Follow up on Lawrence Wilkerson

Yesterday, the L.A. Times published an editorial by Wilkerson which was a concise restatement of his speech at the New American Foundation (see previous post). Those that don't want the extensive discussion in the full speech should definitely read this editorial. For those of you who do not want to take the time and effort to do even that, the first five paragraphs of the editorial will tell you most of what you should know:

IN PRESIDENT BUSH'S first term, some of the most important decisions about U.S. national security — including vital decisions about postwar Iraq — were made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

When I first discussed this group in a speech last week at the New America Foundation in Washington, my comments caused a significant stir because I had been chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell between 2002 and 2005.

But it's absolutely true. I believe that the decisions of this cabal were sometimes made with the full and witting support of the president and sometimes with something less. More often than not, then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice was simply steamrolled by this cabal.

Its insular and secret workings were efficient and swift — not unlike the decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy. This furtive process was camouflaged neatly by the dysfunction and inefficiency of the formal decision-making process, where decisions, if they were reached at all, had to wend their way through the bureaucracy, with its dissenters, obstructionists and "guardians of the turf."

But the secret process was ultimately a failure. It produced a series of disastrous decisions and virtually ensured that the agencies charged with implementing them would not or could not execute them well.

Oh, and I just cannot resist showing something Wilkerson said in the Q&A portion of his appearance at the New American Foundation. Wilkerson was contrasting Bush 43 with Bush 41:

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. And I went to high school in Houston – I’ve got some connections with Texas. But there’s just a vast difference between the way George (H.W.) Bush (41) dealt with major challenges, some of the greatest challenges at the end of the 20th century, and affected positive results, in my view, and the way we conduct diplomacy today.

I like to use the world gracelessness, and I use that word because grace is something we have lost in the modern world. It’s a very important product. It’s very different, for example, to walk in with a foreign leader and find something you can be magnanimous about. You don’t have to win everything. You don’t have to be the big bully on the block. Find something you can be magnanimous about, that you can give him, that you can say he gets credit for, or she gets credit for. That’s diplomacy. That’s diplomacy. You don’t walk in and say, I’m the big mother on the block and if everybody’s not with me, they’re against me, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The difference between father and son, in my mind, sort of comes from that attitudinal approach to the world.

In another post, I explained that in late 2003 I went on record as saying "The Bush administration has displayed an astounding combination of stupidity, delusion, and arrogance." I have repeated that claim several times on this blog. And Lawrence Wilkerson's firsthand, personal experience supports that evaluation.