The White House Cabal By Lawrence B. Wilkerson (Colin Powell's Chief Of Staff)

[Booker Floyd]

While I dont intend on posting here much, I think this is worth posting (I dont think it has been posted yet, anyway).

Its a piece written by Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powells chief of staff.  For those eager to discredit anybody who is critical of this president and his administration, Ill remind you that Wilkerson served in this administration from 2002 to 2005.  Its a first-hand account that serves as confirmation for what many of us already know about this administration and how its selfish, petty and illogical management has actually endangered our national security.  Id suggest that those predisposed to instinctively defending this administration actually consider what Wilkerson is saying.  Its my own assumption that this isnt too far off from Colin Powells view of things, its just unfortunate that he didnt do more to change things then and wont speak out more now.

The White House cabal
By Lawrence B. Wilkerson, LAWRENCE B. WILKERSON served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell from 2002 to 2005.


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."

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 Gen. 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.

[Booker Floyd]

Ill also add this, which might have already been posted. ?Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft was National Security Adviser under Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush. ?Some of you might remember reading a 1998 Time feature titled "Why We Didnt Remove Saddam." ?That was an excerpt from the book A World Transformed, written by George Bush and Scowcroft. ?He was critical of this administration prior to invading Iraq, but has stayed relatively quiet until now. ?Unlike the current president, Bush and Scowcroft possessed the foresight and better sense than to stage an Iraqi invasion. ?The Time feature that he and Bush wrote was dead-on in its forecast of the consequences an invasion would bring.  Reading it is similar to reading that New Orleans newspaper article on the effects a hurricane would have on the city.  Virtually every prediction was proven to be true.  This is not a liberal, or even a Democrat speaking out...this is the man who helped design the first Gulf War. ?Neither of these stories seem to have gotten much press in the mainstream media, which some of you actually perceive as "liberal." ?

From "Breaking Ranks: What Turned Brent Scowcroft Against the Bush Administration?", Jeffrey Goldberg, The New Yorker, 31 October 2005

Scowcroft on Iraq and Neocon Idealism

A principal reason that the Bush Administration gave no thought to unseating Saddam was that Brent Scowcroft gave no thought to it. An American occupation of Iraq would be politically and militarily untenable, Scowcroft told Bush. And though the President had employed the rhetoric of moral necessity to make the case for war, Scowcroft said, he would not let his feelings about good and evil dictate the advice he gave the President.

It would have been no problem for America's military to reach Baghdad, he said. The problems would have arisen when the Army entered the Iraqi capital. "At the minimum, we'd be an occupier in a hostile land," he said. "Our forces would be sniped at by guerrillas, and, once we were there, how would we get out? What would be the rationale for leaving? I don't like the term 'exit strategy' -- but what do you do with Iraq once you own it?"

Scowcroft stopped for a moment. We were sitting in the offices of the Scowcroft Group, a consulting firm he heads, in downtown Washington. He appeared to be weighing the consequences of speaking his mind. His speech is generally calibrated not to give offense, especially to the senior Bush and the Bush family. He is eighty and, by most accounts, has been content to cede visibility to the larger personalities with whom he has worked.

James Baker told me that he and Scowcroft got along well in part because Scowcroft let Baker speak for the Administration. I learned from people who know Scowcroft that he finds it painful to be seen as critical of his best friend?s son, but in the course of several interviews prudence several times gave way to impatience. "This is exactly where we are now," he said of Iraq, with no apparent satisfaction. "We own it. And we can't let go. We're getting sniped at. Now, will we win? I think there's a fairchance we'll win. But look at the cost."

The first Gulf War was a success, Scowcroft said, because the President knew better than to set unachievable goals. "I'm not a pacifist," he said. "I believe in the use of force. But there has to be a good reason for using force. And you have to know when to stop using force." Scowcroft does not believe that the promotion of American-style democracy abroad is a sufficiently good reason to use force.

"I thought we ought to make it our duty to help make the world friendlier for the growth of liberal regimes," he said. "You encourage democracy over time, with assistance, and aid, the traditional way. Not how the neocons do it."

The neoconservatives -- the Republicans who argued most fervently for the second Gulf war -- believe in the export of democracy, by violence if that is required, Scowcroft said. "How do the neocons bring democracy to Iraq? You invade, you threaten and pressure, you evangelize." And now, Scowcroft said, America is suffering from the consequences of that brand of revolutionary utopianism. "This was said to be part of the war on terror, but Iraq feeds terrorism," he said.


Scowcroft on Iraq & Israel

In August of 2002, seven months before George W. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq, Scowcroft upset the White House with an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal. The headline read, "DON'T ATTACK SADDAM." Scowcroft would have preferred something more nuanced, he told me, but the words accurately reflected his message.

In the article, he argued that an invasion of Iraq would deflect American attention from the war on terrorism, and that it would do nothing to solve the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, which he has long believed is the primary source of unhappiness in the Middle East. Unlike the current Bush Administration, which is unambiguously pro-Israel, Scowcroft, James Baker, and others associated with the elder George Bush believe that Israel's settlement policies arouse Arab anger, and that American foreign policy should reflect the fact that there are far more Arabs than Israelis in the world.

"The obsession of the region . . . is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," Scowcroft wrote in the Journal. "If we were seen to be turning our back on that bitter conflict -- which the region, rightly or wrongly, perceives to be clearly within our power to resolve -- in order to go after Iraq, there would be an explosion of outrage against us." Scowcroft went on to say that the United States was capable of defeating Saddam's military. "But it would not be a cakewalk. On the contrary, it undoubtedly would be very expensive -- with serious consequences for the U.S. and global economy -- and could as well be bloody. In fact, Saddam would be likely to conclude he had nothing left to lose, leading him to unleash whatever weapons of mass destruction he possesses."


Scowcroft's Frustration Communicating with Bush 43

Like nearly everyone else in Washington, Scowcroft believed that Saddam maintained stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, but he wrote that a strong inspections program would have kept him at bay. "There may have come a time when we would have needed to take Saddam out," he told me. "But he wasn't really a threat. His Army was weak, and the country hadn't recovered from sanctions." Scowcroft's colleagues told me that he would have preferred to deliver his analysis privately to the White House. But Scowcroft, the apotheosis of a Washington insider, was by then definitively on the outside, and there was no one in the White House who would listen to him. On the face of it, this is remarkable: Scowcroft's best friend's son is the President; his friend Dick Cheney is the Vice-President; Condoleezza Rice, who was the national-security adviser, and is now the Secretary of State, was once a Scowcroft protege; and the current national-security adviser, Stephen Hadley, is another protege and a former principal at the Scowcroft Group.

[Booker Floyd]

Scowcroft on Cheney: "The Real Anomaly"

"The real anomaly in the Administration is Cheney," Scowcroft said. "I consider Cheney a good friend -- I've known him for thirty years. But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore." He went on, "I don't think Dick Cheney is a neocon, but allied to the core of neocons is that bunch who thought we made a mistake in the first Gulf War, that we should have finished the job. There was another bunch who were traumatized by 9/11, and who thought, 'The world's going to hell and we've got to show we're not going to take this, and we've got to respond, and Afghanistan is O.K., but it's not sufficient.'" Scowcroft supported the invasion of Afghanistan as a "direct response" to terrorism.

On George W. Bush Not Hearing Dissent or Considering Alternative Views -- With A Nudge from Bush 41

A common criticism of the Administration of George W. Bush is that it ignores ideas that conflict with its aims. "We always made sure the President was hearing all the possibilities," John Sununu, who served as chief of staff to George H. W. Bush, said. "That's one of the differences between the first Bush Administration and this Bush Administration." I asked Colin Powell if he thought, in retrospect, that the Administration should have paid attention to Scowcroft's arguments about Iraq. Powell, who is widely believed to have been far less influential in policymaking than either Cheney or the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, said, pointedly, "I always listen to him. He's a very analytic and thoughtful individual, he's powerful in argument, and I've never worked with a better friend and colleague."

