mr. Scowcroft’s sections of a book he co-wrote with George H.W. Bush, Mr. Scowcroft writes, “It was my sense that the ‘Evil Empire’ rhetoric had been excessive. It tended to frighten our allies and make support of American leadership of the West more difficult.”

In a January 25, 1987, article he co-wrote in the New York Times Magazine, Mr. Scowcroft compared Mr. Reagan’s tax cuts with the Gipper’s decision to walk out of the Reykjavic summit with the Soviet Union rather than give up on the Star Wars strategic defense initiative. “The decision to undercut the revenue base in 1981 and the decision to trash deterrence in 1986 had certain features in common,” he wrote. “Both leave the country now with huge deficits — political and financial — and require dedication and rebuilding so that the nation can merely return to where it once was.”

Opponents of a war against Saddam Hussein may well ask, why all the focus on Mr. Scowcroft personally, rather than on his argument? The answer is that his argument is so weak that we can only surmise that the main reason anyone is paying attention to it is that Mr. Scowcroft is behind it. In that Thursday Wall Street Journal op-ed, Mr. Scowcroft makes three main discernable claims: First, that “Saddam’s goals have little in common with the terrorists who threaten us, and there is little incentive for him to make common cause with them.” Second, that “Israel would have to expect to be the first casualty” of an American attack on Saddam. And third, that an attack on Iraq would somehow “jeopardize” the American campaign against terrorism.

Now, whatever Saddam’s incentives for making common cause with the terrorists who threaten us, he has already done so — paying the families of Palestinian Arab terrorists the likes of whom have murdered 36 Americans in suicide attacks, sheltering a terrorist on the FBI’s most wanted list for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, observing of September 11 that America was “…reaping the fruits of [its] crimes against humanity.” If the Israelis have so much to fear from the results of an American attack, they have even more to fear from a delay; that is why Prime Minister Sharon’s spokesman told the Associated Press, “Any postponement of an attack on Iraq at this stage will serve no purpose. It will only give him [Saddam] more of an opportunity to accelerate his program of weapons of mass destruction.”

Far from jeopardizing the American campaign against terrorism, an attack on Iraq is an essential part of it. And for those trying to understand why a Bush family friend and adviser would emerge in the middle of a desperate struggle between America and her mortal enemies to suggest backing down from the tasks that need to be undertaken, the place to look is precisely Mr. Scowcroft’s personal bona fides and the commercial interests he has taken on since his years in government service.