The White House cabal
LA Times
Lawrence B. Wilkerson
Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell
October 25, 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 America
Foundation in Washington, 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 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 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. The NSC has often been expanded, depending on
the president in office, to include the CIA director, the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, the Treasury secretary and others, and it has accumulated a
staff of sometimes more than 100 people.
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 in the past led us into a host of disasters,
including the last years of the Vietnam War, the national embarrassment of
Watergate (and the first resignation of a president in our history), 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 in human
history.
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.
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.
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% 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 (no surprise to ignored dissenters such as former
Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki or former Army Secretary Thomas
White).
It's a disaster. Given the choice, I'd choose a frustrating bureaucracy over
an efficient cabal every time.
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