About That Supposed "White House Cabal"

On the drive in, the local Hate Speech Radio hostette was dampening her panties in anticipation of the great political windfall the death of the 2000th soldier in Iraq (Dems love our troops, but only when they die to their benefit) and how the Left was hoping for everyone on Team Dubya to be charged with treason and impeached and imprisoned over Joe Wilson's masterful maneuver of making his lies and outing of his own wife into a problem for the Administration. (To he credit, she wasn't predicting executions out loud like Al Franken did.)

Another thing she was yammering about was a Los Angeles Times editorial by Lawrence B. Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell from 2002 to 2005. In the piece, he offers up a stinging indictment of Team Dubya for the crime of....get this...wanting to control foreign policy!

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.

But it's absolutely true. I believe that the decisions of this cabal were sometimes made with the full and witting support of the president and sometimes with something less. More often than not, then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice was simply steamrolled by this cabal.

Its insular and secret workings were efficient and swift — not unlike the decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy. This furtive process was camouflaged neatly by the dysfunction and inefficiency of the formal decision-making process, where decisions, if they were reached at all, had to wend their way through the bureaucracy, with its dissenters, obstructionists and "guardians of the turf."

But the secret process was ultimately a failure. 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 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.

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. This is particularly the case if the bureaucracies called upon to execute the decisions are in strong competition with one another over scarce money, talented people, "turf" or power.

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.

There's more to his blather, but I quote these bits to point out the utter contradictions and whining hypocrisy of his unfounded arguments. First he says that the NSC is supposed to include the Prez, Veep, Sec. of State and Sec. of Defense, but this is after he's complained that three of these four officers are part of this cabal. Huh?!? If a dozen people are supposed to have a say and a few are undercutting the majority, then you may have a secret cabal, but as he himself lays it out, the PEOPLE WHO ARE SUPPOSED TO BE MAKING THE DECISIONS ARE MAKING THE DECISIONS!!!

So what's the problem? The problem is that he and his fellow travellers in the anti-American CIA and State Dept. don't like that Team Dubya isn't bending the nation's knee to the wishes of the UN and the EU and are now calling about their seditious accomplices in the MSM to spread the smear that something fishy is going on when the system is working as designed.

The key hint is when he talks about how the bureaucracy rebels against decisions it doesn't agree with or didn't get to determine which begs this question: Who the hell is working for whom and who's higher on the org chart?!? Seems to me that the Prez's should have his will done and the people spewing sedition certainly wouldn't be saying a peep if it was a President Kerry plotting with Kofi Anan to sign our sovereignty over to the UN, declaring martial law and rounding up non-fascist sympathizers into camps for re-education and/or disposal.

Nope, it's only bad when it's the people not interested in seeing America destroyed making the decisions. Pffft.