Foreign policy expert Steve Clemons, whose blog The Washington Note served as a forum in the John Bolton UN nomination debacle, has once again done a great service to the country by hosting the appearance of former State Dept. chief of staff Col. Lawrence Wilkerson at his New America Foundation. In his speech Wilkerson blew the lid off the Cheney-Rumsfeld "Cabal" he witnessed while serving former Secretary of State Colin Powell. The Financial TImes has a good summary of Wilkerson’s remarks.
Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government’s foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed on Wednesday.
In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, 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.
“Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences.”
[…]
Among his other charges:
■ The detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere was “a concrete example” of the decision-making problem, with the president and other top officials in effect giving the green light to soldiers to abuse detainees. “You don’t have this kind of pervasive attitude out there unless you’ve condoned it.”
■ Condoleezza Rice, the former national security adviser and now secretary of state, was “part of the problem”. Instead of ensuring that Mr Bush received the best possible advice, “she would side with the president to build her intimacy with the president”.
You can read the complete transcript of Wilkerson’s speech and the Q-A that followed on Clemons’ blog. I can only say that I wish Wilkerson had come forward before the Iraq invasion with his observations about the cabal. Loyalty to his boss Colin Powell prevented him from doing so, but the nation is much worse off because of his reticence.
