Independent Institute
by Ivan Eland

10/24/05

With the continued quagmire in Iraq and the likely indictments of senior Bush administration officials for trying to shore up the shaky rationale for the invasion, one would think that things couldn't get much worse for the administration. But where success has a thousand architects, failure leads to much finger pointing. The administration's latest headache comes from Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff. In a well-publicized recent speech before the New America Foundation, which I attended, Wilkerson lambasted the 'Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal' that got control of U.S. foreign policy from a president 'not versed in international relations and not too much interested either.' Wilkerson's scathing remarks were designed to deflect criticism from his former boss. As one anti-war Republican Senate staff member told me, Wilkerson 'summoned his courage about three years too late.' The typically politically correct, inside-the-beltway audience was too polite to ask why Powell and Wilkerson didn't resign over the invasion of a foreign nation that they privately opposed...

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1593


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp