| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Oct 08, 2006 4:52 pm Post subject: A War for Israel? Colin Powell seems to think so. |
| Note the mention of JINSA (the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs) in the last sentence below (Powell still went along with the war though when he could have resigned, and Armitage was associated with PNAC as well) as we still won't see mention of JINSA on CBS or any of the other US (Zionist controlled/influenced) television networks:
Bushies 'used' Colin, wife sez
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/story/458966p-386181c.html
New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
Bushies 'used' Colin, wife sez
BY CORKY SIEMASZKO
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Friday, October 6th, 2006
Colin Powell fought the Viet Cong, but he was no match for the Bush administration hard-liners who "used" his prestige to sell the Iraq war to the American people, his wife says.
In "Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell," Powell's wife, Alma, says the former secretary of state was "callously used to promote a war she wished had never happened," author Karen DeYoung writes.
"They needed him to do it because they knew people would believe him," she told DeYoung, an editor at the Washington Post.
Colin Powell, who was interviewed by DeYoung six times at length, expressed reservations about invading Iraq but never considered quitting in protest once President Bush decided to go to war.
"I supported him," he said. "I can't go on long patrol and then say, 'Never mind.'"
Old soldiers like Powell "didn't quit when they disagreed with the decisions of their commanders," writes DeYoung.
Powell has called his prewar speech to the United Nations accusing Iraq of hiding weapons of mass destruction a "blot" on his record.
Just as her colleague Bob Woodward does in "State of Denial," DeYoung describes a White House riven by rivalries - with Powell and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage on one side and Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the other.
"Armitage thought simple jealousy had a lot to do with it," adds DeYoung.
DeYoung also writes that Powell believes Bush sees the Palestinian/Israeli struggle in "black and white" terms and called Rumsfeld's team "the JINSA crowd," a reference to the neoconservative Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "Jeffrey Blankfort"
Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 09:44:41 -0700
Subject: A War for Israel? Colin Powell seems to think so.
http://www.calendarlive.com/books/cl-et-book9oct09,0,7893056,print.story?coll=cl-books-top-right
"According to the author, the then-secretary went out of his way to identify the pro-war neoconservatives as
affiliates of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a think-tank with decidedly hard-line views on Israel's security.
"Powell referred to Rumsfeld's team as the 'JINSA crowd.' " Later in "Soldier," readers are told that the neoconservatives in
the Defense Department — nearly all of them Jews — supported war against Iraq as the first step to replacing Arab despots with
democratic governments that would sever their ties to the Palestinians, thereby enhancing Israel's security."
BOOK REVIEW
Powell biography involves a game of connect the blots
"Soldier" provides a sketchy, but intermittently fascinating, portrait of the former
secretary of state.
By Tim Rutten
Times Staff Writer
October 9, 2006
There is so much to like and admire about Colin L. Powell as a man and as a public servant that it would be vaguely
comforting if his failure as secretary of State were somehow mysterious.
It wasn't, although it still may fairly be described as tragic.
That's one of the conclusions to be taken from journalist Karen DeYoung's rather sketchy — but intermittently fascinating —
biography, "Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell." The author is associate editor of the Washington Post and a reporter of long
experience with national security issues. Powell sat for six interviews with DeYoung and gave her wide access to his papers.
His family cooperated in the project, and he presumably encouraged the more than 100 officials and former associates who
were questioned for this book.
Despite the "life" appellation, however, this is essentially the story of Powell's service to President George W. Bush as secretary
of State; the account of those four years consumes more than half the volume's considerable length. DeYoung ranges
competently over the familiar details of Powell's early life and career — the New York-born and educated son of Jamaican
immigrants who built a close and loving, if controlling, family around their children with Anglophile, high-church
Episcopalianism; a desultory student's life at the City College of New York until he discovered a new home and family in the
Reserve Officers' Training Corps; a stunning and well-earned ascent through the officer corps to chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff.
For this part of the book, DeYoung borrows heavily from the 1995 memoir "My American Journey," on which Powell
collaborated with Joseph E. Persico. Readers who find this part of Powell's life compelling — and it is — might profitably refer
to it, as well. Where DeYoung comes into her own is in discussing Powell's brief flirtation with presidential politics and the
bureaucratic infighting that has characterized this Bush administration from the start — in other words, the familiar
territories of Washington reporting.
Here, there is much detail that sheds further light on a story whose broad outlines are well-known through the unprecedented
volume of tell-all and self-justifying literature paradoxically spawned by this security-obsessed presidency. One of the
interesting details is the suggestion that the distrust of Powell shared by Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald
H. Rumsfeld and their cadre of neoconservative acolytes seems to date back to Powell's attempt to forge a more moderate
Republicanism during his brush with presidential ambitions in the mid-1990s. Polls showed that Powell was the most popular
man in America when he proposed that the GOP embrace him as leader who favored abortion rights, was pro-affirmative
action, pro-gay rights and not at all hostile to gun control. President Clinton worried that, if the Republicans nominated
Powell, he would not win reelection. Powell ultimately decided not to seek the nomination, but the neocons — including
former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich — never forgave him for giving them a scare.
When Bush came to office, Cheney and Rumsfeld — whom Powell ruefully said regarded him as the Antichrist — quickly
moved to cut him out of the administration' s inner circle. The new secretary of State, who had spent a lifetime trying to fit in
as a child of immigrants, as an African American in a country still dominated by Jim Crow and as an officer in an army
historically hostile to men of color, chafed at being forced into the role of "odd man out."
Powell's version of events confirms what others have reported, that Cheney, Rumsfeld and their neoconservative aides
arrived in Washington determined to find a reason to attack Saddam Hussein. According to DeYoung, "Powell's first official
briefing on terrorism had taken place on December 20, 2000, even before he was sworn in as secretary of state. He had asked
[counter-terrorism chief Richard A.] Clarke and his team — all still working under President Clinton at the time — to give
him a full rundown on bin Laden. Intelligence had indicated that al-Qaeda was planning direct attacks against the United
States and likely had sleeper cells already in place inside the country. After the inauguration, Cheney and [then national
security advisor Condoleezza] Rice had received the same briefing."
Despite that, when the Cabinet's deputy secretaries first met, Paul D. Wolfowitz — Rumsfeld's assistant — "disputed Clarke's
assessment of the al-Qaeda threat, suggesting that the more immediate terrorist danger to the United States came from Iraq."
Even after Sept. 11, the Cheney-Rumsfeld faction kept up the pressure for an attack on Iraq, while Powell worked to make
possible an assault on Al Qaeda and its Taliban patrons in Afghanistan. Later, although he would do his best to sell the
American people and the world the administration' s case for war against Hussein, Powell also did his best to warn Bush of its
consequences. (Powell's wife, Alma, told DeYoung that her husband was "callously" used by the White House, and the general
now says he regards his infamous U.N. appearance as a "blot" on his record. "If I had known there were no stockpiles, I never
would have said there were stockpiles," he says.)
There is one bit of malice at work in the Powell-DeYoung version of these now familiar events that should not pass
unremarked upon. According to the author, the then-secretary went out of his way to identify the pro-war neoconservatives as
affiliates of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a think-tank with decidedly hard-line views on Israel's security.
"Powell referred to Rumsfeld's team as the 'JINSA crowd.' " Later in "Soldier," readers are told that the neoconservatives in
the Defense Department — nearly all of them Jews — supported war against Iraq as the first step to replacing Arab despots with
democratic governments that would sever their ties to the Palestinians, thereby enhancing Israel's security. In explaining why
he did not resign over his profound differences with the White House, Powell cited the example of Gen. George C. Marshall,
who refused to quit as secretary of State even though he opposed President Truman's recognition of Israel as a quest for
"Jewish votes."
Whatever his bitterness over his mistreatment, Powell knows that these old and wholly unmeritorious allegations of dual
loyalty are a slander. He knows better and so does DeYoung. Their presence in this book is another blot on his record.
As written, the net effect of DeYoung's story — and, despite its length, her book is that, rather than a fully realized biography
— brings to mind a scene from Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather." Late in the film, Michael, who has become heir to his
father's business in the aftermath of his elder brother Sonny's murder, tells the family counselor, Tom Hagen — played by
Robert Duvall — that he is being moved out of his job. Vito Corleone, the Godfather — played by Marlon Brando — comforts
the shaken Hagen thus: "Tom, I never thought you were a bad consigliere. I thought Santino was a bad don."
The loyal counselor
Clearly, Powell — although, characteristically, he never hits the point head-on — thinks of himself as a loyal and disinterested
counselor, who served a bad president and a failed administration. DeYoung implicitly shares that view, but it won't do. Life
isn't a film, and none of us are under contract to speak lines somebody else has written.
When Bush announced Powell's appointment as secretary of State, he invoked the memory of Marshall, the quintessential
soldier-statesman. Powell hung his predecessor' s portrait on his office wall, and he recalled Marshall's refusal to resign over
fundamental differences with Truman as precedent for his own decision. Maybe, but strangely enough, the great American
general whose historic example seems more apt here is Robert E. Lee, whose fidelity to rigidly unexamined notions of martial
honor and personal loyalty helped push the nation into entirely avoidable tragedy.
As Ulysses S. Grant once said, Lee "gave himself wholly and without reservation to his cause, though I believe that cause was
the worst to which any man ever gave himself."
At the end of the day, these two exemplary soldiers, Powell and Lee, shared the same tragic flaw — an inability to recognize the
moment in which personal loyalty becomes civic folly.
Timothy.rutten@ latimes.com
Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell
Karen DeYoung
Alfred A. Knopf: 616 pp., $28.95
If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/ archives.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pat Buchanan's 'Whose War?' article mentioned JINSA as well:
http://www.amconmag.com/03_24_03/cover.html
JINSA is also mentioned in the following article by Robert Fisk:
http://www.robert-fisk.com/articles114.htm
Fisk mentioned the following article from 'The Nation' in the above article:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020902/vest
Bush and Sharon Nearly Identical On Mideast Policy:
By Robert G. Kaiser
Washington Post Staff Writer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45652-2003Feb8?language=printer
You might be interested in reading the following article which mentioned Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski who worked under JINSA Neocon Douglas Feith in the Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon before she resigned after seeing how the intelligence was being cooked and manipulated to get US to go to war with Iraq (isn't it incredible that she hasn't been interviewed either by the mainstream US press/media other than an appearance on a C-SPAN program which can be viewed via www.c-span.org ):
The Lie Factory:
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405.html
Published on Tuesday, February 13, 2007 by The Nation
Feith-Libby Lies Exposed
by Robert Dreyfuss
http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0213-20.htm
A bogus connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 was also made.. See the exchange with Lee Hamilton of the 9/11 Commission via the following video link URL to find out what the actual motivation for 9/11 was:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1bm2GPoFfg
You might be also interested in reading about the 'A Clean Break' agenda by esteemed intelligence author/writer (and former investigative producer for ABC's 'World News Tonight' with Peter Jennings) James Bamford (it was taken from pages 261-269 of his excellent 'A Pretext for War' book which is a must read as well if interested in learning more about the agenda behind the Iraq war as you can scroll down to such at the following URL - be sure to get the paperback version though because it has an additional section about the AIPAC federal case mentioned in Bamford's 'Iran: The Next War' article which is linked below as well):
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/02/11/a-clean-break-from-james-bamford-s-a-pretext-for-war.php
Bamford just had the following article ('Iran: The Next War') for the August 10th, 2006 issue of 'Rolling Stone' magazine (note the response by JINSA Neocon Michael Ledeen and the response to him by Bamford):
Iran: The Next War (for Israel):
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/07/28/iran-the-next-war-for-israel.php
If the JINSA Neocons continue to get their way via Dick Cheney's office, we will be at war with Iran as well before long (such could even draw in Russia and China eventually which could manifest in a world war - we are living in dangerous times with the Bush regime in the hands of these nefarious neocons).
