The White House cabal

[Black Dog]

Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, cast some light on the inner workings of the Bush administration with a number of recent statements, including a speech to the New America Foundation and this commentary in the LA Times.

Fascinating stuff here.

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 America 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."

[theloniusfleabag]

Dear Black Dog,

Interesting indeed. Many of these guys go wayyy back, Rumsfeld was In Ford's administration back in the 70's, when G. H. W. Bush was director of the CIA.

http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/usa/donald-rumsfeld/

In 1962, Rumsfeld won a long-shot run for the House, where he distinguished himself as a liberal Republican with his support for civil rights. After Goldwater's defeat in 1964, Rumsfeld helped lead a block of moderate Republicans to install Gerald Ford as minority leader. He joined the Nixon administration in 1969, serving in a series of non-criminal positions including economic advisor and ambassador to NATO (although he did appear on a few tapes).

When Nixon went up in flames, Rumsfeld came in to help pick up the pieces, first as Ford's chief of staff and later in his first stint as Defense Secretary. In 1977, he was awarded the prestigious Presidential Medal of Freedom for not fucking up too much while executing these important positions.

Rumsfeld might have been a moderate compared to Barry Goldwater, but over the years, his political profile moved to the right, whether as a function of relativity or driven by a actual change in attitude. Illustrative of this point, legend has it that Henry Kissinger describes Rumsfeld as the most ruthless man he ever met (and this is a guy who met Mao Tse-Tung and Augusto Pinochet, not to mention himself).

Cheney was evidently hand-picked by Rumsfeld, as a 'team player'. More of their zany antics can be read about in "The Commanders", by Bob Woodward. It covers the first 'Gulf War', and the illegal invasion of Panama.

[Toro]

I understand the White House has DirectTV.

[tml12]

I understand the White House has DirectTV.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

hahaha...

but seriously rumsfeld is more right wing than i thought!!!

[theloniusfleabag]

Speaking of 'going way back', these guys were involved in a little more than I thought. From "The Commanders", by Bob Woodward pg 35 (a good book but with a couple of glaring omissions),

...Congressman Cheney's pet issues. One was aid to the Nicaraguan Contras, a cause Cheney cared deeply and emotionally about;he believed that Nicaragua was another Cuba in the making, and that the Sandinista regime had to be dislodged from the hemisphere."

Looks like Bush Sr., Rumsfeld and Cheney all met while under Nixon/Ford Admins.

from...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2000/081400a4.html

Bush left Congress to run for Senate in 1970, but lost to Lloyd Bentson. He then went on to work for the Nixon and Ford administrations until 1977. When Jimmy Carter became president, Bush found himself temporarily out of politics. With the elder George Bush briefly on the political sidelines, his oldest son, George W. Bush, began building an oil/politics nexus of his own

[Montgomery Burns]

Black Dog: Fascinating stuff here.

Indeed, his oped in the LA Times is fascinating:

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.

A shadowy hidden secretive little-known cabal of senior officeholders like the VP of the USA and the Secretary of Defense were making administration policy. I'm shocked to hear this!

I also found his speech (from your other link) to be fascinating stuff:

I can’t tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits and us thought that most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the U.N. on 5 February 2003 was the truth.

Bush lied, Uday and Kusay died!

INR dissented that the nuclear program was up and running. That’s all INR dissented on. They were right there with the chems and the bios.

[saddam] was going to wait until the international tension was off of him, until the sanctions were down, and then he was going to go back – certainly go back to all of his programs. I mean, I was convinced of that.

The consensus of the intelligence community was overwhelming.

The French came in in the middle of my deliberations at the CIA and said, we have just spun aluminum tubes, and by god, we did it to this RPM, et cetera, et cetera, and it was all, you know, proof positive that the aluminum tubes were not for mortar casings or artillery casings, they were for centrifuges.

I don’t think Dick Cheney is driven by ideology. I don’t think Donald Rumsfeld is.

But but but....what about the "neocon cabal"?

I’m guardedly optimistic about what’s happening there now.

Obviously Wilkerson hasn't been listening to the MSM media and the far left.

It's a disaster over there. It is a QUAGMIRE!

I believe that this is strategic in a sense that Vietnam was not.

Thanks for posting this topic, BD.

[Black Dog]

I also found his speech (from your other link) to be fascinating stuff:

Read George Packer’s book, “The Assassin’s Gate,” if you haven’t already.  George Packer, a New Yorker – reporter for the New Yorker, has got it right.  I just finished it, and I usually put marginalia in a book, but let me tell you, I had to get extra pages to write on.  (Laughter.)  And I wish I had been able to help George Packer write that book.  In some places I could have given him a hell of a lot more specifics than he’s got.  (Laughter.) But if you want to read how the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal flummoxed the process, read that book.  And of course there are other names in there: Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, whom most of you probably know Tommy Franks said was the stupidest blankety, blank man in the world.  He was.  (Laughter.)  Let me testify to that.  He was.  Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man.  (Laughter.)  And yet – and yet – and yet, after the secretary of State agrees to a $40 billion department rather than a $30 billion department having control, at least in the immediate post-war period in Iraq, this man is put in charge.  Not only is he put in charge, he is given carte blanche to tell the State Department to go screw itself in a closet somewhere.  Now, that’s not making excuses for the State Department; that’s telling you how decisions were made and telling you how things got accomplished.

