A few months ago, Jonathan Chait wrote an interesting column explaining that those who work in the Bush administration, but later work up the courage to criticize it, inevitably (and mysteriously) reverse course. “Most presidents have to face betrayal sooner or later,” Chait said. “What’s uncanny about the Bush administration is that its dissidents invariably recant, usually in zombie-like fashion.”
I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s right-hand man at the State Department, isn’t going to recant a word of what he said yesterday. He was condemning the administration in which he served — and he seemed damn proud of it.
[Wilkerson] 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 [manure],” 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.”
OK, Larry, now tell us what you really think. (Wilkerson’s entire blistering speech is available here.)
I’d also like to take this opportunity to welcome Wilkerson into the illustrious “Disgruntled Former Bush Administration Officials Club.”
It’s a small but growing group of competent, capable public servants who joined the Bush team hoping to serve their country, left government after experiencing first hand how reckless and incompetent the Bush gang really is, and then took (at least some of) their concerns to the public.
Previous members include former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill; former counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke; Rand Beers, Bush’s special assistant to the president for combating terrorism at the National Security Council; and General Anthony Zinni, the former commander of the U.S. Central Command and Bush’s former hand-picked special envoy to the Middle East.
Membership has its perks (widespread respect and admiration), but also a few downsides. Perhaps most importantly, Wilkerson can now expect to be smeared by the GOP attack machine that doesn’t respond well to criticism of Bush.
Indeed, the harsher the disparagement of the president, the more aggressive the Bush gang response. With this in mind, Wilkerson is in for a world of trouble.
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.”
The cabal’s end run around the bureaucracy, he argued, stalled nuclear diplomacy with North Korea and Iran. He said top officials “condoned” prisoner abuse and left the Army “truly in bad shape.”
“You and I and every other citizen like us is paying the consequences,” he said, “whether it was a response to Katrina that was less than adequate certainly, or the situation in Iraq which still goes unexplained.”
Wow. Now wonder this guy didn’t fit in with the Bush gang.