JINSA ISRAEL FIRSTERS: IRAQ DOWN, IRAN LEFT TO GO:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/04/06/jinsa-israel-firsters-iraq-down-iran-left-to-go.php
NEOCONSERVATISM AS A JEWISH MOVEMENT:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/04/06/neoconservatism-as-a-jewish-movement.php
Welcome to Fascist America (brought to US by the neo-Bolshevik Jewish JINSA Neocons and company some of whom were followers of the Bolshevik Trotsky):
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/10/06/welcome-to-fascist-america.php
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Colin Powell couldn't have been more on the mark when he mentioned that the 'JINSA crowd' was in control of the Pentagon when General John Keane (who was involved with the Kagan 'surge' plan from AEI) and Fallon are mentioned below as well:
http://www.jinsa.org/articles/articles.html/function/view/categoryid/1366/documentid/1376/history/3,2359,2166,1366,1376
January 8, 2002 in JINSA Events, Programs, Publications and Notices : Events, Meetings and Programs : The Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson Distinguished Service Award
2001 Jackson Award Honors Service Secretaries
On October 25, JINSA hosted more than 600 guests drawn from the Pentagon, Capitol Hill, the diplomatic and defense communities to pay tribute to Navy Secretary Gordon R. England, Air Force Secretary Dr. James G. Roche, and Army Secretary Thomas E. White, as they were each presented with JINSA's Henry M. ÒScoop" Jackson Distinguished Service Award. Presenting the awards was Mr. Rudy De Leon, Senior Vice President of the Boeing Company's Washington, D.C. Operations. Boeing was this year's event Major Corporate Sponsor.
Each year, JINSA honors leaders who, throughout their careers, have honored the tradition of the late Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson. As Secretary White noted, "JINSA was organized in part to perpetuate his legacy and we can feel his spirit here tonight. Senator Jackson inspired American's with his dedication to a strong U.S. defense posture and his abiding interest in helping oppressed peoples." In a letter to this year's recipients, Mrs. Helen Jackson wrote that "It is gratifying to know that as the three of you perform your vital tasks on behalf of our nation at this particularly critical time, you are embodying the ideas of my late husband, a strong national defense and close ties with Israel."
The dinner opened with a presentation of colors by the military district of Washington followed by a welcome by Mr. David Steinmann, Chairman of JINSA's Board of Advisors who eloquently stated the purpose of the evening's occasion: "We are really privileged to [the three Service Secretaries] because in thanking them we also get to thank all of the Armed Forces whom they lead É the men and women who have worn the uniform and who wear it today É who as we sit here tonight are going in harm's way on our behalf É the men and women without whom none of our freedoms would be possible and without whom we might not be here tonight." Rudy de Leon echoed the sentiment in his introduction: "The men and women of the Armed Forces are indeed honored to have three distinguished leaders serving as the Service Secretaries of the critical departments of the Army, Navy, and Air Force."
JINSA President Norman Hascoe read the audience a letter sent by President George W. Bush in which he not only thanked the honorees for their hard work and leadership, but also congratulated JINSA for its commitment to strengthening national defense and our relationship with Israel.
Each of the Secretaries spoke about working together with our allies to strengthen our defense against terrorism. Secretary White said in his speech: "Today we have the will and the means to protect ourselves and our allies and our friends. That will is being tested and we are not the only target." Secretary England said, "Events like September 11 remind us that it is always prudent to be prepared. Complacency is never rewarded. Preparedness is a virtue. JINSA's goal of a strong national defense needs to be a continuing bedrock of our national policy and posture."
Secretary England also spoke about cooperation: "The three of us are in this together. We are committed to work jointly with all the government agencies and we set the direction for each of our services together rather than going it along so it is a great honor to be here with the tonight." Secretary Roche continued this sentiment in his address: "We work together each day É engaged in helping to lead our military service system, modernize our forces and develop our leaders and troops, and to preserve and protect our nation's security interests across the globe."
At the end of the evening, Tom Neumann, JINSA's Executive Director, said reflecting on September 11: "What happened September 11 woke us up to our need for national security but it also reminded us why we are so great to be Americans. It reminded us that we are unique in the world and that some things are worth fighting for and what we have as a nation is worth fighting for. Too often we have forgotten and we have been reminded."
Mr. Mark Broxmeyer, JINSA's new Chairman did the honors in welcoming a long list of distinguished guests including Admiral William Fallon, Vice Chief of Naval Operations; General John Keane, Vice Chief of Staff of the Army; General Michael Williams, Vice Commandant of the Marine Corps; Lieutenant General Lance Lord, Assistant Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force; Dr. Dov Zackheim , Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller and CFO);.Senator Bob Smith; Congressman Eric Cantor; Congressman Felix Grucci; Congressman Mark Kirk; Congressman Ed Whitfield; Mark Rosenker, Senior Military Advisor to President Bush; Honorable John Young, Assistant Secretary of the Navy; Dr. William Snyder, Chairman of the Defense Science Board; Israeli Ambassador David Ivry; Turkish Ambassador Faruk Logoglu; and Rani Levy, Special Advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Read the Entire Transcript of the Evening's Remarks
Additional photos from the 2001 Henry M. Jackson Service Award Dinner
Fallon says U.S. miscalculated Iraq
By ANNE FLAHERTY, Associated Press Writer 27 minutes ago
Adm. William Fallon, who is poised to become the top American commander in the Middle East, says the United States miscalculated the ability of Iraqi forces to take control and underestimated the enemy's persistence.
"Securing the stability of the country has been more difficult than anticipated," Fallon said in a written statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee. "Our ability to correctly assess the political, economic and security situation in Iraq has been lacking."
Fallon's remarks were submitted in advance of a confirmation hearing Tuesday. Fallon, who commands troops in the Pacific region, has been tapped to replace Army Gen. John Abizaid as head of the U.S. Central Command.
In addition Tuesday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was expected to consider the nomination of John Negroponte, the first director of national intelligence, to become deputy secretary of state.
Fallon and Negroponte's confirmations were not expected to rouse Senate protests, despite bitter opposition in Congress to Bush's plan to send 21,500 additional troops to Iraq.
Public sentiment has turned strongly against a war that has dragged on for nearly four years with more than 3,000 American dead and violence unabated by insurgents and sectarian militias.
In remarks prepared for a speech Tuesday, Sen. Bill Nelson (news, bio, voting record), D-Fla., a member of the Armed Services Committee who recently returned from a trip to the region, said only another 200,000 or 300,000 U.S. troops would make a substantial difference in Iraq.
"Based on everything I saw last month, and based on my conversations with Iraqi officials, our own military leaders and rank-and-file soldiers, I am convinced more troops won't end the sectarian violence," Nelson said.
Nelson also was expected to deliver a sharp rebuke of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Nelson said al-Maliki "either lacks the will, or the nerve, to take on the Shiite militias."
Last week the Senate approved, 81-0, Bush's nomination of Army Lt. Gen. David Petraeus to head the Iraq war. Petraeus would work alongside Fallon, who would oversee military operations throughout the region, including Afghanistan.
During Petraeus' Jan. 23 confirmation hearing, senators questioned him on how Bush's new strategy would work and whether Congress should weigh in with a resolution of disapproval. Petraeus said the situation in Iraq was "dire" but not hopeless.
In his written remarks, Fallon told the Senate panel that the U.S. has "relearned" the need to hold secure an area "until Iraqi security forces and local political and economic activity have provided essential confidence to the population."
Fallon also said he believes the Pakistan government should do more to prevent al-Qaida operatives from crossing its border into Afghanistan and that Iran remains a serious threat to the region.
However, Fallon said Tehran was unlikely to produce a nuclear weapon until "mid-next decade."
"I sense that our allies in the region are more concerned about the potential threat posed by Iran now than at any time since the Iran-Iraq War," he wrote.
Petraeus is to arrive in Baghdad to take over for Gen. George Casey as the top U.S. commander in Iraq next week, a defense official said Monday. Casey, tapped to become the next Army chief of staff, will face the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Judge says "ample cause to believe" AIPAC pair were foreign agents
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/08/11/irmep-aipac-espionage-case-dismissal-gambit-fails.php
--------------------------------------
PRO-ISRAEL LOBBY IN US UNDER ATTACK:
http://www.upi.com/InternationalIntelligence/view.php?StoryID=20060
Intl. Intelligence
WASHINGTON, March 20 (UPI) -- Two of America's top scholars have published a searing attack on the role and power of Washington's pro-Israel lobby in a British journal, warning that its "decisive" role in fomenting the Iraq war is now being repeated with the threat of action against Iran. And they say that the Lobby is so strong that they doubt their article would be accepted in any U.S.-based publication.
Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, author of "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics" and Professor Stephen Walt of Harvard's Kenney School, and author of "Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy," are leading figures American in academic life.
They claim that the Israel lobby has distorted American policy and operates against American interests, that it has organized the funneling of more than $140 billion dollars to Israel and "has a stranglehold" on the U.S. Congress, and its ability to raise large campaign funds gives its vast influence over Republican and Democratic administrations, while its role in Washington think tanks on the Middle East dominates the policy debate.
And they say that the Lobby works ruthlessly to suppress questioning of its role, to blacken its critics and to crush serious debate about the wisdom of supporting Israel in U.S. public life.
"Silencing skeptics by organizing blacklists and boycotts -- or by suggesting that critics are anti-Semites -- violates the principle of open debate on which democracy depends," Walt and Mearsheimer write.
"The inability of Congress to conduct a genuine debate on these important issues paralyses the entire process of democratic deliberation. Israel's backers should be free to make their case and to challenge those who disagree with them, but efforts to stifle debate by intimidation must be roundly condemned," they add, in the 12,800-word article published in the latest issue of The London Review of Books.
The article focuses strongly on the role of the "neo-conservatives" within the Bush administration in driving the decision to launch the war on Iraq.
"The main driving force behind the war was a small band of neo-conservatives, many with ties to the Likud," Mearsheimer and Walt argue." Given the neo-conservatives' devotion to Israel, their obsession with Iraq, and their influence in the Bush administration, it isn't surprising that many Americans suspected that the war was designed to further Israeli interests."
"The neo-conservatives had been determined to topple Saddam even before Bush became president. They caused a stir early in 1998 by publishing two open letters to Clinton, calling for Saddam's removal from power. The signatories, many of whom had close ties to pro-Israel groups like JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs) or WINEP (Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy), and who included Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Bernard Lewis, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, had little trouble persuading the Clinton administration to adopt the general goal of ousting Saddam. But they were unable to sell a war to achieve that objective. They were no more able to generate enthusiasm for invading Iraq in the early months of the Bush administration. They needed help to achieve their aim. That help arrived with 9/11. Specifically, the events of that day led Bush and Cheney to reverse course and become strong proponents of a preventive war," Walt and Mearsheimer write.
