Vice President Dick Cheney came to town for a fundraiser this week, just as he was coming under a most uncomfortable spotlight – the withering judgment of Washington insiders involving his oversize role in U.S. foreign policy.
A top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell said that Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld led a “secretive, little-known cabal” that directed foreign policy to the country’s detriment.
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson says he witnessed during more than four years at State “a case I had never seen before in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process.” He is a retired Army officer who served Powell for 16 years.
In remarks in Washington last week, and then in an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times, Wilkerson described a cabal including Cheney, Rumsfeld and other officials that made decisions while leaving the bureaucracies that would have to carry them out in the cold. This group communicated its decisions “in such a disjointed, incredible way” that it made it difficult to execute the policies, Wilkerson said, and America is now suffering the consequences.
President Bush, unlike his father, the 41st president, was “not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either,” Wilkerson said. He cited leadership failures including detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere; the long refusal to engage with North Korea or back European efforts to deal with Iran’s nuclear threat; the Iraq war, and a weakening of an overstretched and demoralized U.S. military.
Adding weight to Wilkerson’s brief was a critique of White House foreign policy by Brent Scowcroft, who served Bush’s father as national security adviser. Both Wilkerson and Scowcroft are retired military.
In an interview with the New Yorker, Scowcroft recalled talking to Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, about her claim that “we’re going to democratize Iraq.” When Scowcroft challenged her, she replied, “You know, you’re just stuck in the old ways.”
“The real anomaly in the administration is Cheney,” Scowcroft said. “I consider Cheney a good friend – I’ve known him for 30 years. But Dick Cheney I don’t know anymore.” Scowcroft’s remarks point to an estrangement between the elder Bush’s camp and that of his son, according to Jeffrey Goldberg, author of the New Yorker article.
We note that the elder Bush valued Scowcroft’s friendship because he was “someone I can depend on to tell me what I need to know and not just what I want to hear.” After hearing from Scowcroft and Wilkerson, we wonder if the current president has the benefit of such advisors.
