“Moderates” and “liberals” (not to speak of the Right) have long criticized the “extreme left” for claiming that the Bush administration is a cabal run by Rumsfeld and Cheney, for the benefit of their corporate cronies. George Bush, we claimed, is merely a useful figurehead, since he believes all the nonsense he spouts, and so is seen as credible by the public.
Of course, this view of Bush & Co is admitedly based on speculation, although there is quite a bit of evidence for its credibility. But now, a Bush & Co insider, who could hardly be labelled a “leftist,” is making the very same claim. The article below is from today’s New York Times.
Something I would add, that Wilkerson doesn’t say: If the United States was a “normal” country, such a charge would be explosive. But a very large minority of the people in the US are in the thrall of fundamentalist religion. They don’t really believe in secular democratic values. An ideological facade is put forth by Bush & Co to garner favor with this group. And since this groups is a cohesive voting block, it has enough power to keep the Republicans in power in the U.S.’s winner-take-all system of government. Unless the rest of the American people wake up to the danger soon, the U.S. is headed for even deeper trouble.
By the way, the parallels to Israel are striking.
Former Powell Aide Says Bush Policy Is Run by ‘Cabal’ By BRIAN KNOWLTON
WASHINGTON, Oct. 20 – Secretary of State Colin Powell’s former chief of staff has offered a remarkably blunt criticism of the administration he served, saying that foreign policy had been usurped by a “Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal,” and that President Bush has made the country more vulnerable, not less, to future crises.
The comments came in a speech Wednesday by Lawrence Wilkerson, who worked for Mr. Powell at the State Department from 2001 to early 2005. Speaking to the New America Foundation, an independent public-policy institute in Washington, Mr. Wilkerson suggested that secrecy, arrogance and internal feuding had taken a heavy toll in the Bush administration, skewing its policies and undercutting its ability to handle crises.
“I would say that we have courted disaster, in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran, generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita – and I could go on back,” he said. “We haven’t done very well on anything like that in a long time.”
Mr. Wilkerson suggested that the dysfunction within the administration was so grave that “if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence.”
Mr. Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel and former director of the Marine Corps War College, said that in his years in or close to government, he had seen its national security apparatus twisted in many ways. But what he saw in Mr. Bush’s first term “was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberration, bastardizations” and “perturbations.”
“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,” he said.
The former aide referred to Mr. Bush as someone who “is not versed in international relations, and not too much interested in them, either.” He was far more admiring of the president’s father, whom he called “one of the finest presidents we’ve ever had.”
Mr. Wilkerson has long been considered a close confidant of Mr. Powell, but their relationship has apparently grown strained at times – including over the question of unconventional weapons in Iraq – and the former colonel said Mr. Powell did not approve of his latest public criticisms.