The article, which is already stirring furious debate in U.S. academic and intellectual circles, also explores the historical role of the Lobby.
"For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centerpiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel," the article says.
"The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread 'democracy' throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized not only U.S. security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the U.S. been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state?" Professors Walt and Mearsheimer add.
"The thrust of U.S. policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the 'Israel Lobby'. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. interests and those of the other country - in this case, Israel -- are essentially identical," they add.
They argue that far from being a strategic asset to the United States, Israel "is becoming a strategic burden" and "does not behave like a loyal ally." They also suggest that Israel is also now "a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states.
"Saying that Israel and the U.S. are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around," they add. "Support for Israel is not the only source of anti-American terrorism, but it is an important one, and it makes winning the war on terror more difficult. There is no question that many al-Qaida leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are motivated by Israel's presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians. Unconditional support for Israel makes it easier for extremists to rally popular support and to attract recruits."
They question the argument that Israel deserves support as the only democracy in the Middle East, claiming that "some aspects of Israeli democracy are at odds with core American values. Unlike the US, where people are supposed to enjoy equal rights irrespective of race, religion or ethnicity, Israel was explicitly founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship. Given this, it is not surprising that its 1.3 million Arabs are treated as second-class citizens."
The most powerful force in the Lobby is AIPAC, the American-Israel Public affairs Committee, which Walt and Mearsheimer call "a de facto agent for a foreign government," and which they say has now forged an important alliance with evangelical Christian groups.
The bulk of the article is a detailed analysis of the way they claim the Lobby managed to change the Bush administration's policy from "halting Israel's expansionist policies in the Occupied Territories and advocating the creation of a Palestinian state" and divert it to the war on Iraq instead. They write "Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical."
"Thanks to the lobby, the United States has become the de facto enabler of Israeli expansion in the Occupied Territories, making it complicit in the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians," and conclude that "Israel itself would probably be better off if the Lobby were less powerful and U.S. policy more even-handed."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mearsheimer replies to the irate "Israel Lobby"
Letters - The Israel Lobby - From John Mearsheimer & Stephen Walt.
We wrote 'The Israel Lobby' in order to begin a discussion of a subject that had become difficult to address openly in the United States (LRB, 23 March). We knew it was likely to generate a strong reaction, and we are not surprised that some of our critics have chosen to attack our characters or misrepresent our arguments. .... Must Read !!!
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n09/letters.html
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/print/mear01_.html
Iran: The Next War (for Israel):
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/07/28/iran-the-next-war-for-israel.php
Additional at following URL:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/03/17/u-s-middle-east-policy-motivated-by-pro-israel-lobby.php
US Support of Israel PRIMARY MOTIVATION for the tragic attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and on 9/11:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/08/05/the-gorilla-in-the-room-is-us-support-for-israel.php
Bamford discusses 'A Clean Break'/war for Israel agenda on MSNBC's 'Countdown with Keith Olbermann':
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/08/07/bamford-discusses-a-clean-break-on-msnbc-s-countdown.php
The following article is right in accordance with the 'A Clean Break' agenda as 'A Clean Break' was written for Netanyahu who is apparently going to replace Olmert:
Honor First?; the liberation of Lebanon :
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article14620.htm
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Lobby and the Israeli Invasion of Lebanon:
Their Facts and Ours
by James Petras
www.dissidentvoice.org
August 29, 2006
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Aug06/Petras29.htm
Israel's attack on Lebanon resulted in 9/11:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/07/17/israel-s-attack-on-lebanon-resulted-in-9-11.php
AIPAC, JINSA and similar have prevented Israel's treacherous attack on the USS Liberty from ever being investigated fully (with the survivors testifying before Congress) because traitorous AIPAC hacks like John McCain have helped to keep the USS Liberty cover-up perpetuated in service of a foreign government:
http://www.ussliberty.org
http://rense.com/Datapages/usslib.htm
Last edited by Alpha on Tue Apr 10, 2007 8:11 am; edited 6 times in total | |  | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2006 7:55 am Post subject: |
| From: "Jeffrey Blankfort"
Date: Wed, 08 Nov 2006 22:10:20 -0800
Subject: [IntelligentMinds] Neocons blame Bush
Poor Dubya! He tried to be so unlike his father who was savaged by the neocons for leaving Saddam in power after the 1991 Gulf War and now he is
being scapegoated for having allowed the neocons to get him into a second attack on Iraq but this time with the removal of Saddam at the top of the agenda, a la
"A Clean Break," which Perle, Douglas Feith, and Merav Wurmser wrote for Bibi Netanyahu in 1996. .
We always hear or are told about Jews being made the scapegoats for other people's transgressions, but in this case it is a group of Jews--"the JINSA crowd" that
Colin Powell referred to, who were largely responsible for selling the president and the public on the need for attacking Iraq who are now trying to avoid having
the finger of guilt pointed at them. He didn't even include here Kenneth Pollack, another one of that crowd, whose book, "The Gathering Storm: The Case for
Invading Iraq" in 2002 (Random House) was a "best seller" in the true sense of the word. Do not expect the Democrats to have any of these criminals hauled
into their hearing rooms.
Vanity Fair November 3, 2006
Vanity Fair exclusive: Now they tell us
Neo Culpa
As Iraq slips further into chaos, the war's neoconservative boosters have
turned sharply on the Bush administration, charging that their grand designs
have been undermined by White House incompetence. In a series of exclusive
interviews, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum, and others play the
blame game with shocking frankness. Target No. 1: the president himself.
By David Rose
I remember sitting with Richard Perle in his suite at London's Grosvenor
House hotel and receiving a private lecture on the importance of securing
victory in Iraq. "Iraq is a very good candidate for democratic reform,"
he
said. "It won't be Westminster overnight, but the great democracies of
the
world didn't achieve the full, rich structure of democratic governance
overnight. The Iraqis have a decent chance of succeeding." Perle seemed to
exude the scent of liberation, as well as a whiff of gunpowder. It was
February 2003, and Operation Iraqi Freedom, the culmination of his long
campaign on behalf of regime change in Iraq, was less than a month away.
Three years later, Perle and I meet again at his home outside Washington,
D.C. It is October, the worst month for U.S. casualties in Iraq in almost
two years, and Republicans are bracing for losses in the upcoming midterm
elections. As he looks into my eyes, speaking slowly and with obvious
deliberation, Perle is unrecognizable as the confident hawk who, as chairman
of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, had invited the
exiled Iraqi dissident Ahmad Chalabi to its first meeting after 9/11. "The
levels of brutality that we've seen are truly horrifying, and I have to say,
I underestimated the depravity," Perle says now, adding that total defeat—an
American withdrawal that leaves Iraq as an anarchic "failed state"—is
not
yet inevitable but is becoming more likely. "And then," says Perle, "you'll
get all the mayhem that the world is capable of creating."
According to Perle, who left the Defense Policy Board in 2004, this
unfolding catastrophe has a central cause: devastating dysfunction within
the administration of President George W. Bush. Perle says, "The decisions
did not get made that should have been. They didn't get made in a timely
fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly.… At the end of the
day, you have to hold the president responsible.… I don't think he realized
the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the
disloyalty."
Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not have
advocated an invasion of Iraq: "I think if I had been delphic, and had seen
where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think
now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for
dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying
weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.' … I don't say that because I
no
longer believe that Saddam had the capability to produce weapons of mass
destruction, or that he was not in contact with terrorists. I believe those
two premises were both correct. Could we have managed that threat by means
other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have."
Having spoken with Perle, I wonder: What do the rest of the pro-war
neoconservatives think? If the much caricatured "Prince of Darkness" is
now
plagued with doubt, how do his comrades-in- arms feel? I am particularly
interested in finding out because I interviewed many neocons before the
invasion and, like many people, found much to admire in their vision of
spreading democracy in the Middle East.
I expect to encounter disappointment. What I find instead is despair, and
fury at the incompetence of the Bush administration the neoconservatives
once saw as their brightest hope.
To David Frum, the former White House speechwriter who co-wrote Bush's 2002
State of the Union address that accused Iraq of being part of an "axis of
evil," it now looks as if defeat may be inescapable, because "the insurgency
has proven it can kill anyone who cooperates, and the United States and its
friends have failed to prove that it can protect them." This situation, he
says, must ultimately be blamed on "failure at the center"—starting with
President Bush.
Kenneth Adelman, a lifelong neocon activist and Pentagon insider who served
on the Defense Policy Board until 2005, wrote a famous op-ed article in The
Washington Post in February 2002, arguing: "I believe demolishing Hussein's
military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk." Now he says, "I
just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent
national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They
turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. Not
only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they
were deadly, dysfunctional. "
Fearing that worse is still to come, Adelman believes that neoconservatism
itself—what he defines as "the idea of a tough foreign policy on behalf of
morality, the idea of using our power for moral good in the world"—is dead,
at least for a generation. After Iraq, he says, "it's not going to sell."
And if he, too, had his time over, Adelman says, "I would write an article
that would be skeptical over whether there would be a performance that would
be good enough to implement our policy. The policy can be absolutely right,
and noble, beneficial, but if you can't execute it, it's useless, just
useless. I guess that's what I would have said: that Bush's arguments are
absolutely right, but you know what, you just have to put them in the drawer
marked CAN'T DO. And that's very different from LET'S GO."
I spend the better part of two weeks in conversations with some of the most
respected voices among the neoconservative elite. What I discover is that
none of them is optimistic. All of them have regrets, not only about what
has happened but also, in many cases, about the roles they played. Their
dismay extends beyond the tactical issues of whether America did right or
wrong, to the underlying question of whether exporting democracy is
something America knows how to do.
I will present my findings in full in the January issue of Vanity Fair,
which will reach newsstands in New York and L.A. on December 6 and
nationally by December 12. In the meantime, here is a brief survey of some
of what I heard from the war's remorseful proponents.
Richard Perle: "In the administration that I served [Perle was an assistant
secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan], there was a one-sentence
description of the decision-making process when consensus could not be
reached among disputatious departments: 'The president makes the decision.'
[Bush] did not make decisions, in part because the machinery of government
that he nominally ran was actually running him. The National Security
Council was not serving [Bush] properly. He regarded [then National-Security
Adviser Condoleezza Rice] as part of the family."
Michael Ledeen, American Enterprise Institute freedom scholar: "Ask yourself
who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are
in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen
Hughes."
Frank Gaffney, an assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan and
founder of the Center for Security Policy: "[Bush] doesn't in fact seem
to
be a man of principle who's steadfastly pursuing what he thinks is the right
course. He talks about it, but the policy doesn't track with the rhetoric,
and that's what creates the incoherence that causes us problems around the
world and at home. It also creates the sense that you can take him on with
impunity."
