One of the red flags about the Bush administration is being raised by a close aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell — and he doesn’t mince words.
The latest verbal broadside: a remarkably blunt and angry interview by former Powell chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson who suggests that Bush administration bigwigs see the President as someone whose desires trump international law — a President he paints as aloof, distant and not really involved in the intricacies of policy. The Associated Press reports:
A top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Monday that wrongheaded ideas for the handling of foreign detainees arose from White House and Pentagon officials who argued that “the president of the United States is all-powerful” and the Geneva Conventions irrelevant.
In an Associated Press interview, former Powell chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson also said President Bush was “too aloof, too distant from the details” of postwar planning. Underlings exploited Bush’s detachment and made poor decisions, Wilkerson said.
But he was just getting revved up:
Wilkerson blamed Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and like-minded aides. He said Cheney must have sincerely believed that Iraq could be a spawning ground for new terror assaults, because “otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard.”
That’s unusually blunt language. And MORE:
On the question of detainees picked up in Afghanistan and other fronts in the war on terror, Wilkerson said Bush heard two sides of an impassioned argument within his administration. Abuse of prisoners, and even the deaths of some who had been interrogated in Afghanistan and elsewhere, have bruised the U.S. image abroad and undermined support for the Iraq war.
Cheney’s office, Rumsfeld aides and others argued “that the president of the United States is all-powerful, that as commander in chief the president of the United States can do anything he damn well pleases,” Wilkerson said.On the other side were Powell, others at the State Department and top military brass, and occasionally Condoleezza Rice, who was then national security adviser, Wilkerson said.
Powell raised frequent and loud objections, his former aide said, once yelling into a telephone at Rumsfeld: “Donald, don’t you understand what you are doing to our image?”
And therein lies a conflict. One school of thought is that the United States can’t operate in a vacuum but needs to have a good image and the cooperation of other countries. The other is that safeguarding image may work against the long or short term interests of the United States.
Accoring to the AP, Wilkerson says Bush “tried to work out a compromise in 2001 and 2002 that recognized that the war on terrorism was different from past wars and required greater flexibility in handling prisoners who don’t belong to an enemy state or follow the rules themselves.” AND:
Bush’s stated policy, which was heatedly criticized by civil liberties and legal groups at the time, was defensible, Wilkerson said. But it was undermined almost immediately in practice, he said.
In the field, the United States followed the policies of hard-liners who wanted essentially unchecked ability to detain and harshly interrogate prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, Wilkerson said.
Wilkerson, who left government with Powell in January, said he is now somewhat estranged from his former boss. He worked for Powell for 16 years. Wilkerson became a surprise critic of the Iraq war-planning effort and other administration decisions this fall, and he has said his Powell did not put him up to it.
So what questions does this raise? It raises the question about whether:
- The underlying assumption of key Bush administration officials was not just that the President was above the law but the President IS the law — a troubling assumption in a democracy and one that Richard Nixon learned could be harmful to your career.
- Wilkerson is truly estranged from his former boss. Wilkerson is too independent to parrot Powell’s line but we have not to date seen any Powell press conference berating his former aide for his tough talk. The silence can be interpreted as tacit agreement.
- The comments tie in with criticism of the present Bush administration coming from some figures linked to the administration of the first President George Bush. Is all of this happenstance? Or are we seeing some folks once linked to Bush 41 making it clear that their administration would have handled Iraq much differently.
- Just how isolated George Bush is as President. If he’s deciding, precisely what kind of information does he get, is it from a diverse number of sources or just a handful of people?
The big PLUS for the Bush administration coming from Wilkerson’s comments stem from the fact that he paints the picture of a divided administration — in other words, one where there was some passionate debate about key issues. It wasn’t as if Bush just threw a dart on a dartboard to make a decision.
But, then, the BIG question is: did debate matter? Or is this a President leading an administration where its most powerful members don’t care whether valid points are raised in arguments because they’ve decided to it their way, no matter how many reservations others raise about possible implications and consequences?