Re: A real soldier speaks

>Wilkerson calls Bush an unsophisticated leader

No need to be gentle ...Georgie knows he's an idiot drunkard since the
disaster debates with Kerry ...remember the monkey-whose-banana-is-not there
look?


"Joe S." <anon@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:MfKdneDQ5vcYLkzeRVn-pw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
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> QUOTE
>
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> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/18/AR2006011802607.html?sub=AR
>
> Breaking Ranks
> Larry Wilkerson Attacked the Iraq War. In the Process, He Lost the
> Friendship of Colin Powell.
>
> By Richard Leiby
> Washington Post Staff Writer
> Thursday, January 19, 2006; Page C01
>
> In an overheated old schoolroom in Washington, Larry Wilkerson, a retired
> Army colonel, is doing his best to impose military discipline on 25 pupils
> as they prepare to attack a mountain of pizza, cupcakes and cookies. It is
> the year-end party for Macfarland Middle School's Colin L. Powell
> Leadership Club, a tutoring and mentoring program that Wilkerson oversees
> as a volunteer. Striding before his charges in smart burgundy suspenders,
> the colonel -- everybody here calls him the colonel -- makes a point about
> duty:
>
> "If you're not attending the meetings, you aren't a member of the club.
> It's as simple as that." He rebukes a boy who has shown up for the party
> but otherwise been scarce. "You know how I'll feel if you don't come to
> subsequent meetings," Wilkerson warns, "and you don't want to get me
> angry."
>
> Then he drops the bluff demeanor and authorizes the kids to start chowing
> down. "Try to keep as much as you can off the floor," he says in a
> Southern accent softened by frequent chuckles. For the next hour he
> circulates through the room, greeting each student by name -- Jamie,
> Angela, Trevon, Tanya -- encouraging them to keep their grades up,
> prodding them to complete their community-service projects, inquiring
> about sometimes precarious home lives.
>
> Since 1998, Wilkerson has devoted himself to helping at-risk children at
> Macfarland in the name of Colin Powell, whom he refers to as "my boss" and
> "the general." Wilkerson works tirelessly to keep them in the club and to
> secure scholarships for them at private high schools.
>
> Yet these days he and Powell are estranged: This program represents the
> last remnant of a long, deep friendship between them. Like ex-spouses in
> an uneasy detente, "we decided we'd just communicate over the kids," says
> Wilkerson, sounding pained by the situation.
>
> The split came as both men left the administration -- Powell as secretary
> of state, Wilkerson as his chief of staff -- after working side by side
> for 16 years. Wilkerson, a once-loyal Republican with 31 years of Army
> service, has emerged in recent months as a merciless critic of President
> Bush and his top people, accusing them of carrying out a reckless foreign
> policy and imperiling the future of the U.S. military.
>
> "My wife would probably shoot me if I headed to the ballot box with a
> Republican vote again," he says. "This is not a Republican administration,
> not in my view. This is a radical administration."
>
> Wilkerson calls Bush an unsophisticated leader who has been easily swayed
> by "messianic" neoconservatives and power-hungry, secretive schemers in
> the administration. In a landmark speech in October, Wilkerson 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."
>
> He is particularly appalled by U.S. treatment of enemy detainees, counting
> at least 100 deaths in custody during the course of the war on
> terrorism -- 27 of them ruled homicides. "Murder is torture," he says.
> "It's not torture lite."
>
> As for the invasion of Iraq? A blunder of historic proportions, he
> believes.
>
> "This is really a very inept administration," says Wilkerson, who has
> credentials not only as an insider in the Bush I, Clinton and Bush II
> presidencies but also as a former professor at two of the nation's war
> colleges. "As a teacher who's studied every administration since 1945, I
> think this is probably the worst ineptitude in governance, decision-making
> and leadership I've seen in 50-plus years. You've got to go back and think
> about that. That includes the Bay of Pigs, that includes -- oh my God,
> Vietnam. That includes Iran-contra, Watergate."
>
> Such a critique, coming from a man who was long thought to speak for
> Powell, is seismic in Washington power circles. Some observers used to
> regard Powell and Wilkerson as so close that they enjoyed a "mind meld,"
> but now Powell distances himself from the pronouncements of his former
> aide.
>
> Often described as the ultimate loyal soldier -- and, like Wilkerson, a
> Vietnam combat veteran -- Powell has largely kept his mouth zipped.
> Whatever public regret or private disappointment Powell may have about
> selling the Iraq war, he still supports the commander in chief -- most
> recently during the flap over domestic electronic eavesdropping -- and
> occasionally dines with Bush.
>
> Now consulting in the private sector, Powell declined to answer questions
> about Wilkerson's version of episodes in their tenure together. "General
> Powell considers Colonel Wilkerson a good friend of 16 years," an aide
> said by e-mail. "He has no other comment."