Kenneth Adelman: "The most dispiriting and awful moment of the whole
administration was the day that Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom
to [former C.I.A. director] George Tenet, General Tommy Franks, and
[Coalition Provisional Authority chief] Jerry [Paul] Bremer—three of the
most incompetent people who've ever served in such key spots. And they get
the highest civilian honor a president can bestow on anyone! That was the
day I checked out of this administration. It was then I thought, There's no
seriousness here, these are not serious people. If he had been serious, the
president would have realized that those three are each directly responsible
for the disaster of Iraq."
David Frum: "I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade
the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself
committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me
has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb
the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything."
Michael Rubin, former Pentagon Office of Special Plans and Coalition
Provisional Authority staffer: "Where I most blame George Bush is that
through his rhetoric people trusted him, people believed him. Reformists
came out of the woodwork and exposed themselves." By failing to match his
rhetoric with action, Rubin adds, Bush has betrayed Iraqi reformers in a way
that is "not much different from what his father did on February 15, 1991,
when he called the Iraqi people to rise up, and then had second thoughts and
didn't do anything once they did."
Richard Perle: "Huge mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on
this: They were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in
what happened, and certainly almost no voice in what happened after the
downfall of the regime in Baghdad. I'm getting damn tired of being described
as an architect of the war. I was in favor of bringing down Saddam. Nobody
said, 'Go design the campaign to do that.' I had no responsibility for
that."
Kenneth Adelman: "The problem here is not a selling job. The problem is a
performance job.… Rumsfeld has said that the war could never be lost in
Iraq, it could only be lost in Washington. I don't think that's true at
all.
We're losing in Iraq.… I've worked with [Rumsfeld] three times in my life.
I've been to each of his houses, in Chicago, Taos, Santa Fe, Santo Domingo,
and Las Vegas. I'm very, very fond of him, but I'm crushed by his
performance. Did he change, or were we wrong in the past? Or is it that he
was never really challenged before? I don't know. He certainly fooled me."
Eliot Cohen, director of the strategic-studies program at the Johns Hopkins
School of Advanced International Studies and member of the Defense Policy
Board: "I wouldn't be surprised if what we end up drifting toward is some
sort of withdrawal on some sort of timetable and leaving the place in a
pretty ghastly mess.… I do think it's going to end up encouraging various
strands of Islamism, both Shia and Sunni, and probably will bring
de-stabilization of some regimes of a more traditional kind, which already
have their problems.… The best news is that the United States remains a
healthy, vibrant, vigorous society. So in a real pinch, we can still pull
ourselves together. Unfortunately, it will probably take another big hit.
And a very different quality of leadership. Maybe we'll get it."
David Rose is a Vanity Fair contributing editor | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Dec 09, 2006 8:51 am Post subject: |
| http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/10/books/10kaku.html?ex=1165813200&en=48dce3d968611cd4&ei=5070
October 10, 2006
Books of The Times
Tracing Colin Powell’s Journey, Both in and Out of Step With Those Around Him
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
SOLDIER
The Life of Colin Powell
By Karen DeYoung
Illlustrated. 610 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $28.95.
As the war in Iraq drags on, and more and more is learned about the missteps and misrepresentations made in the walkup to the war, it becomes clear that former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell — who harbored serious doubts about the wisdom of invasion and who frequently found himself an outsider in an administration dominated by neo-conservative hawks — was prescient about a host of issues, from the difficulties of rebuilding a postwar Iraq to the need for higher troop levels and multilateral support.
Even as his foresight is underscored, journalists and former colleagues have continued to ask: Why didn’t Mr. Powell resign when he realized that much of his advice was being ignored? Why didn’t he more forcefully express his reservations about the war to President Bush? Why did he put up with being cut out of major foreign policy decisions by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld? Why was he unable to make the president and the Pentagon heed the tenets of the “Powell Doctrine” (which held that military commitments must be made with decisive force, a clear objective and popular support, to avoid another Vietnam)?
As Karen DeYoung, an associate editor of The Washington Post, notes in her new biography, various theories have been advanced to explain Mr. Powell’s decision to quietly stick out his first-term tenure as secretary of state. She writes that some of his closest overseas counterparts speculated “that his military background made him unwilling to question orders or that any black man who reached the top in America must have done so by toeing the line.”
She observes that some Foreign Service officers believed that he stayed put because he was “the only thing standing between a sustainable foreign policy and utter national disaster,” and that in the words of one assistant secretary, he prevented “much worse stuff from happening.”
And, finally, she suggests that Mr. Powell let the administration use his prestige and popularity “even as it repeatedly undermined him and disregarded his advice,” at least in part because he “simply refused to acknowledge the extent of the losses he had suffered”: “Beyond his soldier’s sense of duty, he saw even the threat of resignation as an acknowledgment of defeat. He was a proud man, and he would never have let them see him sweat.”
Much of “Soldier” retraces familiar ground. The first half of the book — which focuses on Mr. Powell’s early life, his distinguished Army career and his role in the first gulf war under the first President Bush — draws heavily on the general’s own memoirs, published in 1995. The second half, devoted to his tenure as the second President Bush’s secretary of state, reiterates a lot of information in earlier books by reporters like Bob Woodward, Seymour M. Hersh and Ron Suskind, while echoing observations made more vociferously by Mr. Powell’s former chief of staff Lawrence B. Wilkerson, who in the last year has become an increasingly outspoken critic of the administration.
Mr. Powell gave Ms. DeYoung six lengthy, on-the-record interviews (five in 2003-4, when he was secretary of state, and one in 2005 after leaving office), and this book’s chief usefulness is in fleshing out the narrative of the administration’s road to war from the general’s perspective — much the way Mr. Suskind’s book “The Price of Loyalty” fleshed out a portrait of the administration from the point of view of Paul O’Neill, the former treasury secretary. Sometimes Ms. DeYoung is content to play the role of Mr. Powell’s sock puppet, channeling his views of the Bush administration. Sometimes she steps back to offer her own assessments of the general’s decisions.
As depicted in “Soldier,” Colin Powell comes across as an able public servant blessed with enormous experience, common sense and political skills, but also hampered as secretary of state by an underestimation of his hawkish colleagues’ determination to go to war and an overconfidence in his own ability to influence President Bush. Both before and after 9/11, he was the odd man out: a careful tactician in an administration driven by visionary zeal; a moderate and multilateralist in an administration inclined toward unilateral and pre-emptive action.
Caution seems to be a hallmark of both his personality and his style: Ms. DeYoung tells us that as a junior officer, Mr. Powell had his grade on an exam nicked for not coming up with a bolder response to a hypothetical war-fighting question, and later carried with him a three-by-five card that read, “Avoid Conservatism.” Caution would inform his reluctance to rush to war against Iraq, but it also appears to have informed his dealings with President Bush and administration hawks.
“Powell thought that Bush had a bad habit of driving headlong down blind alleys or going along for the ride when policy was being driven by Cheney, often with Rumsfeld in the jump seat,” Ms. DeYoung writes. “But at least the president was usually willing to apply the brakes before crashing into a wall, and he seemed to understand that his secretary of state was there to steer him back toward a reasonable course.”
At least that is how Mr. Powell saw it, she suggests, “in a series of first-year crises — the initial hard lines on China and on troop withdrawal from Bosnia, the refusal to talk to North Korea and the move toward peremptory withdrawal from the ABM treaty.”
Yet at the same time, she observes, “Powell was slow to grasp the extent of his — and the State Department’s — isolation within Bush’s national security team,” adding that, in the wake of 9/11, with hawks pushing the case for war, he remained “certain there was still plenty of time to get Iraq right.”
The portrait of the Bush White House that emerges from this volume ratifies those drawn in many other recent books: it is an administration in which traditional policy-making channels are subverted, expert advice is frequently ignored, and substantive debate and discussion are avoided.
Like many earlier books by reporters and former administration insiders, this volume suggests that the National Security Council — which is supposed to mediate differences among the State Department, the Pentagon and other administration officials — was highly dysfunctional: as national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice at times seemed “willfully blind to the damage being done by these intramural disputes.” More dangerously, in Mr. Powell’s view, “she tended to echo back to the president what she thought he wanted to hear rather than what he needed to know.”
During the winter of 2002-3, Ms. DeYoung notes, the National Security Council “met regularly to review the status of both military planning and the diplomatic effort,” but “the principals had never discussed the pros and cons of the war itself.” There was never a moment, Mr. Powell said, when they all made their recommendations, and Mr. Bush made a decision.
As Mr. Powell saw it, writes Ms. DeYoung, the “main impediment to a more orderly, disciplined process in the Bush administration” was Vice President Cheney, who had his own shadow National Security Council staff and who spent a good part of every day in Mr. Bush’s presence: “The president tended to pay most attention to the last person to whisper in his ear, Powell thought, and that person was usually Cheney.”
The growing antipathy between Mr. Powell and the State Department on one side, and Mr. Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld and their senior staffs on the other, Ms. DeYoung says, extended far beyond specific policy disagreements: “It was institutional, ideological and even personal.” She adds: “Powell was put off by Cheney’s dour certitude,” while “Cheney thought that anyone as smooth and popular as Powell was inherently untrustworthy.”
As recounted by Ms. DeYoung, one of the great paradoxes — and tragedies — of Mr. Powell’s story is that his experiences in Vietnam, combined with his experiences in the Reagan administration where he witnessed the fallout of Iran-Contra, left him with the deeply held belief that “presidential policy decisions made without a full and honest airing of options and potential pitfalls among a range of senior advisers usually resulted in disaster.”
In his role as secretary of state in the administration of George W. Bush, Mr. Powell was unable to impress upon the president and the rest of his war cabinet the wisdom of this lesson, as they hurried America to war against Iraq and as he, the good soldier, reluctantly went along. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Dec 09, 2006 8:55 am Post subject: |
| http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/books/review/Lewis.t.html?ex=1165813200&en=da8ebcebdaa45602&ei=5070
November 26, 2006
Reluctant Warrior
By MICHAEL LEWIS
SOLDIER
The Life of Colin Powell.
By Karen DeYoung.
Illustrated. 610 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $28.95.
When her kid brother exhibited a strange new passion for church-going, Marilyn Powell decided he was “as much enthralled with the pageantry and costumes as he was imbued with the Holy Spirit.” A few years later, when Colin Powell, an otherwise aimless freshman at City College in New York, enrolled in the R.O.T.C. program, those who knew him best would conclude that he was less interested in serving his country than in the spit and the shine. “What attracted him more than anything else was their uniforms,” Karen DeYoung writes in her account of Powell’s life. “The young cadets looked sharp in their dark brown shirts and ties and gleaming brass buckles. Compared to his solitary, stumbling progress through college, they seemed to belong to something and to know where they were going.” The young Colin Powell seems to have been a character in search of a role, who sensed that it would be easier to play if it came with a costume.
A less sympathetic biographer might have seized on this point in Powell’s character — a perhaps excessive interest in the surface of things — turned it into a weapon and run him through with it. DeYoung, an associate editor at The Washington Post, offers it up more mercifully as just another of Powell’s personality traits, to be set incongruously beside his courage, ambition, humor, evasiveness, charm, calculation and decency. It’s not that she is entirely uncritical; it’s just that she is blessed with the ability to see through her subject and forgive him for the view. She’s written a portrait of Powell that is as revealing as it can be and remain flattering, and as flattering as it can be and remain revealing. And she’s written it very well.