When, in an e-mail, I asked George H.W. Bush about Scowcroft's most useful qualities as a national-security adviser, he replied that Scowcroft "was very good about making sure that we did not simply consider the 'best case,' but instead considered what it would mean if things went our way, and also if they did not."


Bush 41 Unable to Mend Fences Between Bush 43 and Scowcroft

According to friends of the elder Bush, the estrangement of his son and his best friend has been an abiding source of unhappiness, not only for Bush but for Barbara Bush as well. George Bush, the forty-first President, has tried several times to arrange meetings between his son, "Forty-three," and his former national-security adviser to no avail, according to people with knowledge of these intertwined relationships. "There have been occasions when Forty-one has engineered meetings in which Forty-three and Scowcroft are in the same place at the same time, but they were social settings that weren't conducive to talking about substantive issues," a Scowcroft confidant said.

Few Areas of Foreign Policy Agreement Between Scowcroft and George W. Bush

When I asked Scowcroft if the son was different from the father, he said, "I don't want to go there," but his dissatisfaction with the son's agenda could not have been clearer. When I asked him to name issues on which he agrees with the younger Bush, he said, "Afghanistan." He paused for twelve seconds. Finally, he said, "I think we're doing well on Europe," and left it at that.

Scowcroft's Deteriorarting Relationship with Condoleeza Rice

The disintegrating relationship between Scowcroft and Condoleezza Rice has not escaped the notice of their colleagues from the first Bush Administration. She was a political-science professor at Stanford when, in 1989, Scowcroft hired her to serve as a Soviet expert on the National Security Council. Scowcroft found her bright -- "brighter than I was" -- and personable, and he brought her all the way inside, to the Bush family circle. When Scowcroft published his Wall Street Journal article, Rice telephoned him, according to several people with knowledge of the call. "She said, 'How could you do this to us?'" a Scowcroft friend recalled. "What bothered Brent more than Condi yelling at him was the fact that here she is, the national-security adviser, and she's not interested in hearing what a former national-security adviser had to say."


Scowcroft on Rice's Foreign Policy Deficits & Israel Policy

Scowcroft told me that he still has a high regard for Rice. He did note, however, that her "expertise is in the former Soviet Union and Europe. Less on the Middle East." Rice, through a spokesman, said, "Sure, we've had some differences, and that's understandable. But he's a good friend and is going to stay a good friend." Yet the two do not see each other much anymore. According to friends of Scowcroft, Rice has asked him to call her to set up a dinner, but he has not, apparently, pursued the invitation. The last time the two had dinner, nearly two years ago, it ended unhappily, Scowcroft acknowledged.

"We were having dinner just when Sharon said he was going to pull out of Gaza," at the end of 2003. "She said, 'At least there's some good news,' and I said, 'That's terrible news.' She said, 'What do you mean?' And I said that for Sharon this is not the first move, this is the last move. He's getting out of Gaza because he can't sustain eight thousand settlers with half his Army protecting them. Then, when he's out, he will have an Israel that he can control and a Palestinian state atomized enough that it can?t be a problem." Scowcroft added, "We had a terrible fight on that."

They also argued about Iraq. "She says we're going to democratize Iraq, and I said, 'Condi, you're not going to democratize Iraq,' and she said, 'You know, you're just stuck in the old days,' and she comes back to this thing that we've tolerated an autocratic Middle East for fifty years and so on and so forth," he said. Then a barely perceptible note of satisfaction entered his voice, and he said, "But we've had fifty years of peace."

