Re: OT: The Century Ahead

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2006/01/18/AR2006011802607.html

Worth reading. From a true insider

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

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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

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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

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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
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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



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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."

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