[Mb-civic] Bob Herbert

[Mike Blaxill]

How Scary Is This?
    By Bob Herbert
    The New York Times

    Monday 24 October 2005

    The White House is sweating out the
possibility that one or more top officials will
soon be indicted on criminal charges. But the
Bush administration is immune to prosecution for
its greatest offense - its colossal and
profoundly tragic incompetence.

    Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel
who served as chief of staff to Secretary of
State Colin Powell, addressed the
administration's arrogance and ineptitude in a
talk last week that was astonishingly candid by
Washington standards.

    "We have courted disaster in Iraq, in North
Korea, in Iran," said Mr. Wilkerson. "Generally,
with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita
... we haven't done very well on anything like
that in a long time. And if something comes along
that is 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."

    The investigation of Karl Rove, Scooter Libby
et al. is the most sensational story coming out
of Washington at the moment. But the story with
the gravest implications for the U.S. and the
world is the overall dysfunction of the Bush
regime. This is a bomb going "Tick, tick, tick .
. ." What is the next disaster that this crowd
will be unprepared to cope with? Or the next
lunatic idea that will spring from its
ideological bag of tricks?

    Mr. Wilkerson gave his talk before an
audience at the New America Foundation, an
independent public policy institute. On the
all-important matter of national security, which
many voters had seen as the strength of the
administration, Mr. Wilkerson said:

    "The case that I saw for four-plus years was
a case that I have never seen in my studies of
aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations,
changes to the national security decision-making
process. 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."

    When the time came to implement the
decisions, said Mr. Wilkerson, they were
"presented in such a disjointed, incredible way
that the bureaucracy often didn't know what it
was doing as it moved to carry them out."

    Where was the president? According to Mr.
Wilkerson, "You've got this collegiality there
between the secretary of defense and the vice
president, and you've got a president who is not
versed in international relations and not too
much interested in them either."

    One of the consequences of this dysfunction,
as I have noted many times, is the unending
parade of dead or badly wounded men and women
returning to the U.S. from the war in Iraq - a
war that the administration foolishly launched
but now does not know how to win or end.

    Mr. Wilkerson was especially critical of the
excessive secrecy that surrounded so many of the
most important decisions by the Bush
administration, and of what he felt was a general
policy of concentrating too much power in the
hands of a small group of insiders. As much as
possible, government in the United States is
supposed to be open and transparent, and a
fundamental principle is that decision-making
should be subjected to a robust process of checks
and balances.

    While not "evaluating the decision to go to
war," Mr. Wilkerson told his audience that under
the present circumstances "we can't leave Iraq.
We simply can't." In his view, if American forces
were to pull out too quickly, the U.S. would end
up returning to the Middle East with "five
million men and women under arms" within a
decade.

    Nevertheless, he is appalled at the way the
war was launched and conducted, and outraged by
"the detainee abuse issue." In 10 years, he said,
when this matter is "put to the acid test, ironed
out, and people have looked at it from every
angle, we are going to be ashamed of what we
allowed to happen."

    Mr. Wilkerson said he has taken some heat for
speaking out, but feels that "as a citizen of
this great republic," he has an obligation to do
so. If nothing is done about the current state of
affairs, he said, "it's going to get even more
dangerous than it already is."

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/102405Z.shtml