Like They Didn't See This Coming?

The White House cabal

By Lawrence B. Wilkerson, LAWRENCE B. WILKERSON served as chief of
staff to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell from 2002 to 2005.

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.

No! Who would have thought it! And Cheney and Rumsfeld seem like such nice men. It's always the quiet ones, they say. Unless it's the gruff, loud-mouthed know-it-alls.

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.

My goodness! Will surprises never end? Our own president incapable of making his own decisions?

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."

And to think, looking at it from the outside, it all seemed so smooth and transparent!

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.

I never would have guessed it.

[...]

Both as a former academic and as a person who has been in the ring with the bull, I believe that there are two reasons we should care. First, such departures from the process have in the past led us into a host of disasters, including the last years of the Vietnam War, the national embarrassment of Watergate (and the first resignation of a president in our history), the Iran-Contra scandal and now the ruinous foreign policy of George W. Bush.

Ruinous? How could that happen? People say George W. Bush is the best president ever. They say his policies and decisions are guided by God himself!

[...]

It takes firm leadership to preside over the bureaucracy. But it also takes a willingness to listen to dissenting opinions. It requires leaders who can analyze, synthesize, ponder and decide.

I was going to say something very similar to that, about oh, I'd say 5 years ago, and then again last year, but I held my toungue. No wait, actually, I was quite outspoken and so were a lot of other people, and many of us voted for someone who is not the current president because of what we saw.

[...]

It's a disaster. Given the choice, I'd choose a frustrating bureaucracy over an efficient cabal every time.

I hate to say I told you so, but.... no, actually I LOVE to say I TOLD YOU SO!

How could anyone not have seen this? I saw all of it, does that make me some kind of genius? No, I refuse to believe that. And yet, I know that many who voted for Bush are incredibly naïve, and in 2004 a poll showed that most Bush supporters actually attributed to him policy positions which were in direct opposition to those he had demonstrated to hold. They truly are like those hapless citizens of the fable of the Emperor's New Clothes, seeing only what they want to see.