WASHINGTON - As top officials in the White
House and Vice President Dick Cheney's office
await possible criminal indictments for their
efforts to discredit a whistle-blower, a top aide
to former secretary of state, Colin Powell, on
Wednesday accused a "cabal" led by Cheney and
Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld of hijacking US
foreign policy by circumventing or ignoring formal
decision-making channels.
Lawrence
Wilkerson, a retired colonel, also charged that,
as national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice was
"part of the problem" by not ensuring that the
policy-making process was open to all relevant
participants. Wilkerson served as Powell's chief
of staff from 2001 to 2005 and when Powell was
chairman of the joint chiefs of staff of the US
Armed Forces during the
administration of
former president, George H W Bush.
"In
some cases, there was real dysfunctionality," said
Wilkerson, who spoke at the New America Foundation
(NAF), a prominent Washington think tank. "But in
most cases ... she made a decision that she would
side with the president to build her intimacy with
the president."
"The case that I saw for
four-plus years was a case that I have never seen
in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations and
perturbations in the national-security
[policy-making] process," he said.
"What I
saw was a cabal between the vice president of the
United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary
of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues
that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not
know were being made."
Wilkerson also
stressed the "extremely powerful" influence of
what he called the "Oval Office cabal" of Cheney
and Rumsfeld, both former secretaries of defense
with a long-standing personal and professional
relationship.
He said they both were
members of the "military-industrial complex" that
former president, Dwight Eisenhower, warned the
nation against in his 1961 farewell address.
Wilkerson's remarks come as the
administration is besieged by record-low approval
ratings and anticipation that a special prosecutor
will hand down indictments of top aides to both
Bush and Cheney, including President George W
Bush's political adviser, Karl Rove, and Cheney's
chief of staff, I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, in
connection with efforts to discredit retired
ambassador Joseph Wilson.
In July 2003,
Wilson publicly challenged the administration's
pre-war depiction of Iraq's alleged
nuclear-weapons program, and particularly its
assertion that Baghdad had sought to buy uranium
yellow cake from Niger, an assertion that Wilson
himself investigated and rejected in early 2002
after traveling to Niger as part of a Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) mission. White House
officials, including Rove and Libby, told
reporters that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA
and had played a role in selecting him for the
mission.
On Wednesday, Capitol Hill was
rife with rumors that Cheney himself may also be
indicted or resign over the scandal. They were
given more credence by an anecdote recounted by
the insider Nelson Report on Wednesday night that
Powell had told a prominent Republican senator
that Cheney had become "fixated" on the
relationship between Wilson and his wife, Valerie
Plame, after he and Bush learned about it directly
from Powell.
Since his departure from the
administration, Powell has declined to publicly
criticize US policy or his former cabinet
colleagues. Until now, Wilkerson has also kept his
counsel, although he publicly opposed John
Bolton's confirmation as UN ambassador. At that
time, most analysts believed that Wilkerson
reflected Powell's private views on Bolton.
That would not be surprising, as Wilkerson
worked directly with or for Powell for some 16
years out of their 30-year-plus military and
government careers. At the same time, Wilkerson
said he had paid a "high cost" in his personal
relationship with Powell for publicly speaking
out.
"Wilkerson embodies Powell and
[Powell's deputy secretary of state, Richard]
Armitage," who is also a retired military officer,
said Steve Clemons, who organized Wilkerson's NAF
appearance. "That's how his remarks should be
seen."
If so, it appears that Powell and
Armitage have little but disdain for Rice's
performance as national security adviser, although
Wilkerson was more complimentary about her
subsequent work at the State Department and the
relative success she has enjoyed in steering US
policy in a less-confrontational direction
compared to the frustrations that dogged Powell.
Wilkerson attributed her success to
several factors, including her "intimacy with the
president" and the fact that the administration
"finds itself in some fairly desperate straits
politically and otherwise".
Most of his
remarks, however, addressed what he described as a
national-security policy-making apparatus that was
made dysfunctional by secrecy,
compartmentalization and distrust, as well as the
machinations of the Cheney-Rumsfeld "cabal".