The general outlines of Powell’s life will be more than familiar to his fans and readers of his memoir, “My American Journey” — itself so well traveled that even Fidel Castro bought himself a copy, and ordered it translated into Spanish. Right from the start Powell seems to have been perfectly suited to the United States Army, and rose rapidly through its ranks. Along the way he proved himself competent, reliable, punctilious and physically brave. Most famously, in Vietnam he rushed into the wreckage of his crashed and smoking helicopter to drag fellow soldiers to safety. But he was brave in other ways too, and stood up for the Army when he might more easily have walked away and left it to rot. Home from Vietnam, Powell remained a soldier, but enrolled in an M.B.A. program at George Washington University. In full uniform, wearing a chestful of ribbons and medals, he walked onto a campus where the military was by then reviled. One evening, as he sat with a Navy veteran, a student came up to Powell, called him a “mindless military robot” and began to ridicule his uniform. The room “was full of kids just like this guy — long hair, jeans, wire-rim glasses, old fatigue jackets,” Powell’s friend recalls. “Colin looked the young man up and down and said, ‘Who do you say is in uniform?’ And the kid just sputtered for a minute and walked away.” As DeYoung writes, “He thought of those who quit the service in protest as slightly inferior beings, although never as lowly as those who had used money or connections or unmerited draft deferments to weasel their way out of the war in the first place.”
That Powell never allowed race to interfere with his rise in the world appears to have been less a matter of colorblindness than of shrewdness. Ronald Reagan apparently once said, “You know, you don’t even think of Colin as black,” and many of the white officers who promoted him, as well as Powell himself, seemed to concur. (“I ain’t that black,” he once explained to someone who asked how a black man’s career could have met with so little resistance from whites.) Powell, DeYoung writes, “saw no personal profit in racial activism and considered himself largely above, or at least apart from, issues of color.” The story she tells in “Soldier” is less a story of a black man making it in a white world than a case study in career management in Washington for a man of any color. Powell, who seemed to have a sixth sense for self-advancement, may be the closest thing to Dale Carnegie ever produced by the American bureaucracy. He had a fondness for career maxims, and a gift for sage career advice. “Members of Congress are not accustomed to playing by our rules of duty, honor, country,” read a report he oversaw for the Army, which had become concerned with its inability to get what it wanted from politicians. “They are sometimes selfish, self-centered, ill informed and irreverent. ... We strongly recommend you mentally prepare yourself to aggressively work with the Congress. ... It won’t always be pleasant — but the payoff will be astounding.” The oddly ambitious who make a close study of Powell’s rise will find a great many stated rules for success here, and a few unstated ones as well.
Unstated Rule No. 1, for instance, seems to be that if you want to be a player in Washington you must sacrifice much of your private life. DeYoung tells us that early in Powell’s career, on family automobile trips, he’d take his seat behind the wheel and drive as fast as he could to get from one place to the next, ignoring the scenery in between. His family seems to have accepted its place in the back seat of his life, just as DeYoung seems to have realized that the biography she was working on was not so much of a man as of a career. As Powell’s career flourishes, the space she devotes to his life away from work dwindles. And from the moment in 1986 when he is named Reagan’s deputy national security adviser, less than a third of the way into her narrative, she treats his personal life almost as an afterthought — as it appears to have been to him.
Which brings us to Unstated Rule No. 2: you should cultivate an ability to overlook the idiocy of your superiors. Actually, Powell almost came right out and said this once. “I detected a common thread running through the careers of officers who ran aground even though they were clearly able,” he wrote, looking back on his time in the Army but also ahead to his time working for several presidents. “They fought what they found foolish or irrelevant, and consequently did not survive to do what they considered vital.” He never forgot, as he put it, to “pay the king his shilling.” When Powell leaves the conventional path inside the fighting end of the military and enters the political end, he brings with him his sack of shillings. For example, he joins the first Bush administration at the pleasure of Dick Cheney, for whom he clearly felt only contempt. “As far as Powell was concerned,” DeYoung writes, “the most salient fact about Cheney was his avoidance of the Vietnam draft.” The second most salient fact was that he was, in Powell’s view, something close to a right-wing loon. But Powell hid his feelings well. “Powell had no intention of letting his personal doubts about Cheney stand in the way of his career,” DeYoung writes.
But in retrospect that career, like this book about the career — and this review of the book — was driving at speed toward a pothole. Had Powell’s work ended with his memoir and his decision not to run for president in 1996, it’s doubtful that a major publisher, or a first-rate journalist, would see much point in his biography. Too much about Powell was already known, or thought to be known. His image was so fixed and secure — a statue inside the mind of the American public — that he was no longer terribly interesting. But then he did the world of letters a favor: he went to work for a second President Bush and helped to lead the nation into a disastrous second war in Iraq. The statue stepped down from its pedestal and began, once again, to breathe.
From the way DeYoung has put her book together — two-fifths of it is devoted to the final four years of Powell’s career — it’s hard to escape the conclusion that she wrote it in response to a single moment: when Colin Powell appeared before the United Nations and made the case that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. DeYoung recounts the run-up to that speech in greater detail than she provides for any other period in Powell’s career: his appointment as secretary of state, his steady humiliation inside the Bush administration, his willingness to pay the boss his shilling, and then some. The point of view on offer is almost always that of Powell himself, with whom the author conducted half a dozen interviews. When DeYoung writes, “In this administration, presidential decisions seemed to come out of the ether,” or “Bush had an irritating tendency to interrupt everyone from his cabinet officers to visiting heads of state,” she is channeling her subject. And it is mainly from Powell’s point of view that she describes, blow by blow, the preparation of the Speech. The C.I.A. and the White House kept presenting dubious evidence — aluminum tubes supposedly intended for nuclear purposes, sinister meetings between Al Qaeda and Iraq that probably never happened — until the State Department’s speechwriters finally lowered their standards of admissibility. “What we were all involved in — groupthink isn’t the right word,” says Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell’s chief of staff. “It was a process of putting the data to points in the speech rather than challenging the data itself.”
In this telling — as in others — Powell advises the president to delay and allow him time to persuade and the inspectors time to work. The process by which the decision was made to invade Iraq was unusual, in Powell’s view, because the president never seemed to solicit the views of his advisers. Bush decided on war, Powell says, “in his own mind, by himself.” (As deciders will do.) When Wilkerson informed Powell that even if Iraq had weapons of mass destruction they might be impossible to find, Powell replied, “I wonder what we’ll do when we put half a million troops on the ground in Iraq and search it from one end to the other — and find nothing.” It was an echo of a moment before the Persian Gulf war of 1991, when, seeing the decision to go to war had been made, a similarly hedgy Powell went home and wrote a private note to himself. In it, DeYoung says, Powell told himself that “he had done what his conscience and duty required.” His job was to serve the president, not to undermine him.
Walking into the United Nations, Powell understood he was being used by the administration to persuade not foreign governments but the American people. And persuade them he did. Before his speech, DeYoung points out, two-thirds of Americans were against going to war; after it, half of them favored war. Three-quarters of those polled by The Los Angeles Times said they felt Powell had proved the case against Iraq. Before the speech Colin Powell was the most unambiguously admired figure in public life. “You’ve got high poll ratings,” Cheney said to him beforehand, as he poked Powell in the chest. “You can afford to lose a few points.” “They needed him to do it,” Powell’s wife, Alma, says here, “because they knew people would believe him.”
How you feel about all this will probably say as much about you as it does about Powell. On the one hand, it would have been useful, in retrospect, if he had sacrificed his career for the sake of his country; on the other hand, at the time it wasn’t clear, even to Powell, that his country was making a colossal mistake, or that he had the power to prevent it. But because his decision not to take Bush on directly had the pleasant side effect of preserving his job and his status, it feels, again in retrospect, as if it was another case of Powell being unwilling to do anything that might damage his career.
But this moment in Powell’s career obviously says something about Powell, too. What exactly that is DeYoung prefers not to put too fine a point on. She doesn’t exactly let him off the hook. After quoting the retired general Anthony Zinni on his deep admiration for Powell, for instance, she allows him to add: “Powell is a pretty ambitious guy. I don’t think it was in him to stop this by bringing down his president.” But she leaves the reader with the sense that Colin Powell was a good man in a bad administration, and that he deserves mostly sympathy for his predicament. He argued against war right up until war became inevitable, then, like a good soldier, followed his orders.
Only he wasn’t a soldier. He was a wily old political hand. I don’t doubt that Powell acted as brake rather than accelerator. But he has preserved this kind of deniability in almost every aspect of his public life. He seems never to have accepted a promotion without making the promoter beg him to take it, and he seems never to have gone along with a plan without first warning that it might not work. His one theoretical contribution to statecraft — the Powell doctrine — is a kind of extension of his flank-protecting instinct. The doctrine, articulated by Powell, is that “if in the end war becomes necessary ... you must do it right. You’ve got to be decisive. You’ve got to go in massively. You’ve got to be wise and fight in a way that keeps casualties to a minimum. And you’ve got to go in to win.” It’s hard to disagree with any of this — which is the problem. What it amounts to, really, is an escape hatch in the event of failure. “You see,” it enables the speaker to say, when the day of public reckoning comes, “we didn’t go in massively enough. We lost because we didn’t go in to win.” But the thing about war is that you never know in advance how it’s going to end, or what it will take to win, or what it will lead to.
It’s not surprising that a man first drawn to religion for the pomp and the Army for the uniform winds up, when he enters politics, obsessing so over his image. And it’s not surprising that, having managed it so beautifully, he fails to see its limits. Lawrence Wilkerson — on whom the author appears to have leaned for some point of view other than Powell’s — is interesting on the way Powell was used and abused by the people with power inside the Bush administration. “He had had so many years of success,” Wilkerson tells DeYoung, “that he had come to believe not that he was invulnerable, but that with his persuasiveness, charisma and celebrity, he could just about persuade anybody to do anything. And I think it came as a shock to him as he began to realize that it wasn’t going to work out that way.”
Michael Lewis is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. His most recent book is “The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game.” | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Dec 09, 2006 9:53 am Post subject: |
| Wilkerson (who was the assistant to Colin Powell in the US Army and while Powell was at the State Department as well) also mentioned that there was a cabal from the White House to the Pentagon (as Wilkerson has mentioned Bamford's 'A Pretext for War' book as well - be sure to take a look at the paperback version though as it includes the additional section about the ongoing AIPAC espionage case which the pro-Israel biased US press/media isn't covering either).
Wilkerson is mentioned in the following article:
October 20, 2005
Powell Aide Blasts Rice, Cheney-Rumsfeld 'Cabal'
by Jim Lobe
As top officials in the White House and Vice President Dick Cheney's office await possible criminal indictments for their efforts to discredit a whistleblower, a top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell on Wednesday accused a "cabal" led by Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld of hijacking U.S. foreign policy by circumventing or ignoring formal decision-making channels.
Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Powell's chief of staff from 2001 to 2005 and when Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. Armed Forces during the administration of former president George H.W. Bush, also charged that, as national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice was "part of the problem" by not ensuring that the policymaking process was open to all relevant participants.