Well, Saddam Hussein really cared about deterring the Persians – the Iranians – and his own people.  He didn’t give a hang about us except on occasion.  And so he had to convince those audiences that he still was a powerful man.  So who better to do that through than the INC, Ahmad Chalabi and his boys, and by spoofing our eyes in the sky and our little HUMINT, and the Brits and the French and the Germans, too.  That’s all I can figure. 

But he was a "sworn enemy" of the United States!?

We were wrong.  We were wrong. 

The other thing that no one ever likes to talk about is SUVs and oil and consumption and, as one little girl said yesterday at the Yoshiyama Awards, do you know that we consume 60 percent of the world’s resources?  We do; we consume 60 percent of the world’s resources.  Well, we have an economy and we have a society that is built on the consumption of those resources.  We better get fast at work changing the foundation – and I don’t see us fast at work on that, by the way, another failure of this administration, in my mind – or we better be ready to take those assets.  We had a discussion in policy planning about actually mounting an operation to take the oilfields in the Middle East, internationalize them, put them under some sort of U.N. trusteeship and administer the revenues and the oil accordingly.  That’s how serious we thought about it.

If you want those resources and you want governments that aren’t inimical to your interests with regard to those resources, then you better pay attention to the area and you better not leave it in a mess.

But it was never about oil, was it?

There was simply no plan, other than humanitarian assistance and a few other things like protection of oil and so forth, with regard to post-war Iraq.  There was no plan.

So if you’re unilaterally declaring Kyoto dead, if you’re declaring the Geneva Convention is not operative, if you’re doing a host of things that the world doesn’t agree with you on and you’re doing them blatantly and in their face – as I said before, without grace – then you’ve got to pay the consequences, and the consequences are your public diplomacy people have a really tough job

Why do they hate our freedoms?

[Montgomery Burns]

George Packer asks the question "Why did the US invade Iraq?" and pretends not to know the answer. It is widely known that officials in the Bush administration have always been in support of enforcing the 12 years of broken ceasefires and 17 broken UN resolutions.

Colin Powell's right-hand man has launched a blistering attack on the White House, describing President George W Bush as "cowboyish", his secretary of state Condoleezza Rice as "extremely weak"

Yep. That weak-kneed pacifist Condi Rice. Nice to see the State Dep't girlie boys get their panties in a bunch. American diplomats have forgotten that they serve US interests in general and the President in particular.

"You've got a president who is not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either."

Good...it's about time.

And as a result, we have voting and freedom in parts of the Middle East (Iraq and Afghanistan) unparralled in history...with the very real prospect that the freedoms wil take firm root there, thrive, prosper, and become strong enough to stand on their own.

If that's this particular individual's idea of "sh*t" (with all due respect to the Colonel)...well then, pile on the manure.

Wilkerson previously told reporters that Bolton would make an "abyssmal" UN Ambassador.

Wilkerson said the Secretary of State had spent much of his time doing damage control around the world for the actions of his colleagues.

Mr Wilkerson attacked those he said were making cavalier decisions about sending men and women out to die.

He compared the Deputy Defence Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, to the Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin, describing them both as Utopians.

"When all you use is a stick," he pointed out, "you're not going to get too far."

On the US policy towards Cuba, it was the "dumbest policy on the face of the earth," he said. "It's crazy."

Larry Wilkerson, claims to have had a falling out with him (Powell) over his unwillingess to go public about the neocon "cabal".   Powell’s chief of staff Larry Wilkerson says the US sanctions policy against countries such as Pakistan and Cuba is "the dumbest policy on the face of the Earth".  As Colin Powell's right-hand man at the State Department, Larry Wilkerson seethed quietly during President Bush's first term. Yesterday, Colonel Wilkerson made up for lost time.

He said the vice president and the secretary of defense created a "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal" that hijacked U.S. foreign policy. He said of former defense undersecretary Douglas Feith: "Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man."

And how about Karen Hughes's efforts to boost the country's image abroad? "It's hard to sell [manure]," Wilkerson said, quoting an Egyptian friend.

" If there is a nuclear terrorist attack or a major pandemic, Wilkerson continued, "you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that'll take you back to the Declaration of Independence."

He blamed Rice for dropping her role as honest broker to "build her intimacy with the president." And he blamed whoever gave Feith "carte blanche to tell the State Department to go screw itself."

He said top officials "condoned" prisoner abuse and left the Army "truly in bad shape."

"You and I and every other citizen like us is paying the consequences," he said, "whether it was a response to Katrina that was less than adequate certainly, or the situation in Iraq which still goes unexplained."

Another leftwing weenie who wants to blame America for daring to show up the rest of the world..

It does get old. *yawn*

But thanks again to BD for posting this.