[Booker Floyd]

Scowcroft's Realism on the Middle East

Scowcroft is unmoved by the stirrings of democracy movements in the Middle East. He does not believe, for instance, that the signs of a democratic awakening in Lebanon are related to the Iraq war. He sees the recent evacuation of the Syrian Army from Lebanon not as a victory for self-government but as a foreshadowing of civil war. "I think it's something we have to worry about -- the sectarian emotions that were there when the Syrians went in aren't gone."

Scowcroft and those who share his views believe that the reality of life in Iraq at the moment is undermining the neoconservative agenda. Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who served as Colin Powell's chief policy planner during the first Bush Administration (and who was Scowcroft's Middle East expert on the National Security Council during the first Gulf War) said that the days of armed idealism are over. "We've seen the ideological high-water mark," he said. "I mean wars of choice, and unilateralism, and by that I mean an emphasis, almost to the point of exclusion of everything else, on regime change as opposed to diplomacy aimed at policy change."


Scowcroft on Wolfowitz

One day, I mentioned to Scowcroft an interview I had had with Paul Wolfowitz, when he was Donald Rumsfeld's deputy. Wolfowitz was the leading neoconservative thinker in the senior ranks of the current Bush Administration. (He is now the president of the World Bank.) I asked him what he would think if previously autocratic Arab countries held free elections and then proceeded to vote Islamists into power. Wolfowitz answered, "Look, fifty per cent of the Arab world are women. Most of those women do not want to live in a theocratic state. The other fifty per cent are men. I know a lot of them. I don't think they want to live in a theocratic tate."

Scowcroft said of Wolfowitz, "He's got a utopia out there. We're going to transform the Middle East, and then there won't be war anymore. He can make them democratic. He is a tough-minded idealist, but where he is truly an idealist is that he brushes away questions, says, 'It won't happen,' whereas I would say, 'It's likely to happen and therefore you can't take the chance.' Paul's idealism sweeps away doubts."

Wolfowitz, for his part, said to me, "It's absurdly unrealistic, demonstrably unrealistic, to ignore how strong the desire for freedom is." Scowcroft said that he is equally concerned about Wolfowitz's unwillingness to contemplate bad outcomes and Kagan's willingness to embrace them on principle. "What the realist fears is the consequences of idealism," he said. "The reason I part with the neocons is that I don't think in any reasonable time frame the objective of democratizing the Middle East can be successful. If you can do it, fine, but I don't think you can, and in the process of trying to do it you can make the Middle East a lot worse."

He added, "I'm a realist in the sense that I'm a cynic about human nature."


An Odd Exchange with Sharansky: Insight into Bush 43's Views of his Father

In September, Sharansky was in Washington at the invitation of Condoleeza Rice; he gave the closing speech at a State Department conference on democratization. "Can you believe it?" he said to me just before the session. "Rice gave the opening speech and I give the closing?" Of his complicated relations with the Bush family, he said, "A few days after my book comes out, I get a call from the White House. 'The President wants to see you.' So I go to the White House and I see my book on his desk. It is open to page 210. He is really reading it. And we talk about democracy.

This President is very great on democracy. At the end of the conversation, I say, 'Say hello to your mother and father.' And he said, 'My father?' He looked very surprised I would say this.? Sharansky went on, "So I say to the President, 'I like your father. He is very good to my wife when I am in prison.' And President Bush says, 'But what about Chicken Kiev?'"

Sharansky smiled as he recounted this story. "The President looked around the room and said, 'Who is responsible for that Chicken Kiev speech? Find out who wrote it. Who is responsible?' Everyone laughed." Sharansky paused, and looked at me intently. He had a broad grin. "I know who wrote Chicken Kiev speech," he said. "It was Scowcroft!"

Scowcroft may have had a hand in the speech, but when I asked George H.W. Bush about it he answered as if it had been his own idea. ?I got hammered on the Kiev speech by the right wing and some in the press, but in retrospect I think the Baltic countries understood that we were being cautious vis-a-vis the Soviet Union," Bush said. "And their freedoms were established without a shot being fired."

You can find the whole article in the New Yorker.

