‘Cheney cabal hijacked US foreign policy’, Financial Times + Wa Post

[Coastie for Truth]

Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government's foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed on Wednesday.

In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, said: “What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.

“Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences.”

Mr Wilkerson said such secret decision-making was responsible for mistakes such as the long refusal to engage with North Korea or to back European efforts on Iran.

---edited for brevity---

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 ," 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."

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Sorry, No New York Times Link

[BrklynLiberal]

1. Too little too late..especially waterboy Dana Milbank.

[ewagner]

2. Holy Crap!

Look at this:

snip(s)

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."

edited to add emphasis....

[4dsc]

4. More reasons why we need a democrat majority

Time to investigate this corruption!!

[indepat]

3. W and Uncle Dick have made our nation so much safer and stronger

[BrklynLiberal]

5. This guy admires GHW Bush,and yet dumps on his men...Cheney,

Rumsfeld, etc. Weren't these GHW Bush's men?