How Scary Is This?
By
BOB HERBERT

The White House is sweating out the possibility that one or more top
officials will soon be indicted on criminal charges. But the Bush
administration is
immune to prosecution for its greatest offense - its colossal and profoundly
tragic incompetence.

Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as chief of staff to
Secretary of State Colin Powell, addressed the administration's arrogance
and
ineptitude in a talk last week that was astonishingly candid by Washington
standards.

"We have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran," said Mr.
Wilkerson. "Generally, with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita ...
we haven't
done very well on anything like that in a long time. And if something comes
along that is truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a
major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to
see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to
the
Declaration of Independence."

The investigation of Karl Rove, Scooter Libby et al. is the most sensational
story coming out of Washington at the moment. But the story with the gravest
implications for the U.S. and the world is the overall dysfunction of the
Bush regime. This is a bomb going "Tick, tick, tick . . ." What is the next
disaster
that this crowd will be unprepared to cope with? Or the next lunatic idea
that will spring from its ideological bag of tricks?

Mr. Wilkerson gave his talk before an audience at the New America
Foundation, an independent public policy institute. On the all-important
matter of national
security, which many voters had seen as the strength of the administration,
Mr. Wilkerson said:

"The case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen
in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the
national security decision-making process. 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."

When the time came to implement the decisions, said Mr. Wilkerson, they were
"presented in such a disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy often
didn't know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out."

Where was the president? According to Mr. Wilkerson, "You've got this
collegiality there between the secretary of defense and the vice president,
and you've
got a president who is not versed in international relations and not too
much interested in them either."

One of the consequences of this dysfunction, as I have noted many times, is
the unending parade of dead or badly wounded men and women returning to the
U.S. from the war in Iraq - a war that the administration foolishly launched
but now does not know how to win or end.

Mr. Wilkerson was especially critical of the excessive secrecy that
surrounded so many of the most important decisions by the Bush
administration, and of
what he felt was a general policy of concentrating too much power in the
hands of a small group of insiders. As much as possible, government in the
United
States is supposed to be open and transparent, and a fundamental principle
is that decision-making should be subjected to a robust process of checks
and
balances.

While not "evaluating the decision to go to war," Mr. Wilkerson told his
audience that under the present circumstances "we can't leave Iraq. We
simply can't."
In his view, if American forces were to pull out too quickly, the U.S. would
end up returning to the Middle East with "five million men and women under
arms" within a decade.

Nevertheless, he is appalled at the way the war was launched and conducted,
and outraged by "the detainee abuse issue." In 10 years, he said, when this
matter is "put to the acid test, ironed out, and people have looked at it
from every angle, we are going to be ashamed of what we allowed to happen."

Mr. Wilkerson said he has taken some heat for speaking out, but feels that
"as a citizen of this great republic," he has an obligation to do so. If
nothing
is done about the current state of affairs, he said, "it's going to get even
more dangerous than it already is."

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. Copyright 2005
The New York Times Company

Posted by MIriam V.