"In some cases, there was real dysfunctionality," said Wilkerson, who spoke at the New America Foundation, a prominent Washington think tank. "But in most cases … she [Rice] made a decision that she would side with the president to build her intimacy with the president."
"[T]he case that I saw for four-plus years," he said, "was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, and perturbations in the national-security [policymaking] process," he added.
"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."
Wilkerson also stressed that the "extremely powerful" influence of what he called the "Oval Office Cabal" of Cheney and Rumsfeld, both former secretaries of defense with a long-standing personal and professional relationship, adding that both were members of the "military-industrial complex" that former President Dwight Eisenhower warned the nation against in his 1961 Farewell Address. "[D]on't you think they aren't among us today in a concentration of power that is just unparalleled," he warned.
Wilkerson's remarks came as the administration is besieged by record-low approval ratings and anticipation that a special prosecutor will hand down indictments of top aides to both Bush and Cheney, including Bush's political adviser, Karl Rove, and Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, in connection with efforts to discredit retired ambassador Joseph Wilson.
In July 2003, Wilson publicly challenged the administration's prewar depiction of Iraq 's alleged nuclear-weapons program, and particularly its assertion that Baghdad had sought to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger , an assertion that Wilson himself investigated and rejected in early 2002 after traveling to Niger as part of a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) mission.
White House officials, including Rove and Libby, told reporters that Wilson 's wife worked for the CIA and played a role in selecting him for the mission.
On Wednesday, Capitol Hill was rife with rumors that Cheney himself may also be indicted or resign over the scandal. They were given more credence by an anecdote recounted that Powell had told a prominent Republican senator that Cheney had become "fixated" on the relationship between Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, after he and Bush learned about it directly from Powell.
Since his departure from the administration, Powell has declined to publicly criticize U.S. policy or his former cabinet colleagues. Until now, Wilkerson has also kept his counsel, although he publicly opposed John Bolton's confirmation as UN ambassador. At that time, most analysts believed that Wilkerson reflected Powell's private views on Bolton .
That would not be surprising, as Wilkerson worked directly with or for Powell for some 16 years out of their 30-plus-year military and government careers. At the same time, Wilkerson said he had paid a "high cost" in his personal relationship with Powell for publicly speaking out.
"Wilkerson embodies Powell and [Powell's deputy secretary of state, Richard] Armitage," who is also a retired military officer, Steve Clemons, who organized Wilkerson's NAF appearance, told IPS. "That's how his remarks should be seen."
If so, it appears that Powell and Armitage have little but disdain for Rice's performance as national security adviser, although Wilkerson was more complimentary about her work at the State Department and the relative success she has enjoyed in steering U.S. policy in a less confrontational direction compared to the frustrations that dogged Powell.
He attributed her success to several factors, including her "intimacy with the president" and the fact that the administration "finds itself in some fairly desperate straits politically and otherwise."
Most of his remarks, however, addressed what he described as national-security policymaking apparatus that was made dysfunctional by secrecy, compartmentalization, and distrust, as well as the machinations of the Cheney-Rumsfeld "cabal."
"You've got this collegiality there between the secretary of defense and the vice president," he said. "And then you've got a president who is not versed in international relations – and not too much interested in them either. And so it's not too difficult to make decisions in this, what I call the Oval Office Cabal, and decisions often that are the opposite of what you thought were made in the formal [decision-making] process."
"Why did we wait three years to talk to the North Koreans? Why did we wait four-plus years to at least back the EU-3 approach to Iran ?" he asked. "… The formal process … camouflaged the efficiency of the secret decision-making process. So we got into Iraq ."
"And then when the bureaucracy was presented with those decisions and carried them out, it was 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," he said.
"If you're not prepared to stop the feuding elements in the bureaucracy as they carry out your decisions, you are courting disaster," he said. "And I would say that we have courted disaster in Iraq , in North Korea , in Iran ."
Wilkerson was particularly scathing about former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, citing Gen. Tommy Frank's famous description of the neoconservative ideologue as the "f*cking stupidest guy on the planet."
"Let me testify to that," he said. "He was. Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man. And yet, after the [Pentagon is given] control, at least in the immediate postwar period in Iraq , this many is put in charge. Not only is he put in charge, he is given carte blanche to tell the State Department to go screw themselves in a closet somewhere. … That's telling you how decisions were made and … how things got accomplished."
He also denounced the abuse of detainees and said Powell was particularly upset by it. "Ten years from now, when we have the whole story, we are going to be ashamed," he said. "This is not us. This is not the way we do business. I don't think in our history we've ever had a presidential involvement, a secretarial involvement, a vice-presidential involvement, an attorney general's involvement in telling our troops essentially, carte blanche is the way you should feel. You should not have any qualms because this is a different kind of conflict."
"You don't have this kind of pervasive attitude out there unless you've condoned it," he said adding that "it will take years to reverse the situation" within the military. He said it was a "concrete example" of the result of the way the cabal worked.
Wilkerson also contrasted Bush's diplomacy very unfavorably with his father's. Referring to Bush's first meeting with South Korean President Kim Dae Jung, Wilkerson noted: "When you put your feet up on a hassock and look at the man who's won the Nobel Prize and is currently president of South Korea and tell him in a very insulting way that you don't agree with his assessment of what is necessary to be reconciled with the North, that's not diplomacy; that's cowboyism."
"It's very different when you walk in and find something you can be magnanimous about, that you can give him, that you can say he or she gets credit, that's diplomacy. You don't say, 'I'm the big mother on the block and everybody who's not with me is against me.' That's the difference between father and son."
At the same time, Bush had been "wonderful" in "put[ting] his foot down" against a more aggressive policy on North Korea, at one point saying, according to Wilkerson, "I do not want a war on the Korean peninsula."
"That was very helpful, very helpful," said Wilkerson. "It helped us fight off some less desirable results."
Cheney, he said, was a "good executive" as defense secretary under George H. W. Bush but appeared to change as a result of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. "I think [he] saw 9/11 and the potential for another 9/11 with nuclear weapons and suddenly became so fixated on that problem that it skewed his approach," Wilkerson said, adding that neither he nor Rumsfeld could be considered neoconservatives.
On Iraq , he said he was "guardedly optimistic" because "we may have reached the point where we are actually listening to the Iraqis." U.S. troops will likely have to remain in Iraq for between five to eight years, however, because "it is strategic in the sense that Vietnam was not."
He predicted that a precipitous withdrawal "without leav[ing] something behind we can trust, we will mobilize the nation, with five million men and women under arms to go back and take the Middle East within a decade," due to the U.S. dependence on the region's energy sources.
He disclosed that the Department's policy planning bureau had a discussion about "actually mounting an operation to take the oil fields in the Middle East , internationalize them under some sort of UN trusteeship, and administer the revenues and the oil accordingly."
(Inter Press Service)
Find this article at:
http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=7703
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.state.gov/outofdate/bios/w/26731.htm
BIOGRAPHY
Lawrence B. Wilkerson
Chief of Staff,
Term of Appointment: 08/01/2002 to 01/26/2005
Colonel, U.S. Army (Retired) Larry Wilkerson joined General Colin L. Powell in March 1989 at the U.S. Army’s Forces Command in Atlanta, Georgia as his Deputy Executive Officer. He followed the General to his next position as Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, serving as his special assistant. Upon Powell's retirement from active service in 1993, Colonel Wilkerson served as the Deputy Director and Director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College at Quantico, Virginia. Upon Wilkerson’s retirement from active service in 1997, he began working for General Powell in a private capacity as a consultant and advisor.
In December 2000, Secretary of State-designate Powell asked Wilkerson to join him in the Transition Office at the U.S. State Department and, later, upon his confirmation as Secretary of State, Secretary Powell moved Wilkerson to his Policy Planning Staff with responsibilities for East Asia and the Pacific, and legislative and political-military affairs. In June of 2002, the Director for Policy Planning, Ambassador Richard Haass, made Wilkerson the associate director. In August of 2002, Secretary Powell moved Wilkerson to the position of Chief of Staff of the Department.
Wilkerson is a veteran of the Vietnam war as well as a U.S. Army “Pacific hand,” having served in Korea, Japan, and Hawaii and participated in military exercises throughout the Pacific. Moreover, Wilkerson was Executive Assistant to US Navy Admiral Stewart A. Ring, Director for Strategy and Policy (J5) USCINCPAC, from 1984-87. Wilkerson also served on the faculty of the U.S. Naval War College at Newport, RI and holds two advanced degrees, one in International Relations and the other in National Security Studies. He has written extensively on military and national security affairs–especially for college-level curricula--and been published in a number of professional journals, including the Naval Institute’s Proceedings, The Naval War College Review, Military Review, and Joint Force Quarterly (JFQ). | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Dec 09, 2006 10:58 am Post subject: |
| COMMENTARY
Wilkerson: The president's cabal has cost our country
Lawrence B. Wilkerson, SPECIAL TO THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
Thursday, October 27, 2005
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 American Foundation in Washington, D.C., 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 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 adviser 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.
But the secret process ultimately failed. It produced a series of disastrous decisions and virtually ensured that the agencies charged with implementing them would not or could not execute them well.
I watched these dual decision-making processes operate for four years at the State Department. As chief of staff for 27 months, I had a door adjoining the secretary of State's office. I read virtually every document he read. I read the intelligence briefings and spoke daily with people from all across government.
I knew that what I was observing was not what Congress intended when it passed the 1947 National Security Act. The law created the National Security Council — consisting of the president, vice president and the secretaries of State and Defense — to make sure the nation's vital national security decisions were thoroughly vetted.
But many of the most crucial decisions from 2001 to 2005 were not made within the traditional NSC process.
Scholars and knowledgeable critics of the U.S. decision-making process may rightly say, so what? Haven't all of our presidents in the last half-century failed to conform to the usual process at one time or another? Isn't it the president's prerogative to make decisions with whomever he pleases? Moreover, can he not ignore whomever he pleases? Why should we care that President Bush gave over much of the critical decision-making to his vice president and his secretary of Defense?
Both as a former academic and as a person who has been in the ring with the bull, I believe that there are two reasons we should care. First, such departures from the process have led us into a host of disasters, including the last years of the Vietnam War, the national embarrassment of Watergate, the Iran-Contra scandal and now the ruinous foreign policy of George W. Bush.
But a second and far more important reason is that the nature of both governance and crisis has changed in the modern age. From managing the environment to securing sufficient energy resources, from dealing with trafficking in human beings to performing peacekeeping missions abroad, governing is vastly more complicated than ever before.
Further, the crises the U.S. government confronts today are so multifaceted, so complex, so fast-breaking — and almost always with such incredible potential for regional and global ripple effects — that to depart from the systematic decision-making process laid out in the 1947 statute invites disaster.
Discounting the professional experience available within the federal bureaucracy — and ignoring entirely the inevitable but often frustrating dissent that often arises therein — makes for quick and painless decisions. But when government agencies are confronted with decisions in which they did not participate and with which they frequently disagree, their implementation of those decisions is fractured, uncoordinated and inefficient.
