ST. PAUL, Minn.--The GOP foreign policy message men here are almost as on-message as the Sarah Palin defenders. But at an International Republican Institute Panel today, éminences grises bickered just a little bit about Iran and North Korea. Yet the most revealing moment was when moderator Jim Kolbe, a former Arizona congressman, asked the panelists what they would tell the new president if summoned on his first day to help set priorities. Each recommendation got at a critique conservatives have harbored toward the Bush administration:

• Brent Scowcroft, the über-realist national security adviser to George H.W. Bush (who has been neutral in the McCain-Obama contest) said, “The first thing to deal with is Iraq.” Not surprisingly, stability (not democracy) is the first goal.
• Richard Burt, a senior adviser to the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former ambassador to East Germany, started with the Middle East: “Don’t wait, as did your two predecessors, to work on Israel and Palestine. It won’t transform the strategic situation, but it’ll certainly help, especially with moderates in the region.”
• John Lehman, a former Navy secretary, brought his experience on the 9/11 Commission to bear. “Get your appointees in the top 100 national security slots as soon as possible,” he counseled. “Bush had only 30 percent of the key slots filled on 9/11.”
• Richard Williamson, the special envoy to Sudan and Reagan administration operative, hinted at the Bush bubble described by rebels like Paul O’Neill and John DiIulio: “Listen to a variety of perspectives, and not just from people in government.”
• Pete Hoekstra, the House Intelligence Committee ranking member, insisted that the president should lead. He didn’t say it, but the implication was that, in the post-Iraq years, on issues from North Korea to Libya, he has followed other countries’ diplomatic initiatives.
• Lawrence Eagleburger, Reagan’s secretary of state, thinks that U.S. resources are stretched too thin, and that U.S. foreign policy is too dilettantish: “The United States has spent too much time, resources, and attention on too many plans and needs to reduce its activities internationally. Do we need troops in Haiti, for example?”

Some of these people offered gentle criticism during the Bush era (Scowcroft and, to a lesser extent, Eagleburger expressed doubts about the war; Lehman had a 9/11 Commissioner’s frustrations with the president’s refusal to implement his recommendations), but it’s hard not to wonder: where were these people during the last eight years?