Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, gives us his observations in four years working at State (partial transcript here).
"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."Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences."
Mr Wilkerson said such secret decision-making was responsible for mistakes such as the long refusal to engage with North Korea or to back European efforts on Iran.
It also resulted in bitter battles in the administration among those excluded from the decisions.
"If you're not prepared to stop the feuding elements in the bureaucracy as they carry out your decisions, you are courting disaster. And I would say that we have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran."
The comments, made at the New America Foundation, a Washington think-tank, were the harshest attack on the administration by a former senior official since criticisms by Richard Clarke, former White House terrorism czar, and Paul O'Neill, former Treasury secretary, early last year.
Wilkerson's a former lecturer at the Naval and Marine War Colleges, so he had both an academic and an operational view of the Bush White House and its conduct of foreign policy. Those are pretty good credentials, to my taste. He continues:
But fundamental decisions about foreign policy should not be made in secret. Let me tell you the practical reason and here I’m jumping over in, really into both realms. The practical reasons why it’s true.You’ve probably all read books on leadership, 7 Habits of Successful People, or whatever. If you, as a member of bureaucracy, do not participate in a decision, you are not going to carry that decision out with the alacrity, the efficiency and the effectiveness you would if you had participated.
When you cut the bureaucracy out of your decisions and then foist your decisions on us out of the blue on that bureaucracy, you can’t expect that bureaucracy to carry your decision out very well and, furthermore, if you’re not prepared to stop the feuding elements in that bureaucracy, as they carry out your decision, you’re courting disaster.
And I would say that we have courted disaster, in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran, generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita and I could go on back, we haven’t done very well on anything like that in a long time. And if something comes along that is truly serious, 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.
I'm not quite sure what he means by that last sentence. I would argue that we've seen the ineptitude of this government repeated time and again already. We've seen it in the hiring of a political crony who used to judge horse show judges, in the deliberate ostracism of the State Department from any post-invasion planning for Iraq, the decision to go to war in Iraq on false pretenses, the withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan before bin Laden was captured/killed, ad infinitum. It's nearly beyond belief, and yet it's happened.
It will be interesting to see how broad a play this speech gets (if any) in the American media. The Financial Times of London is the paper where Brad DeLong found it.
Posted by Linkmeister at October 20, 2005 12:01 AM | TrackBack