It takes firm leadership to preside over the bureaucracy. But it also takes a willingness to listen to dissenting opinions. It requires leaders who can analyze, synthesize, ponder and decide.
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.
Today, we have a president whose approval rating is 38 percent and a vice president who speaks only to Rush Limbaugh and assembled military forces. We have a secretary of Defense presiding over the death-by-a-thousand-cuts of our overstretched armed forces.
It's a disaster. Given the choice, I'd choose a frustrating bureaucracy over an efficient cabal every time.
Wilkerson served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005. He wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.
Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/stories/10/27wilkerson_edit.html | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Dec 09, 2006 11:09 am Post subject: |
| ‘Cheney cabal hijacked US foreign policy’
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/afdb7b0c-40f3-11da-b3f9-00000e2511c8.html
By Edward Alden in Washington
Published: October 19 2005 23:00 | Last updated: October 19 2005 23:19
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.”
Transcript: Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson
Click hereMr 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.
It also resulted in bitter battles in the administration among those excluded from the decisions.
“If you're not prepared to stop the feuding elements in the bureaucracy as they carry out your decisions, you are courting disaster. And I would say that we have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran.”
The comments, made at the New America Foundation, a Washington think-tank, were the harshest attack on the administration by a former senior official since criticisms by Richard Clarke, former White House terrorism czar, and Paul O'Neill, former Treasury secretary, early last year.
Mr Wilkerson said his decision to go public had led to a personal falling out with Mr Powell, whom he served for 16 years at the Pentagon and the State Department.
“He's not happy with my speaking out because, and I admire this in him, he is the world's most loyal soldier."
Among his other charges:
■ The detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere was “a concrete example” of the decision-making problem, with the president and other top officials in effect giving the green light to soldiers to abuse detainees. “You don't have this kind of pervasive attitude out there unless you've condoned it.”
■ Condoleezza Rice, the former national security adviser and now secretary of state, was “part of the problem”. Instead of ensuring that Mr Bush received the best possible advice, “she would side with the president to build her intimacy with the president”.
■ The military, particularly the army and marine corps, is overstretched and demoralised. Officers, Mr Wilkerson claimed, “start voting with their feet, as they did in Vietnam. . . and all of a sudden your military begins to unravel”.
Mr Wilkerson said former president George H.W. Bush “one of the finest presidents we have ever had” understood how to make foreign policy work. In contrast, he said, his son was “not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either”.
“There's a vast difference between the way George H.W. Bush dealt with major challenges, some of the greatest challenges at the end of the 20th century, and effected positive results in my view, and the way we conduct diplomacy today.”
www.newamerica.net
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006 | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Dec 18, 2006 1:29 pm Post subject: Powell Says U.S. Losing in Iraq, Calls for Drawdown by Mid-2 |
| Powell Says U.S. Losing in Iraq, Calls for Drawdown by Mid-2007
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/17/AR2006121700494.html
Monday, December 18, 2006; A20
Former secretary of state Colin L. Powell said yesterday that the United States is losing what he described as a "civil war" in Iraq and that he is not persuaded that an increase in U.S. troops there would reverse the situation. Instead, he called for a new strategy that would relinquish responsibility for Iraqi security to the government in Baghdad sooner rather than later, with a U.S. drawdown to begin by the middle of next year.
Powell's comments broke his long public silence on the issue and placed him at odds with the administration. President Bush is considering options for a new military strategy -- among them a "surge" of 15,000 to 30,000 troops added to the current 140,000 in Iraq, to secure Baghdad and to accelerate the training of Iraqi forces, as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and others have proposed; or a redirection of the U.S. military away from the insurgency to focus mainly on hunting al-Qaeda terrorists, as the nation's top military leaders proposed last week in a meeting with the president.
But Bush has rejected the dire conclusions of the Iraq Study Group and its recommendations to set parameters for a phased withdrawal to begin next year, and he has insisted that the violence in Iraq is not a civil war.
"I agree with the assessment of Mr. Baker and Mr. Hamilton," Powell said, referring to the study group's leaders, former secretary of state James A. Baker III and former Indiana congressman Lee H. Hamilton (D). The situation in Iraq is "grave and deteriorating, and we're not winning, we are losing. We haven't lost. And this is the time, now, to start to put in place the kinds of strategies that will turn this situation around."
Speaking on CBS's "Face the Nation," Powell seemed to draw as much from his 35-year Army career, including four years as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as from his more recent and difficult tenure as Bush's chief diplomat.
The summer's surge of U.S. troops to try to stabilize Baghdad failed, he said, and any new attempt is unlikely to succeed. "If somebody proposes that additional troops be sent, if I was still chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, my first question . . . is what mission is it these troops are supposed to accomplish? . . . Is it something that is really accomplishable? . . . Do we have enough troops to accomplish it?"
Although he said he agrees with Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, that there should be an increase in U.S. advisers to the Iraqi military, he said that "sooner or later, you have to begin the baton pass, passing it off to the Iraqis for their security and to begin the drawdown of U.S. forces. I think that's got to happen sometime before the middle of next year."
Before any decision to increase troops, he said, "I'd want to have a clear understanding of what it is they're going for, how long they're going for. And let's be clear about something else. . . . There really are no additional troops. All we would be doing is keeping some of the troops who were there, there longer and escalating or accelerating the arrival of other troops."
He added: "That's how you surge. And that surge cannot be sustained."
The "active Army is about broken," Powell said. Even beyond Iraq, the Army and Marines have to "grow in size, in my military judgment," he said, adding that Congress must provide significant additional funding to sustain them.
Powell also agreed with the study group's recommendation that the administration open talks with Syria and Iran as it seeks a solution to the Iraq problem. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have explicitly rejected talks until Syria ends its destabilizing influence in Lebanon and its support for anti-Israel militants, and until Iran suspends its nuclear enrichment program. The administration has charged both countries with aiding the Iraqi insurgency.
"Do they get marginal support from Iran and Syria? You bet they do," Powell said of the Iraq militants. "I have no illusions that either Syria or Iran want to help us in Iraq. I am also quite confident that what is happening in Iraq is self-generated for the most part. The money, the resources, the weapons are in Iraq already."
He added: "Are Iran and Syria regimes that I look down upon? I certainly do. But at the same time, I've looked down on many people over the years, in the course of my military and diplomatic career, and I still had to talk to them."
During Bush's first term, Powell was often on the losing side of disagreements with then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney and the president over a range of foreign policy issues, including the Arab-Israeli peace process, North Korea and Iraq. Although he ultimately supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq -- and played a major role in building public backing for war when he delivered a U.N. Security Council speech saying Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction -- he objected to the administration's detention and interrogation policies for "enemy combatants" and privately questioned the lack of planning and troop strength for postwar Iraq.
His low-key departure from office in January 2005, after Bush's request for his resignation, stood in contrast to Friday's ceremonial farewell to Rumsfeld, whose retirement festivities at the Pentagon were attended by Bush and Cheney. Asked yesterday whether he agreed with Cheney's assessment that Rumsfeld was "the finest defense secretary this nation has ever had," Powell demurred.
"Well, that's the vice president's judgment," he said. "I've known many fine secretaries of defense. . . . But it's history that will judge the performance of all of us in this troubling time . . . and it is a history that I think will ultimately be written as a result of what happens in Iraq."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Powell Says U.S. Army `About Broken' Because of Iraq (Update1)
By Paul Basken and Nadine Elsibai
Dec. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said the U.S. Army is ``about broken'' from the Iraq conflict and cast doubt on whether the military could or should boost the number of troops in the country.
``There really are no additional troops'' to send, Powell said on CBS's ``Face the Nation'' program. ``The current active Army is not large enough and the Marine Corps is not large enough for the kinds of missions they are being asked to perform.''
Powell, 69, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War and the nation's chief foreign policy official during President George W. Bush's first term, said the war has made the U.S. ``a little less safe'' because it has limited the military's ability to respond to another crisis.
The U.S. is at a crossroads in Iraq as Bush reviews assessments from outside experts and administration advisers in preparation for announcing his next steps in Iraq after the first of the year.
Among the options the president is considering is sending 15,000 to 30,000 more troops to Iraq temporarily, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post reported last week, citing unidentified administration officials. Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona has been the leading congressional advocate for such an increase, saying the U.S. never committed enough troops to the war to accomplish the mission.
Tried Before
``We have tried this surge of troops over the summer'' and it didn't work, Powell said, referring to an operation in which the U.S. shifted more troops into Baghdad to help local forces break a cycle of attacks and reprisals between Sunni and Shiite Muslim factions. The U.S. military has acknowledged that effort wasn't successful as bombings and other violence in the capital continues.
Additions to the 140,000 U.S. military personnel now in Iraq would have to be created by extending duty tours for some soldiers and Marines already there or accelerating the arrival of forces scheduled to go, Powell said. He said he agreed with General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, who told lawmakers last week that the Iraq war has strained the military's ability to wage the global war on terrorism.
Spreading Problem
``All of my contacts within the Army suggest that the Army has a serious problem in the active force, and it's a problem that will spread into the Guard and Reserves,'' Powell said.
Any proposal to add forces should be made with a ``clear'' mission outlined and a definite schedule for how long they will be there, Powell said. The U.S. military can't quell the sectarian violence in the country, a task that must be accomplished by the Iraqis, he said.
Powell said the bipartisan Iraq Study Group was correct in its assessment that the situation in Iraq is ``grave and deteriorating.'' The independent commission said the U.S. should set a goal of pulling back most combat troops by early 2008 and focus on training Iraqi police and military forces.
One of those recommending a troop increase to the president is retired Army General Jack Keane. He said on ABC's ``This Week'' program that an additional 25,000 American forces should be sent to the Iraqi capital. Another 10,000 are needed in the Anbar province, another hotspot of sectarian fighting, he said.
The buildup would give Iraqi leaders the time needed to devise a political and economic solution to the sectarian conflict, Keane said. Completing the military mission would take about a year, he said.
`Protection Force'
``Our problem in the past, in Fallujah, in Samarra, twice in Baghdad, has always been the same,'' Keane said. ``We've ran the insurgents out, and we never put the protection force in to secure the people.''
A political leader of Iraq's minority Sunni population, Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, said his country's security forces are incapable of protecting civilians in Baghdad from militia groups without more U.S. help.
``Iraqi troops, across the board, they are insufficient, incompetent, and many of them are corrupted,'' Hashemi, who met with Bush at the White House last week, said on CNN's ``Late Edition'' program.
He faulted the U.S. for disbanding the Iraqi Army after the fall of Saddam Hussein's government in 2003.
In the latest violence, more than 25 Iraqi Red Crescent aid agency workers were abducted today from their Baghdad office by a gang of 50 gunmen wearing police uniforms, Agence France- Presse reported. In addition, the U.S. announced that three soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb near Baghdad yesterday.
Congressional Divide
Two senior U.S. Senate Democrats indicated their party is divided on the idea of temporarily dispatching more troops.
Nevada Senator Harry Reid, due to become majority leader next month, said on ABC's ``This Week'' program he would support a surge of American forces for two or three months as part of a larger plan to withdraw combat troops by 2008. Senator Edward Kennedy, a Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a separate interview on ``Fox News Sunday'' that such a proposal would be rejected in Congress and at the Defense Department.
