How Scary Is This?
rc...@mailinator.com
by Bob Herbert
The New York Times
October 24, 2005
The White House is sweating out the possibility that one or more top
officials will soon be indicted on criminal charges. But the Bush
administration is immune to prosecution for its greatest offense - its
colossal and profoundly tragic incompetence.
Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as chief of staff
to
Secretary of State Colin Powell, addressed the administration's
arrogance
and ineptitude in a talk last week that was astonishingly candid by
Washington standards.
"We have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran," said Mr.
Wilkerson. "Generally, with regard to domestic crises like Katrina,
Rita ...
we haven't done very well on anything like that in a long time. And if
something comes along that is truly serious, something like a nuclear
weapon
going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic,
you
are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will
take
you back to the Declaration of Independence."
The investigation of Karl Rove, Scooter Libby et al. is the most
sensational
story coming out of Washington at the moment. But the story with the
gravest
implications for the U.S. and the world is the overall dysfunction of
the
Bush regime. This is a bomb going "Tick, tick, tick . . ." What is the
next
disaster that this crowd will be unprepared to cope with? Or the next
lunatic idea that will spring from its ideological bag of tricks?
Mr. Wilkerson gave his talk before an audience at the New America
Foundation, an independent public policy institute. On the
all-important
matter of national security, which many voters had seen as the strength
of
the administration, Mr. Wilkerson said:
"The case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never
seen
in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes
to the
national security decision-making process. 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."
When the time came to implement the decisions, said Mr. Wilkerson, they
were
"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."
Where was the president? According to Mr. Wilkerson, "You've got this
collegiality there between the secretary of defense and the vice
president,
and you've got a president who is not versed in international relations
and
not too much interested in them either."
One of the consequences of this dysfunction, as I have noted many
times, is
the unending parade of dead or badly wounded men and women returning to
the
U.S. from the war in Iraq - a war that the administration foolishly
launched
but now does not know how to win or end.
Mr. Wilkerson was especially critical of the excessive secrecy that
surrounded so many of the most important decisions by the Bush
administration, and of what he felt was a general policy of
concentrating
too much power in the hands of a small group of insiders. As much as
possible, government in the United States is supposed to be open and
transparent, and a fundamental principle is that decision-making should
be
subjected to a robust process of checks and balances.
While not "evaluating the decision to go to war," Mr. Wilkerson told
his
audience that under the present circumstances "we can't leave Iraq. We
simply can't." In his view, if American forces were to pull out too
quickly,
the U.S. would end up returning to the Middle East with "five million
men
and women under arms" within a decade.
Nevertheless, he is appalled at the way the war was launched and
conducted,
and outraged by "the detainee abuse issue." In 10 years, he said, when
this
matter is "put to the acid test, ironed out, and people have looked at
it
from every angle, we are going to be ashamed of what we allowed to
happen."
Mr. Wilkerson said he has taken some heat for speaking out, but feels
that
"as a citizen of this great republic," he has an obligation to do so.
If
nothing is done about the current state of affairs, he said, "it's
going to
get even more dangerous than it already is."