"You've got this collegiality there
between the secretary of defense and the vice
president," Wilkerson said. "And then you've got a
president who is not versed in international
relations - and not too much interested in them
either. And so it's not too difficult to make
decisions in this, what I call the Oval Office
cabal, and decisions often that are the opposite
of what you thought were made in the formal
[decision-making] process.
"Why did we
wait three years to talk to the North Koreans? Why
did we wait four-plus years to at least back the
EU-3 [Germany, France and Britain] approach to
Iran?... The formal process ... camouflaged the
efficiency of the secret decision-making process.
So we got into Iraq.
"And then when the
bureaucracy was presented with those decisions and
carried them out, it was presented in such a
disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy
often didn't know what it was doing as it moved to
carry them out.
"If you're not prepared to
stop the feuding elements in the bureaucracy as
they carry out your decisions, you are courting
disaster. And I would say that we have courted
disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran."
Wilkerson was particularly scathing about
the former under secretary of defense for policy,
Douglas Feith, citing (retired general) Tommy
Frank's famous description of the neo-conservative
ideologue as the "f...ing stupidest guy on the
planet". "Let me testify to that," he said.
"He was. Seldom in my life have I met a dumber
man. And yet, and yet, after the [Pentagon is
given] control, at least in the immediate post-war
period in Iraq, this man is put in charge. Not
only is he put in charge, he is given carte
blanche to tell the State Department to go screw
themselves in a closet somewhere ... That's
telling you how decisions were made and ... how
things got accomplished."
He also
denounced the abuse of detainees and said that
Powell was particularly upset by it. "Ten years
from now, when we have the whole story, we are
going to be ashamed," he said. "This is not us.
This is not the way we do business. I don't think
in our history we've ever had a presidential
involvement, a secretarial involvement, a vice
presidential involvement, an attorney general's
involvement in telling our troops essentially,
'Carte blanche is the way you should feel. You
should not have any qualms because this is a
different kind of conflict'.
"You don't
have this kind of pervasive attitude out there
unless you've condoned it," he said, adding. "It
will take years to reverse the situation within
the military." He said it was a "concrete example"
of the result of the way the cabal worked.
Wilkerson also contrasted Bush's diplomacy
very unfavorably with his father's. Referring to
Bush's first meeting with former South Korean
president, Kim Dae-jung, Wilkerson noted, "When
you put your feet up on a hassock and look at the
man who's won the Nobel Prize and is currently
president of South Korea and tell him in a very
insulting way that you don't agree with his
assessment of what is necessary to be reconciled
with the North, that's not diplomacy; that's
cowboyism."
"It's very different when you
walk in and find something you can be magnanimous
about, that you can give him, that you can say he
or she gets credit, that's diplomacy. You don't
say, 'I'm the big mother on the block and
everybody who's not with me is against me'. That's
the difference between father and son."
At
the same time, Bush had been "wonderful" in
"putting his foot down" against a more aggressive
policy on North Korea, at one point saying,
according to Wilkerson, "I do not want a war on
the Korean peninsula."
"That was very
helpful, very helpful," said Wilkerson. "It helped
us fight off some less desirable results."
Cheney, he said, was a "good executive" as
defense secretary under George H W Bush, but
appeared to change as a result of September 11. "I
think [he] saw 9/11 and the potential for another
9/11 with nuclear weapons and suddenly became so
fixated on that problem that it skewed his
approach," Wilkerson said, adding that neither he
nor Rumsfeld could be considered
neo-conservatives.
On Iraq, he said he was
"guardedly optimistic" because "we may have
reached the point where we are actually listening
to the Iraqis". US troops will likely have to
remain in Iraq for between five to eight years,
however, because "it is strategic in the sense
that Vietnam was not". He predicted that a
precipitous withdrawal "without leaving something
behind we can trust, we will mobilize the nation,
with 5 million men and women under arms to go back
and take the Middle East within a decade", due to
the US dependence on the region's energy sources.