>
> Powell did address Wilkerson's central charge of secretive White House
> decision-making in an interview with the BBC in December. "I wouldn't
> characterize it the way Larry has, calling it a cabal," Powell said. "Now
> what Larry is suggesting in his comments is that very often maybe Mr.
> Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney would take decisions in to the
> president that the rest of us weren't aware of. That did happen, on a
> number of occasions."
>
> The White House offered no specific rebuttal of Wilkerson's views, but a
> spokesman gave a statement taking issue with the notion that Bush was
> somehow misled about the need to invade Iraq (a charge Wilkerson hasn't
> made outright). "President Bush made his decision to go to war in Iraq
> based on the intelligence given to him by the intelligence community. It
> was the president's decision, and the president made that decision based
> on the totality of the evidence presented to him," said the spokesman, who
> asked that his name not be used "because of the nature of the topic."
>
> Interviewed by CNN in November, Rumsfeld termed the suggestion of a cabal
> "ridiculous" and said of Wilkerson, "In terms of having firsthand
> information, I just can't imagine that he does."
>
> Making a Military Man
>
>
>
> Wilkerson, 60, got his start with Powell as a speechwriter and you can see
> why. He tends to talk in fully formed paragraphs. Over a lunch of
> barbecued chicken salad, he begins his life story this way:
>
> "I was born in Gaffney, South Carolina, which is right near Spartanburg,
> which is right near Greenville. My dad was a World War II vet -- B-17
> bombardier and navigator. He came home from the war and entered the South
> Carolina National Guard, so I kind of grew up riding around in Jeeps and
> shooting .30-caliber machine guns. I shot my first Browning .30-caliber at
> 9. That is to say, the National Guardsmen made me think I was shooting
> it."
>
> The family later moved to Houston, where Wilkerson graduated from high
> school. (Aside here on George W. Bush: "I see hard-headedness, I see
> arrogance, I see hubris, I see what I saw in a lot of Texans.")
>
> Wilkerson went north to study philosophy and English lit at Bucknell but
> quit college in his senior year. He was newly married yet determined to go
> to Vietnam. It was 1966.
>
> "I felt an obligation because my dad had fought," he says, "and I thought
> that was kind of your duty."
>
> Eventually he got there as an Army officer, spending a year in what he
> calls the "hottest combat" possible, piloting his OH-6A helicopter close
> to the jungle canopy, scouting out the enemy on behalf of the infantry.
>
> "We got shot at nearly every day," he says. A brush with death came when a
> sniper's bullet pierced the helicopter's cockpit plexiglass, but he was
> never wounded or shot down. "My men used to call me the Teflon guy. . . .
> I felt like I had some kind of protective coating on me because I think I
> flew about 1,100 combat hours, which is a lot of hours."
>
> (Predictable aside on hawks like *** Cheney, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith
> and Paul Wolfowitz: "None of these guys ever heard a bullet go by their
> ears in combat.")
>
> After Vietnam, Wilkerson went on to the elite Airborne and Ranger schools,
> earned his bachelor's in English literature and advanced degrees in
> international relations and national security. Rising through the ranks,
> he attended the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., and eventually
> returned there to teach. He later served as acting director at the Marine
> Corps War College at Quantico.
>
> He made a natural professor. In conversation, he often lectures in a lofty
> but folksy way, citing the works of the great war theoretician Karl von
> Clausewitz or putting the zeal of neocons in historical context: Their
> fellow travelers, he says, were Lenin and the Bolsheviks and the Jacobins
> of the French Revolution -- utopians who had no qualms using the
> guillotine in service of their ideals.
>
> (Long aside on how Bush, who criticized "nation building" as a candidate
> in 2000, became a globe-changing Jacobin: "Here we are with a failure in
> Iraq, a massive failure. Not only an intelligence failure, but it looks
> like it's gonna be a real failure on the ground. How do you suddenly
> transform that? Well, you suddenly become a Jacobin yourself, you're
> suddenly for this messianic spread of freedom and democracy around the
> world. You're suddenly an advocate of all things that John F. Kennedy was
> an advocate of: 'We will bear any burden, pay any price.' You've discarded
> John Quincy Adams, who said we're the friends of liberty everywhere, the
> custodians only of our own. And you've suddenly said, 'I'm the custodian
> of the whole world's liberty, and by God if you don't realize it I'm going
> to bring it to you -- and if I have to bring it to you at the point of a
> gun, that's the way I'm going to bring it to you!' ")
>
> But back to the biography: Wilkerson spent years in Korea, Japan and
> Hawaii, assigned to the Navy's Pacific Command, where he burnished his
> skills as an executive assistant to the top brass.
