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10/26/2005:

"Critics on Iraq Policy Come Out of the Woodwork"

With the continued quagmire in Iraq and the likely indictments of senior Bush administration officials for trying to shore up the shaky rationale for the invasion, one would think that things couldn't get much worse for the administration. But where success has a thousand architects, failure leads to much finger pointing. The administration's latest headache comes from Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff. In a well-publicized recent speech before the New America Foundation, which I attended, Wilkerson lambasted the "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal" that got control of U.S. foreign policy from a president "not versed in international relations and not too much interested either."

Wilkerson's scathing remarks were designed to deflect criticism from his former boss. As one anti-war Republican Senate staff member told me, Wilkerson "summoned his courage about three years too late." The typically politically correct, inside-the-beltway audience was too polite to ask why Powell and Wilkerson didn't resign over the invasion of a foreign nation that they privately opposed.
commondreams.org

Wilkerson: The White House Cabal
In President 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 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."