October 25, 2005--The Real "Cabale"
Tucked away, and I mean tucked away well below the fold on a very interior page, there was a piece recently in the NY Times about former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s former Chief of Staff’s claim that US foreign policy has been usurped by a “Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal” (see link below for the scant six inches of column space devoted to this astonishing story).
Lawrence Wilkerson, retired Colonel Wilkerson is not exactly a stealth liberal who was planted in the State Department by Powell to run their version of an accomodationist cabal. Before becoming Powell’s Chief of Staff, Col Wilkerson, unlike the President, Vice President, and Secretary of Defense, served in Vietnam War and Korea and then went on to stints in the Pentagon and at the Naval War College. He holds two advanced degrees and has written extensively on National Security Studies.
And so when he made his assertion the other day about the cabal, more ears should have pricked up. Including at the NY Times.
Since I suspect you may have missed the piece, here’s a little more about what he had to say:
In a long, somewhat scholarly address at the New America Foundation (full text available on their website), Wilkerson traced the history of foreign policy decision making from FDR through the current Bush administration, including how all administrations frequently and legitimately found it essential to do much of their national security thinking and planning far from public scrutiny. But when he looked back over the four years that he spent as part of the current administration, to quote him:
I have never seen [an equivalent case] in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, and changes in the national security decision-making process. What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United Sates, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. And then when the bureaucracy was presented with the decision to carry them out, it was 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.
“Aberrations,” “perturbations,” and “bastardizations.” Not the usual language of diplomacy. And “cabal.” Isn’t that from the French “cabale”? I think so, and how ironically appropriate.
But there was a little more. Colonel Wilkerson concluded with this ominous thought—“If something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in an American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence.”
Did he mean—“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which connect them with another . . . ?
Lawrence Wilkerson, retired Colonel Wilkerson is not exactly a stealth liberal who was planted in the State Department by Powell to run their version of an accomodationist cabal. Before becoming Powell’s Chief of Staff, Col Wilkerson, unlike the President, Vice President, and Secretary of Defense, served in Vietnam War and Korea and then went on to stints in the Pentagon and at the Naval War College. He holds two advanced degrees and has written extensively on National Security Studies.
And so when he made his assertion the other day about the cabal, more ears should have pricked up. Including at the NY Times.
Since I suspect you may have missed the piece, here’s a little more about what he had to say:
In a long, somewhat scholarly address at the New America Foundation (full text available on their website), Wilkerson traced the history of foreign policy decision making from FDR through the current Bush administration, including how all administrations frequently and legitimately found it essential to do much of their national security thinking and planning far from public scrutiny. But when he looked back over the four years that he spent as part of the current administration, to quote him:
I have never seen [an equivalent case] in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, and changes in the national security decision-making process. What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United Sates, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. And then when the bureaucracy was presented with the decision to carry them out, it was 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.
“Aberrations,” “perturbations,” and “bastardizations.” Not the usual language of diplomacy. And “cabal.” Isn’t that from the French “cabale”? I think so, and how ironically appropriate.
But there was a little more. Colonel Wilkerson concluded with this ominous thought—“If something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in an American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence.”
Did he mean—“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which connect them with another . . . ?
posted by Steven Zwerling at
10:08 AM
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