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By BOB HERBERT
Published: 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.
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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."
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The Right One
"Peter White" <pe...@white.dot> wrote in message
news:vlZ6f.113078$Ph4.3...@ursa-nb00s0.nbnet.nb.ca...
> How Scary Is This?
>
It's getting close to halloween and Peter thinks he is scary?
--
Terry Pearson
http://www.rightpoint.org
http://www.cafepress.com/6272.10146499
Liberal Response To Spending Scandals
"We were only following treasury board guidlines."
Paul Martin's response:
"I know nothing"
Svend Robinson is a prime example
that the liberal left's allurement to
homosexuality has gotten them to
the point where they turn a blind eye
towards crime and corruption!
notritenoteri
"The Right One" <righ...@Alberta.usa> wrote in message
news:z507f.287621$tl2.191934@pd7tw3no...
>
> It's getting close to halloween and Peter thinks he is scary?
> --
> Terry Pearson