[Booker Floyd]

And finally, the article that I mentioned...from the March 2, 1998 Time:

Why We Didn't Remove Saddam

George Bush and Brent Scowcroft

The end of effective Iraqi resistance came with a rapidity which surprised us all, and we were perhaps psychologically unprepared for the sudden transition from fighting to peacemaking. True to the guidelines we had established, when we had achieved our strategic objectives (ejecting Iraqi forces from Kuwait and eroding Saddam's threat to the region) we stopped the fighting. But the necessary limitations placed on our objectives, the fog of war, and the lack of "battleship Missouri" surrender unfortunately left unresolved problems, and new ones arose.

We were disappointed that Saddam's defeat did not break his hold on power, as many of our Arab allies had predicted and we had come to expect. President Bush repeatedly declared that the fate of Saddam Hussein was up to the Iraqi people. Occasionally, he indicated that removal of Saddam would be welcome, but for very practical reasons there was never a promise to aid an uprising. While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the U.S. nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf. Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome.

We discussed at length forcing Saddam himself to accept the terms of Iraqi defeat at Safwan--just north of the Kuwait-Iraq border--and thus the responsibility and political consequences for the humiliation of such a devastating defeat. In the end, we asked ourselves what we would do if he refused. We concluded that we would be left with two options: continue the conflict until he backed down, or retreat from our demands. The latter would have sent a disastrous signal. The former would have split our Arab colleagues from the coalition and, de facto, forced us to change our objectives. Given those unpalatable choices, we allowed Saddam to avoid personal surrender and permitted him to send one of his generals. Perhaps we could have devised a system of selected punishment, such as air strikes on different military units, which would have proved a viable third option, but we had fulfilled our well-defined mission; Safwan was waiting.

As the conflict wound down, we felt a sense of urgency on the part of the coalition Arabs to get it over with and return to normal. This meant quickly withdrawing U.S. forces to an absolute minimum. Earlier there had been some concern in Arab ranks that once they allowed U.S. forces into the Middle East, we would be there to stay. Saddam's propaganda machine fanned these worries. Our prompt withdrawal helped cement our position with our Arab allies, who now trusted us far more than they ever had. We had come to their assistance in their time of need, asked nothing for ourselves, and left again when the job was done. Despite some criticism of our conduct of the war, the Israelis too had their faith in us solidified. We had shown our ability--and willingness--to intervene in the Middle East in a decisive way when our interests were challenged. We had also crippled the military capability of one of their most bitter enemies in the region. Our new credibility (coupled with Yasser Arafat's need to redeem his image after backing the wrong side in the war) had a quick and substantial payoff in the form of a Middle East peace conference in Madrid.

The Gulf War had far greater significance to the emerging post-cold war world than simply reversing Iraqi aggression and restoring Kuwait. Its magnitude and significance impelled us from the outset to extend our strategic vision beyond the crisis to the kind of precedent we should lay down for the future. From an American foreign-policymaking perspective, we sought to respond in a manner which would win broad domestic support and which could be applied universally to other crises. In international terms, we tried to establish a model for the use of force. First and foremost was the principle that aggression cannot pay. If we dealt properly with Iraq, that should go a long way toward dissuading future would-be aggressors. We also believed that the U.S. should not go it alone, that a multilateral approach was better. This was, in part, a practical matter. Mounting an effective military counter to Iraq's invasion required the backing and bases of Saudi Arabia and other Arab states.

[Surfrider]

Is this really anything new?  I think it is pretty much well-known that Bush listened to Cheney and Rumsfeld more than he did to Powell.  Sure it was a mistake in hindsight, but I am sure all presidents listen to some more than others.

I also think it is absurd to claim that Congress has any say (as his piece seems to claim talking about passage of the 1947 NSA Act) over what process the President must use when making decisions.  Our country has something known as "separation of powers", and Congress can't pre-set the procedure that the President must use in making his decisions.  Look at JFK, he was well-known for only confiding in a few, including his brother.