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Wednesday, Oct 15, 2008
A veteran Foreign Service officer warns that when Colin Powell departs in a second Bush term, America will lose its last bulwark against the radical ideologues who are planning more Iraqs.
Oct 4, 2004 | Secretary of State Colin Powell is not staying for a second Bush term. When he goes, the last bulwark against complete neoconservative control of U.S. foreign policy goes with him. The implications are enormous, yet the American electorate appears to be blinded by the Bush campaign's deliberate manipulations of 9/11.
Powell has served both as the reasoned voice of career diplomats and the experienced voice of career U.S. military in the Bush administration. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ignored military advice and excluded Department of State career professionals from Iraq planning. Power was concentrated in the hands of a clique of neocon ideologues he placed in key policy positions, including Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. In the first term of George W. Bush, protégés of now disgraced former Defense Policy Board member and neocon godfather Richard Perle achieved control or subordination of every executive branch foreign-policymaking body -- except the Department of State.
Career employees of the department enthusiastically greeted Colin Powell when he pulled up to the curb for the first time at Foggy Bottom in his PT Cruiser. They have supported him, and through him, have unfailingly supported the president through thick and thin over four years -- up to and including volunteering in record numbers to staff fully the highly dangerous positions in the new embassy in Baghdad, Iraq. Even after being dumped on by the Pentagon neocons and witnessing the debacle of the Pentagon's Jay Garner's post-conflict solution, the State Department's Civil and Foreign Service staff took up the slack when the Pentagon unceremoniously fled responsibility for Iraq reconstruction and stabilization. Now, Powell's departure is seen within the department as an invitation to a lynching.
The realization that the same neocons who dismissed State's accurate "Future of Iraq Project," prepared before the war, may now take over at State in the second term is widely viewed inside the department as a threat to the very integrity of the country's diplomatic first line of defense. Corridor discussion has turned desperate -- maybe former Secretary of State James Baker will intervene, maybe former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft will talk to someone, maybe 41 will talk to 43.
State personnel are used to comings and goings of Democratic and Republican administrations, serving all equally and fairly. Not since Vietnam, however, has the U.S. diplomatic establishment viewed the future with such a degree of alarm. Retired U.S. ambassadors and diplomats have raised their own public concerns in signed public statements about the direction of U.S. foreign policy -- but that concern pales compared with the quiet revolt brewing against a neocon takeover at Foggy Bottom.
After 9/11, Wolfowitz, Feith and his subordinate, Harold Rhode, recruited David Wurmser as a contractor from the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute to set up what became known internally as the "Wurmser-Maloof" project. F. Michael Maloof, neocon fellow traveler and former aide to Richard Perle, and Wurmser created a hidden intelligence unit, the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group, under Feith at the Pentagon. The purpose of the group was to end-run the CIA and create the rationale for invading Iraq. The parallel operations model was previously followed by Oliver North at the National Security Council and Elliott Abrams at State in their ill-fated Iran-Contra strategy. It should have come as no surprise that another neocon think-tank insider, Abram Shulsky, an Abrams colleague from their days as staffers to Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, would end up heading up what became the Office of Special Plans, the secret intelligence unit at the Pentagon under Feith. The weapons of mass destruction disinformation that was fed to the president and to the American public came directly from Shulsky's shop.
After setting up this operation at the Pentagon for Wolfowitz and Feith, Wurmser, with the help of Perle, was sent in early 2002 to burrow in at State as senior advisor to John Bolton, under secretary for arms control and international security.
In December 2002, Wolfowitz, Feith, Wurmser and Vice President Cheney's national security advisor, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, acting together, maneuvered Condoleezza Rice into appointing Elliott Abrams to the position of special assistant to the president and senior director for the Middle East at the National Security Council. This appointment gave the neocons everything they wanted -- the NSC, Executive Office of the President, Office of the Vice President, the Pentagon, a cornered director in George Tenet at CIA, and Wurmser at State.
The neocons had control of the information reaching the president and a channel for their pseudo-intelligence product from Wolfowitz and Feith's secret Pentagon Office of Special Plans. The only wild card was Colin Powell and State's elite and independent Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR).
Neither Powell nor his deputy, Richard Armitage, who is also leaving with Powell, seems to have been fooled by Wurmser's desire to leave the Pentagon and join John Bolton's staff -- in effect, to come work for Powell. They cornered and then neutralized Wurmser. Wurmser's target was to get at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, a thorn in the neocons' side and Powell's intelligence ace-in-the-hole against Tenet's "slam-dunk" sellout at the CIA.
INR kept telling Powell the truth about Saddam's nonexistent WMD. State's Future of Iraq project, led by a career Foreign Service officer, who was cold-shouldered by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, laid out what might happen if we took over control of Iraq. Unfortunately, even the sober minds of INR could not stop Powell from lending his credibility to the "unfortunate error" show at the U.N. Security Council. Modeled on Adlai Stevenson's Oct. 25, 1962, Cuban missile presentation to the Security Council, Powell's Feb. 5, 2003, presentation marks the low point of his tenure and, in retrospect, underscores how badly his credibility was needed and then was abused by Vice President Cheney and the president.
The whole time Wurmser was at State, career professionals around him saw someone acting more like an agent of influence than as a subordinate of the secretary of state. He was in constant contact with his Pentagon intelligence cell. Questions were asked -- but never answered -- as to how Wurmser got a full security clearance when he never registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act for his 1996 policy work for Israel's incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (including advice on how to lobby the U.S. Congress) and as someone who was married to an Israeli citizen with close ties to Israel's Likud Party -- in theory, a party to U.S.-brokered Middle East peace negotiations.
In September 2003, Wurmser left the Department of State to become Vice President Cheney's principal deputy for national security affairs under "Scooter" Libby. He left before any questions were answered about his access to and use of classified information. His clearances were never questioned when he joined the vice president's staff, and his status under the Foreign Agents Registration Act has never been clarified.
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