``If the commanders on the ground said this is just for a short period of time, we'll go along with that,'' Reid said. Kennedy said ``there is going to be opposition to that'' among members of the Senate Armed Services Committee and military leaders at the Pentagon.
Democrats won control of Congress in last month's midterm elections in part because of public dissatisfaction with Bush's handling of the war. More than half of Americans want to set a schedule to withdraw all troops, a Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll found. By 62 percent to 35 percent, Americans disapprove of Bush's handling of the war, the Dec. 8-11 survey found.
To contact the reporters on this story: Paul Basken in Washington at pbasken@bloomberg.net ; Nadine Elsibai in Washington at nelsibai@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: December 17, 2006 13:45 EST
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a0kk9WiaajU0&refer=home | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Jan 06, 2007 10:32 am Post subject: |
| A BUSH-SHARON DOCTRINE
2/10/2003
COMMENTARY
by Arnaud de Borchgrave
Israel is asking the U.S. for $4 billion in additional military assistance - in addition, that is, to the just under $3 billion a year a year it receives automatically - plus $8 billion in commercial-loan guarantees. The $12 billion question about the $15 billion grant-and-loan package is "What is the quid pro quo?" Is it tied to a permanent solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum? The beginning of a dismantlement of 145 Israeli settlements in Gaza and the West Bank? A freeze on new settlements? A timetable, however vague, for the establishment of a Palestinian state within five years?
None of the above. The strategic objectives of the U.S. and Israel in the Middle East have gradually merged into a now cohesive Bush-Sharon Doctrine. But this gets lost in the deafening cacophony of talking heads playing armchair generals in the coming war to change regimes in Baghdad. The Washington Post's Bob Kaiser finally broke through the sound barrier to document (2/9) what has long been reported in encrypted diplomatic e-mails from foreign embassies to dozens of foreign governments: Washington's "Likudniks" - Ariel Sharon's powerful backers in the Bush Administration - have been in charge of U.S. policy in the Middle East since president Bush was sworn into office.
In alliance with Evangelical Christians, these policy-makers include some of the most powerful players in the Bush Administration. The course they plotted for Mr. Bush began with benign neglect of the Mideast peace process as Intifada II escalated. 9/11 provided the impulse for a military campaign to consign Saddam Hussein to the dustbin of history. Sharon provided the geopolitical ammo by convincing Mr. Bush that the war on Palestinian terrorism was identical to the global war on terror. Next came a campaign to convince U.S. public opinion that Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden were allies in their war against America. An alleged secret meeting in Prague in April 2001 between Mohamed Atta - the lead suicide bomber on 9/11 - and an Iraqi intelligence agent got the ball rolling. Since then stories about the Saddam-Al Qaeda nexus have become a cottage industry.
But this was barely step one in the Bush-Sharon Doctrine. The strategic objective is the antithesis of Middle Eastern stability. The destabilization of "despotic regimes" comes next. In the Arab bowling alley, one ball aimed at Saddam is designed to achieve a ten-strike that would discombobulate authoritarian and/or despotic regimes in Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Emirates and Sheikhdoms.
The ultimate phase would see Israel surrounded by democratic regimes that would provide five million Israelis - soon to be surrounded by 300 million Arabs - with peace and security for at least a generation. A meritorious plan if it achieves all its objectives.
Close U.S. allies Jordan and Turkey were to form an axis along with Israel to weaken and "roll back" Syria. Turkey was the first Middle Eastern state to recognize Israel in 1949. In 1996, the two countries also signed a strategic partnership that allows the Israeli air force to train in Turkish air space.
The roots of the overall strategy can be traced to a paper published in 1996 by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, an Israeli think tank. The document was titled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" and was designed as a political blueprint for the incoming government of Binyamin Netanyahu, a super hawk in the Israeli political aviary. The complete break with the past was to be a new strategy "based on an entirely new intellectual foundation, one that restores strategic initiative and provides the nation the room to engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism."
Israel, according to the 1996 paper, would "shape its strategic environment,"beginning with the removal of Saddam Hussein and the restoration of the Hashemite monarchy in Baghdad. The Iraqi monarchy was overthrown in a military coup in 1958 when young King Faisal, a cousin of Jordan's late King Hussein, was assassinated.
Last year, Jordan's former Crown Prince Hassan shocked King Abdullah by failing to inform him he was journeying to London to attend a conference of exiled dissident Iraqi officers. Hassan speaks Hebrew and is known to be bitter over his removal as Crown Prince by his brother Hussein a few days before the king lost his battle to cancer.
The rebuilding of Zionism, as the paper urged, must at the same time abandon any thought of trading land for peace with the Arabs, which it described as "cultural, economic, political, diplomatic and military retreat."
The strategic roadmap - which has been followed faithfully thus far by both Netanyahu and his successor Sharon - called for the abandonment of the Oslo accords "under which Israel has no obligations if the PLO does not fulfill its obligations." Yassir Arafat blundered by obliging Israel.
"Our claim to the land [of the West Bank] - to which we have clung for 2,000 years - is legitimate and noble," the paper continued. "Only the unconditional acceptance by Arabs of our rights, especially in their territorial dimension, is a solid basis for the future."
For the strategy to succeed, the paper suggested, Israel would have to win broad American support for these new policies. And to ensure support in Washington, Netanyahu was advised to use "language familiar to the Americans by tapping into themes of past U.S. administrations during the Cold War, which apply as well to Israel."
Prominent American opinion makers who are now senior members of the Bush Administration participated in the discussions and the drafting that led to this 1996 blueprint. Prime Minister Sharon has flown to Washington seven times in two years to meet with Mr. Bush, more frequently than any other head of state or government.
Sharon quickly convinced a receptive and deeply religious Mr. Bush that Palestinian terrorism, Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction were part of a three-pronged offensive against the Judeo-Christian civilization.
The destabilization part of the strategy appears to be working. The Arab League seems to have reached a dead end. And it has no idea how to turn around. Arabs states are the only ones in the world with living standards that have declined steadily for the past two decades. Even the richest one - Saudi Arabia -- has fallen from per capita incomes of some $20,000 plus to $7,000 since 1983. Saudi royals know they have to open up their private fiefdom to participatory democracy. Eight other Arab states are committed to political pluralism and market economies. How to keep politico-religious extremists from winning elections is now their common problem.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
VDARE.COM - http://www.vdare.com/roberts/070105_surge.htm
January 05, 2007
The Surge: Political Cover or Escalation?
By Paul Craig Roberts
The New Year began on the hopeful note that Bush’s illegal war in Iraq would soon be ended. The repudiation of Bush and the Republicans in the November congressional election, the Iraq Study Group’s unanimous conclusion that the US needs to remove its troops from the sectarian strife Bush set in motion by invading Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld’s removal as defense secretary and his replacement by Iraqi Study Group member Robert Gates, the thumbs down given by America’s top military commanders to the neoconservatives’ plan to send more US troops to Iraq, and new polls of the US military that reveal that only a minority supports Bush’s Iraq policy, thus giving new meaning to "support the troops," are all indications that Americans have shed the stupor that has given carte blanche to George W. Bush.
When word leaked that Bush was inclined toward the "surge option" of committing more troops by keeping existing troops deployed in Iraq after their replacements had arrived, NBC News reported that an administration official "admitted to us today that this surge option is more of a political decision than a military one." It is a clear sign of exasperation with Bush when an administration official admits that Bush is willing to sacrifice American troops and Iraqi civilians in order to protect his own delusions.
The American Establishment, concerned by Bush’s egregious mismanagement, moved to take control of Iraq policy away from him. However, recent news reports and analysis suggest that Bush has turned his back to the American establishment and his military advisers and is throwing in his lot with the neoconservatives and the Israeli lobby. This will further isolate Bush and make him more vulnerable to impeachment.
In the January 5 issue of CounterPunch John Walsh gives a good description of the struggle between the American establishment and the neocons.
Peter Spiegel, the Pentagon correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, reported on January 4 that the neocons have used the failure of the administration’s policy in Iraq to convince Bush to launch an aggressive counterinsurgency requiring the buildup of troop levels by extending deployments beyond the agreed terms. [Old guard back on Iraq policy, January 4, 2007]
Raed Jarrar (CounterPunch, January 4) suggests that the Shi’ite militias, such as the one led by Al-Sadr, are the intended targets of the "surge option." There seems no surer way to escalate the conflict in Iraq than to attack the Shi’ite militias. For longer than the US fought Germany in WW II, 150,000 US troops in Iraq have been thwarted by a small insurgency drawn from Iraq’s minority population of Sunnis. It hardly seems feasible that 30,000 additional US troops, demoralized by extended deployment, can succeed in a surge against the Shi’ite militias when 150,000 US troops cannot succeed against the minority Sunnis.
The reason the US has not been driven out of Iraq is that the majority Shi’ites have not been part of the insurgency. The Shi’ites are attacking the Sunnis, who are forced to fight a two-front war against US troops and Shi’ite militias and death squads.
The US owes its presence in Iraq, just as the colonial powers always owed their presence in the Middle East, to the disunity of Arabs. Western domination of the Muslim world succeeded by not picking a fight with all of the disunited Arabs at the same time.
Attacking the Shi’ite militias while fighting a Sunni insurgency would violate this rule. If Bush ignores US military commanders and expert opinion and accepts the surge option advanced by the delusional neocon allies of Israel’s right-wing Likud Party, US troops will be engulfed in general insurgency. This is why General John Abizaid resigned on January 5. He wants no part of the Republican Party’s sacrifice of US soldiers to sectarian conflict.
In recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearings, Republican Senator John McCain, who believes in the efficacy of violence and not in diplomacy, pressed General Abizaid to request more US troops to be sent to Iraq. General Abizaid replied as follows:
"Senator McCain, I met with every divisional commander, General Casey, the core commander, General Dempsey, we all talked together. And I said, in your professional opinion, if we were to bring in more American troops now, does it add considerably to our ability to achieve success in Iraq? And they all said no."
Bush is like Hitler. He blames defeats on his military commanders, not on his own insane policy. Like Hitler, he protects himself from reality with delusion. In his last hours, Hitler was ordering non-existent German armies to drive the Russians from Berlin.
By manipulating Bush and provoking a military crisis in which the US stands to lose its army in Iraq, the neoconservatives hope to revive the implementation of their plan for US conquest of the Middle East. They believe they can use fear, "honor," and the aversion of macho Americans to ignoble defeat to expand the conflict in response to military disaster.
The neocons believe that the loss of an American army would be met with the electorate’s demand for revenge. The barriers to the draft would fall, as would the barriers to the use of nuclear weapons.
Neocon godfather Norman Podhoretz set out the plan for Middle East conquest several years ago in Commentary Magazine. It is a plan for Muslim genocide. In place of physical extermination of Muslims, Podhoretz advocates their cultural destruction by deracination. Islam is to be torn out by the roots and reduced to a purely formal shell devoid of any real beliefs.
Podhoretz disguises the neoconservative attack against diversity with contrived arguments, but its real purpose is to use the US military to subdue Arabs and to create space for Israel to expand.
Not enough Americans are aware that this is what the "war on terror" is all about. | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