>
> "He's the most competent Army officer I've ever worked with," says retired
> Lt. Gen. James W. Crysel, one of Wilkerson's bosses at Pacific Command.
> "He could run a large corporation."
>
> Retired Rear Adm. Stewart A. Ring, whom Wilkerson served for three years,
> is similarly effusive: "He is the most principled individual I have ever
> met and ever worked with. He is a remarkable guy with essentially no ego.
> He stands up for what he thinks is right -- not for Larry Wilkerson, but
> for what is right."
>
> Such high praise won him an interview with Powell in early 1989, when the
> general was exiting as national security adviser in the Reagan White House
> and heading to Army Forces Command in Atlanta. Wilkerson says he was happy
> where he was, teaching at the Naval War College, and that evidently
> impressed Powell: "He said he didn't like overly ambitious people, and it
> was clear that I was content doing what I was doing and I wasn't really
> politicking for a job with him."
>
> (An aside on Powell's personality: "He can be the most endearing person
> you'd ever want to meet in your life. The next minute he can be colder
> than fish.")
>
> Powell's Confidant
>
>
>
> It was, as they say, the start of a beautiful friendship, spanning
> Powell's stint as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Persian Gulf War, the
> general's return to private life -- during which he launched America's
> Promise, the nonprofit initiative that seeded the Macfarland school
> project -- and Powell's support for candidate Bush and appointment as
> secretary of state.
>
> Powell has long been known as a "reluctant warrior." Before the 9/11
> attacks, he took the view that 10 years of U.N. sanctions had contained
> Saddam Hussein and expressed skepticism that Iraq had any ability to use
> weapons of mass destruction.
>
> Having prepared Powell's testimony and speeches, and having received
> top-level intelligence briefings, Wilkerson also knew the post-9/11 case
> against Hussein was not airtight. Powell "presented a number of
> alternatives to war," Wilkerson recalls. "Those alternatives did not
> entail the use of force, or they did not entail the use of force
> immediately. And when he was made aware of the decision otherwise, he
> became the good soldier that he was. I know how he operates and he would
> have decided, 'Okay, I lost, and now I'll carry out the decision as best I
> can' -- and make it seem like it was his decision."
>
> Powell's office on the State Department's sixth floor had a private door
> that led directly to Wilkerson's office. One particular visit burns
> brightly in Wilkerson's memory: It was November 2002, after the U.N.
> Security Council voted 15-0 to order Iraq to admit weapons inspectors, and
> Powell was in a contemplative mood.
>
> "He walked into my office, and he said to me, musing and looking out
> across the greenery there toward National Airport -- I wrote it down on my
> calendar, that's the reason I know what he said -- 'I wonder what will
> happen if we put half a million troops on the ground, and scour Iraq from
> one corner to the other, and find no weapons of mass destruction?' And he
> left that rhetorical question hanging in the air as he went back into his
> office."
>
> Bad Information
>
>
>
> Wilkerson, as it turned out, became the point man for making the case for
> preemptive war against Hussein. He put together the task force that,
> during a week at CIA headquarters, vetted all the intelligence reports
> used for Powell's famous pro-war presentation in February 2003 to the
> Security Council, where he brandished a vial of fake anthrax, played
> excerpts of intercepted Iraqi military chatter, and warned of mobile
> bioweapon "factories" and other doomsday machines, none of which actually
> existed.
>
> How did it happen?
>
> "Larry thought they had cleaned out the obvious garbage, but it turned out
> there was more," says James A. Kelly, a former assistant secretary of
> state who's known Wilkerson for 20 years. "Larry felt that he let down the
> secretary, but the job was so big in cleaning out the misinformation."
>
> Wilkerson won't say outright that he and Powell were deliberately snowed
> by intelligence reports tailored to fit a political push for war, but he
> has edged closer to that view, noting, "I've begun to wonder." It turns
> out that the administration relied on fabricators' claims about Hussein's
> illusory WMD programs and, in one case, an al Qaeda suspect whom the CIA
> turned over to alleged torturers in Egypt.
>
> "I kick myself in the ass," Wilkerson says. "How did we ever get to that
> place?"
>
> The speech tarnished Powell's gold-plated reputation, but he has never
> publicly pointed a finger at then-CIA Director George Tenet or the White
> House.
>
> "Nothing was spun to me," Powell told David Frost in a BBC television
> interview last month. "What really upset me more than anything else was
> that there were people in the intelligence community that had doubts about
> some of this sourcing, but those doubts never surfaced up to us."
>
> Why didn't the doubts reach Powell? Perhaps because then he wouldn't have
> given the speech at all?
>
> "That's right," Wilkerson says, shooting a hard, solemn stare across the
> restaurant table. "That's right."
>
> He also says, "I am prepared to entertain the idea that they used him."
