BUSH DERANGEMENT SYNDROME HITS FORMER POWELL STAFFER

The White House cabal (Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Los Angeles Times, 10/25/05)

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."

[snip]

The administration's performance during its first four years would have been even worse without Powell's damage control. At least once a week, it seemed, Powell trooped over to the Oval Office and cleaned all the dog poop off the carpet. He held a youthful, inexperienced president's hand. He told him everything would be all right because he, the secretary of State, would fix it. And he did — everything from a serious crisis with China when a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft was struck by a Chinese F-8 fighter jet in April 2001, to the secretary's constant reassurances to European leaders following the bitter breach in relations over the Iraq war. It wasn't enough, of course, but it helped.

Colin Powell's bureaucrat/staffer is frothing so badly that it apparently escapes him that he's called President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld secretive and little-known and compared them to a dictatorship, while at the same time indicating a preference for policy made less transparently by career bureaucrats who never have to face a voter. Far from being a "secret cabal," the President and Vice-President do head the executive branch thanks to the voters, and do enjoy the constitutional power of setting foreign policy. As for the highest-profile Secretary of Defense in generations, it's odd for anybody to refer to him as a little-known policymaker.