October 19, 2005 /

Powell Aid Admits Iraq Made Us Less Safe

Seems like more people who have worked in top positions throughout the Bush presidency are now coming out and sharing their views on Bush’s failed foreign policy: 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 […]

Seems like more people who have worked in top positions throughout the Bush
presidency are now coming out and sharing their views on Bush’s failed foreign
policy:

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.”

Mr 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.

Article continues

here
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That is the latest article by the Financial Times. It is also another hard
hit on an already battered administration. According to the same article, Colin
Powell is not very happy with Wilkerson coming out and speaking about this, but
Wilkerson is telling America the truth it needs to hear.

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