>
> Leaving the Fold
>
>
>
> By early 2004, it was clear to Wilkerson that the Pentagon's failure to
> prepare for the war's aftermath -- including dismissal of Army Gen. Eric
> Shinseki's warnings as well as peacekeeping and nation-building plans --
> had led to mounting deaths and injuries for U.S. ground troops. Nor was
> there, in Wilkerson's view, any thought given to future replenishment of
> the Army and Marine combat troops as the insurgency continued.
>
> "Larry Wilkerson is a man of the Army in the finest sense," says Kelly.
> "He cares deeply about the U.S. Army . . . and he hates to see this
> institution badly damaged, and he believes it has been badly damaged."
>
> Revelations about Abu Ghraib and the skirting of the Geneva Conventions
> added to Wilkerson's anger. He came to see Powell as the administration's
> lone voice of reason -- but Powell was being shut out.
>
> "Combine the detainee abuse issue with the ineptitude of post-invasion
> planning for Iraq, wrap both in this blanket of secretive decision-making
> . . . and you get the overall reason for my speaking out," Wilkerson says.
>
> "It never became personal for Powell, because he believed in the process,"
> says Robert Charles, a former assistant secretary of state who worked with
> both men. "I believe it was harder for Larry, because he felt such great
> empathy for the boss, the most seasoned military officer he had ever
> served with."
>
> (Another aside from Wilkerson, on this period with Powell: "I can say in
> all truth that in 16 years he never blew his stack. He got mad at me one
> time and asked me to leave the office -- told me to leave the office --
> and that was towards the end when he was truly embattled, embittered and
> besieged, in my view. And even though it made me a little angry, I didn't
> take it that seriously because I knew at that point he was not a happy
> camper.")
>
> Wilkerson went so far as to draft a letter of resignation to Bush. He
> never sent it and now wonders whether he should have come out guns blazing
> before the 2004 election. But becoming a vocal political defector in
> Washington can mean lonely exile, a loss of stature and income.
>
> "I know it's very hard to put kids, job security and all that sort of
> stuff aside. I think that's the answer to why more people don't speak
> out."
>
> For Wilkerson, there was another reason: It might seem a betrayal of
> Powell, his hero, the man who signed photos to him with sentiments like,
> "To LW, You're the greatest!"
>
> Larry and Barbara Wilkerson, married for 39 years, live frugally in a
> Falls Church townhouse. She works at a Hallmark card shop. Their son is an
> Air Force navigator who's done duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their
> daughter, now a homemaker, served in the Army. Departing from government
> after Bush's second inauguration, Wilkerson had to decide: Would he speak
> his conscience or remain the quiet man like Powell?
>
> "My wife said to me: 'You have two choices, my man. You can think more
> about him or you can think more about your country. I suggest you do the
> latter.' "
>
> The Most Important Things
>
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> For years Barbara Wilkerson, 55, has baked cupcakes and cookies for the
> kids in the Powell club at Macfarland. After distributing treats at the
> year-end party, wearing her festive red blazer and a rhinestone teddy bear
> pin, she sat down for a moment to talk about her husband.
>
> "The most important person in his whole life has been General Powell," she
> says. "And the general has never let him down."
>
> Even more important than Barbara Wilkerson?
>
> "Well," she hesitates, unsure how to put it. "When you're married to an
> Army person, the Army is always -- that's kind of the thing. But he
> wouldn't put anybody above his country, that's for sure."
>
> She and others who know Wilkerson well say he has no intention of cashing
> in as a Bush critic. He hasn't joined a think tank or become a cable news
> pundit-for-hire. He has turned down publishers who want him to write a
> tell-all book for big money.
>
> Wilkerson says he may write an academic text about presidential
> decision-making. This month he began supplementing his retirement with
> part-time teaching jobs at George Washington University and the College of
> William & Mary.
>
> Recently a speakers bureau called Wilkerson to ask what fee he would want
> for a speech to a corporate audience. "I said I'd speak for the highest
> fee they'd pay," he recalls.
>
> But there was a condition: The money couldn't go to him. He said he wanted
> it all donated to scholarships for children in the Colin L. Powell
> Leadership Club.
>
> After the party the colonel helps with the cleanup. He lugs a bag of
> garbage out the door. All part of his duty.
>
> Walking to his car, he offers a final aside, about poetry. The colonel
> sometimes uses poems to tutor the kids in reading. He mentions a line that
> Powell always liked because it described the depth of family ties:
>
> "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you
> in."
>
> "In fact," says Wilkerson, "one time he quoted it to me and I said, 'You
> know where that came from?'
>
> "He said, 'Yeah, it came from me.' I said no, that's from Robert Frost's
> poem."
>
> Powell may or may not have known that already. The poem is called "The
> Death of the Hired Man."
>
> END QUOTE
>
>


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