'Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal' hijacked US foreign policy: former Powell aide

[LittleGeneral]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051021...NlYwMlJVRPUCUl

Former secretary of state Colin Powell's top aide has accused Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld of creating a "cabal" that has hijacked US foreign policy.

Retired colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Powell's right-hand man for 16 years in the public and private sectors, also skewered President George W. Bush, saying the US leader was "not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either."

"I would say that we have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran," Wilkerson, who was Powell's chief of staff at the State Department, said Wednesday at a policy forum at the New America Foundation.

"The case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bas izations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process," he said.

"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," he said.

The Bush administration "made decisions in secret, and now I think it is paying the consequences of having made those decisions in secret. But far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences," Wilkerson said.

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

He added: "So you've got this collegiality there between the secretary of defense and the vice president, and you've got a president who is not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either.

"And so it's not too difficult to make decisions in this what I call Oval Office cabal, and decisions often that are the opposite of what you'd thought were made in the formal process."

He said the "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal" is influenced by the business world and that Cheney was a member of the "military industrial complex."

"How much influence on their decisions? I think a lot -- in how much the decisions reflect their connections with the cartels and the corporations and so forth, I think a lot. I think the president, too," Wilkerson said.

The former top aide, who has criticized the administration in the past, accused the administration of "cowboyism" in its dealings with former South Korean president Kim Dae-Jung, who won the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize for his landmark summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il, which ushered in a new era of rapprochement between the two Koreas.

"When you put your feet up on a hassock and look at a man who's won the Nobel Prize and is currently the president of South Korea, and tell him in a very insulting way that you don't agree with his assessment of what's necessary to be reconciled with the North, that's not diplomacy, that's cowboyism," he said.

Wilkerson also accused Powell's successor, former national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, of cozying up to the president and of being "extremely weak" in her previous post.

As Bush's confidante before becoming secretary of state, "she made a decision that she would side with the president to build her intimacy with the president," he said.

The retired officer admitted that his dissenting views have hurt his relationship with Powell. "He's not happy," he said.

[Vashner]

There are only 2 people elected that determine foreign policy.

President and Vice President...

The person they direct the policy is the Sec of State. The Sec of state and the department serve at the will of the President.

There is no where in the cons ution that staffers make up there own rules..
CHIEF applies to civil servants.. Commander to military and law enforcement.

This so called Colonel... he should be shot for treason for even suggesting this crap.

When you enlist or are commisioned you have to give an oath of service. It says you will obey and follow orders of the commander & chief. Not question them. If you want to question orders don't join the military.. become a reporter or flip burgers.

[Nbadan]

However, only one en y can take the country to war - Congress. The WH needed overwhelming evidence to try and convince both Congress and the UN that Saddam's continued existence as ruler of Iraq was a threat to the security of the U.S. and the world, otherwise the American people would never have supported the war. So they ditched CIA intelligence, or simply downplayed it, if it did not meet their cause, and simultaneously, with the aid of Ahmed Chalabi and other well-paid Iraqi dissidents, they planted a lot of stories about Saddam and Iraq that were simply not true to bolster the cause for war.

This is what Retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson was saying when he made the statement that the Cheney-Rummy cabal had hijacked foreign policy.

[ChumpDumper]

C'mon Vash, you think Rummy has no influence on foreign policy? If all he did was parrot Bush, you could have an intern or robot do that.

It's called delegation, and Bush does quite a bit of it. Cabinet members have varying degrees of influence on their Presidents, and its well-do ented that cabinet members with foreign policy views like Rummy and Rice have had much more influence on Bush's foreign policy than someone like Powell did.

Why do names like Acheson and Kissenger stand out in history and others like Christian Herter and William Rogers do not?

[JoeChalupa]

Conspiracy Theory....oh, yes.