Financial Times- Cheney 'cabal' hijacked US foreign policy

The little, and i mean LITTLE respect i still had for Powell has just disapeared.

I really am disgusted

 

Wow. A great read, gifford. Thanks. I think we will see more people come "out of the closet," as the wheels fall off the Administration. Needless to say, I find Colonel Wilkerson completely credible. I await the usual smear job by the White House, although I suspect that they are extemely busy behind the scenes right now. Perhaps they will ignore it, and hope no one pays attention.

I'm paying attention.



Keep D&D Civil.

 

Rice has gotten intimate with Dubya!?! Holy smokes!

 

Pay closer attention-


President of the United States
Washington, DC

Dear Mr. President:

We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War. In your upcoming State of the Union Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power. We stand ready to offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.

The policy of “containment” of Saddam Hussein has been steadily eroding over the past several months. As recent events have demonstrated, we can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades UN inspections. Our ability to ensure that Saddam Hussein is not producing weapons of mass destruction, therefore, has substantially diminished. Even if full inspections were eventually to resume, which now seems highly unlikely, experience has shown that it is difficult if not impossible to monitor Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons production. The lengthy period during which the inspectors will have been unable to enter many Iraqi facilities has made it even less likely that they will be able to uncover all of Saddam’s secrets. As a result, in the not-too-distant future we will be unable to determine with any reasonable level of confidence whether Iraq does or does not possess such weapons.


Such uncertainty will, by itself, have a seriously destabilizing effect on the entire Middle East. It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course, the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard. As you have rightly declared, Mr. President, the security of the world in the first part of the 21st century will be determined largely by how we handle this threat.


Given the magnitude of the threat, the current policy, which depends for its success upon the steadfastness of our coalition partners and upon the cooperation of Saddam Hussein, is dangerously inadequate. The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.

We urge you to articulate this aim, and to turn your Administration's attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power. This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts. Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater. We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council.

We urge you to act decisively. If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country. If we accept a course of weakness and drift, we put our interests and our future at risk.

Sincerely,

Elliott Abrams Richard L. Armitage William J. Bennett

Jeffrey Bergner John Bolton Paula Dobriansky

Francis Fukuyama Robert Kagan Zalmay Khalilzad

William Kristol Richard Perle Peter W. Rodman

Donald Rumsfeld William Schneider, Jr. Vin Weber

Paul Wolfowitz R. James Woolsey Robert B. Zoellick
link



This letter was sent to President Clinton by the Project for a New American Century on January 26, 1998.

Cheney and Rumsfeld have been partners for many years and the mission they are carrying out is not new nor is it un-calculated.

Project for the New American Century
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The Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, is a Washington, DC, Republican based think tank. The group was established in spring 1997 as a non-profit organization with the goal of promoting " American global leadership". The chairman is William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and FOX News regular. The group is an initiative of the New Citizenship Project, a non-profit 501c3 organization that is funded by the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation and the Bradley Foundation. [1]

Present and former members include several prominent members of the Republican Party and Bush Administration, including Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, Richard Perle, Richard Armitage, Dick Cheney, Lewis Libby, William J. Bennett, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Ellen Bork, the wife of Robert Bork. A large number of its ideas and its members are associated with the neoconservative movement. PNAC has seven full-time staff members, in addition to its board of directors.

The PNAC is a controversial organization. Some have raised concerns that the project has been proposing military and economic domination of land, space, and cyberspace by the United States, so as to establish American dominance in world affairs (Pax Americana) for the future—hence the term "the New American Century", based on the idea that the 20th century was the American Century. Some analysts argue that the U.S. war against Iraq, commenced in March of 2003 under the code name Operation Iraqi Freedom, is the first major step toward implementing these objectives.

 

indeed...i bring up project for a new american century every chance i get. these guys were just implementing plans they had long before 9/11 occurred.

 

Here's a great piece from the Washington Post's Dana Milbank. I'll post the whole thing, since many here probably aren't registered to read the paper. All I can say is, wow!



Colonel Finally Saw Whites of Their Eyes

By Dana Milbank
Thursday, October 20, 2005; A04



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." Addressing scholars, journalists and others at the New America Foundation, Wilkerson accused Bush of "cowboyism" and said he had viewed Condoleezza Rice as "extremely weak." Of American diplomacy, he fretted, "I'm not sure the State Department even exists anymore."

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.

The man who was chief of staff at the State Department until early this year continued: "If you're unilaterally declaring Kyoto dead, if you're declaring the Geneva Conventions not operative, if you're doing a host of things that the world doesn't agree with you on and you're doing it blatantly and in their face, without grace, then you've got to pay the consequences."

With Bush's approval ratings dropping below 40 percent, the administration's vaunted loyalty and party discipline are suffering. David Frum, a former White House speechwriter, is campaigning against confirmation of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. Bruce Bartlett, who worked for the president's father, was fired by his think tank this week because he is publishing a book titled "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy."

And, on Capitol Hill yesterday, Republicans joined in criticizing the administration about Iraq. When Rice said at a hearing that "we have made significant progress" in Iraq, Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee (R.I.) replied: "Well, we all wish that were true, but we can't kid ourselves, either."

Wilkerson adds a new dimension to the criticism. A 31-year military veteran and former director of the Marine Corps War College, he worked for Powell in the public and private sectors for much of the past 16 years, and he was often described by colleagues as the man who would say what Powell was thinking but was too discreet to say.

Wilkerson's beef with the administration was, for the most part, not ideological. He argues that U.S. forces must remain in Iraq, and he describes George H.W. Bush as "one of the finest presidents we've ever had."

Rather, the colonel objected to the administration's secrecy, which allowed Cheney, Rumsfeld and others to subvert the foreign policy apparatus that has been in place since 1947.

"What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld," he said. By cutting out the bureaucracy that had to carry out those decisions, "we have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran, and generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina." 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."

Wilkerson, part military man and part academic, said "hell" a lot but also used words such as "desultory" and "titular." Peering from large wire-rimmed glasses, armed with a flag lapel pin, he spoke with barely restrained anger. He had given critical quotes about the administration before, but yesterday's New America Foundation speech was his coming out as an administration critic.

He had barbs for lawmakers ("truly abandoned their oversight responsibilities") and said past presidents had also circumvented the national security structure. But, he said, "the case that I saw for four-plus years was a case I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process."

Wilkerson blamed Bush, "not versed in international relations and not too much interested," for letting the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal to take over. 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."

The cabal's end run around the bureaucracy, he argued, stalled nuclear diplomacy with North Korea and Iran. 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."

The colonel said his old boss is not pleased with his decision to go public with his criticism. Powell, he said, "is the world's most loyal soldier." Wilkerson said he admired that, but he took a different view of loyalty: not to the administration, but to the country.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/19/AR2005101902246.html


To hell with General Clark... Democrats should draft this guy, if he'll have us. Seriously.



Keep D&D Civil.

 

What a novel concept.

 

The ironic (scary) thing is that these guys actually nicknamed themselves "the Cabal" according to some S. Hersh articles from last year, and basically don't deny filtering evidence to suit their prejudices rather than based on veracity. If you want to whitewash it, you call it "Groupthink", but I don't need any independent committees to tell me that there's something wrong with that. But hey, gay marriage, stem cells, Kerry's purple hearts -blahhh.

 

I still have a great deal of respect for Powell - he did the best he could do under the circumstances.

 

I remember when I posted things about Dick Cheney, mentioning some of the crap he's been getting away with, and some poster jumped in and wrote how "Dick Cheney would never do that" and blah blah blah.

I didn't have an article like this to back me up. A good read.

 

Cabal is a good word to describe politics-

If you really want to get depressed take the 'red pill' and try to find out just how deep the rabbit hole is.

It's why I don't trust too many politicians.

 

He played the good soldier and did and said things that he didn't agree with. Obviously, it can be viewed a few ways - as in him being noble and trying to "change the system from within", or he was too scared to put his $ where his mouth was and resign, and he pleads the "just following orders" defense.

But hten look at the jackasses we are comparing him to in the admin, I guess it's hard to look bad next to that crew.

 

Makes me think of that Sprint commerical, with Dick Cheney as the exec.

"This is how I stick it to the man"
"But sir, aren't you the man?"
"Yes"