@@ White House JEW cabal: Colonel Wilkerson @@
Arash
October 25, 2005
The White House cabal
Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin L.
Powell from 2002 to 2005.
By Lawrence B. Wilkerson
In Bush's first term, some of the most important decisions about U.S. national
security — including vital decisions about postwar Iraq — were made by a secretive,
little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice
President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
When I first discussed this group in a speech last week
(http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/001020.html) at the New American
Foundation in Washington, my comments caused a significant stir because I had been
chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell between 2002 and 2005.
But it's absolutely true. I believe that the decisions of this cabal were sometimes
made with the full and witting support of the president and sometimes with something
less. More often than not, then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice was simply
steamrolled by this cabal.
Its insular and secret workings were efficient and swift — not unlike the
decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy. This
furtive process was camouflaged neatly by the dysfunction and inefficiency of the
formal decision-making process, where decisions, if they were reached at all, had to
wend their way through the bureaucracy, with its dissenters, obstructionists and
"guardians of the turf".
But the secret process was ultimately a failure. It produced a series of disastrous
decisions and virtually ensured that the agencies charged with implementing them
would not or could not execute them well.
I watched these dual decision-making processes operate for four years at the State
Department. As chief of staff for 27 months, I had a door adjoining the secretary of
State's office. I read virtually every document he read. I read the intelligence
briefings and spoke daily with people from all across government.
I knew that what I was observing was not what Congress intended when it passed the
1947 National Security Act. The law created the National Security Council —
consisting of the president, vice president and the secretaries of State and
Defense — to make sure the nation's vital national security decisions were thoroughly
vetted. The NSC has often been expanded, depending on the president in office, to
include the CIA director, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Treasury
secretary and others, and it has accumulated a staff of sometimes more than 100
people.
But many of the most crucial decisions from 2001 to 2005 were not made within the
traditional NSC process.
Scholars and knowledgeable critics of the U.S. decision-making process may rightly
say, so what? Haven't all of our presidents in the last half-century failed to
conform to the usual process at one time or another? Isn't it the president's
prerogative to make decisions with whomever he pleases? Moreover, can he not ignore
whomever he pleases? Why should we care that President Bush gave over much of the
critical decision-making to his vice president and his secretary of Defense?
Both as a former academic and as a person who has been in the ring with the bull, I
believe that there are two reasons we should care. First, such departures from the
process have in the past led us into a host of disasters, including the last years of
the Vietnam War, the national embarrassment of Watergate (and the first resignation
of a president in our history), the Iran-Contra scandal and now the ruinous foreign
policy of George W. Bush.
But a second and far more important reason is that the nature of both governance and
crisis has changed in the modern age.
From managing the environment to securing sufficient energy resources, from dealing
with trafficking in human beings to performing peacekeeping missions abroad,
governing is vastly more complicated than ever before in human history.
Further, the crises the U.S. government confronts today are so multifaceted, so
complex, so fast-breaking — and almost always with such incredible potential for
regional and global ripple effects — that to depart from the systematic
decision-making process laid out in the 1947 statute invites disaster.
Discounting the professional experience available within the federal bureaucracy —
and ignoring entirely the inevitable but often frustrating dissent that often arises
therein — makes for quick and painless decisions. But when government agencies are
confronted with decisions in which they did not participate and with which they
frequently disagree, their implementation of those decisions is fractured,
uncoordinated and inefficient. This is particularly the case if the bureaucracies
called upon to execute the decisions are in strong competition with one another over
scarce money, talented people, "turf" or power.
It takes firm leadership to preside over the bureaucracy. But it also takes a
willingness to listen to dissenting opinions. It requires leaders who can analyze,
synthesize, ponder and decide.
The administration's performance during its first four years would have been even
worse without Powell's damage control. At least once a week, it seemed, Powell
trooped over to the Oval Office and cleaned all the dog poop off the carpet. He held
a youthful, inexperienced president's hand. He told him everything would be all right
because he, the secretary of State, would fix it. And he did — everything from a
serious crisis with China when a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft was struck by a Chinese
F-8 fighter jet in April 2001, to the secretary's constant reassurances to European
leaders following the bitter breach in relations over the Iraq war. It wasn't enough,
of course, but it helped.
Today, we have a president whose approval rating is 38% and a vice president who
speaks only to Rush Limbaugh and assembled military forces. We have a secretary of
Defense presiding over the death-by-a-thousand-cuts of our overstretched armed forces
(no surprise to ignored dissenters such as former Army Chief of Staff General Eric
Shinseki or former Army Secretary Thomas White).
It's a disaster. Given the choice, I'd choose a frustrating bureaucracy over an
efficient cabal every time.
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