Coleen Rowley: Wilkerson Gets Intel Integrity Award; IraqAfPakisNam? Déjà vu?

[laststeamtrain]

Wilkerson Gets Intel Integrity Award

By Coleen Rowley


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Our whole problem in Vietnam from beginning to end was a failure fully to understand what we were trying to do. We didn't know what the situation was really like, or what the forces really were that were opposing us.

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With President Obama now standing at a similar crossroad as LBJ did during the Vietnam War, deciding whether to acquiesce to his general's demands for more troops and facing the prospect of much longer and costly wars, can there be someone better to keynote and get the award than Colonel Wilkerson with his 31 years' military service that goes back to the Vietnam War, spans the birth-to-burial of the "Powell Doctrine" (and its supposed lessons learned from the Vietnam tragedy), and contains his first-hand insights into the egregious errors made by the Bush Administration in launching and waging the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Wilkerson has stood by his earlier description of Cheney and Rumsfeld as having formed a cabal to hijack the decision-making process: "I'm worried and I would rather have the discussion and debate in the process we've designed than I would a diktat from a dumb strongman... I'd prefer to see the squabble of democracy to the efficiency of dictators."

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Another Vietnam vet, Colonel Andrew Bacevich diagnosed the problem very similarly:

"National security policy has long been the province of a small, self-perpetuating, self-anointed group of specialists...dedicated to the proposition of excluding democratic influences from the making of national security policy. To the extent that members of the national security apparatus have taken public opinion into consideration, they have viewed it as something to manipulate."

Historically elections have done little to end wars. The need for exposing official lies and revealing more truth about strategic national interests and security and about the reality on the ground is undoubtedly at the same high level as it was when Sam Adams fought the "War of Numbers" during Vietnam.

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/101909a.html