Thank you for your public service for publishing the transcript as well as your role in organizing the speech.

Wow. Just wow. This needs to be shared with many, many people.

Steve

I am a great fan of yours, but I really have trouble with one part of Col Wilkerson's speach

- one of the finest presidents we’ve ever had – that’s how I feel about George H.W. Bush –

I believe in loyalty, but this is putting your head in a large sand dune.

I have see this everywhere on the net today. Rush spent a whole segment destroying Wilkerson's reputation.
Most interesting, he says it is good news for Bush. Rush says that clearing out the State department is just what Bush had planned. That Wilkerson even speaks only means Bushs success in his plan to remake State. Same with Defense and the UN.
It was quite a rant.

I listened to this speech when it was posted. There
were a couple of things that Wilkerson said that
bothered me.

One involved the infamous aluminum tubes that were
in fact for rockets, but people in the Bush administrion
said were for uranium floride centrafuges. Wilkerson
said that the French had tried them out and that
the French said that they would be just great for
centrafuges. I have no idea what the French said
but from what I have read in the New Yorker, there
were other people in the US government who were
experts on this area who said that there was no
way that the aluminum tubes were what you would
use. Why was it that Wilkerson was listening to
the French when experts within the US government
were saying something else? Could it be that
the French were saying what Powell wanted to hear
because this is what Bush/Cheney wanted to hear?

The second thing that bothered me a lot was his
claim that the US had to stay in Iraq. If the
US pulled out and Iraq became a failed state, he
claimed, the US would have to put "500,000 men
and women under arms and take the entire middle
east".

Wilerson states like this it is received truth
from on high. He knows! Well, it's really a
matter of opinion. There are a few things that
he does not take into account.

Why does the us give a damn about the middle
east? One word: oil. But oil is only useful
if you sell it. Whether the Iranian mullahs
or the Saudi's control it, they still have to
sell it to someone. Sitting in the ground it
does them no good and these are countries without
any other resources and industries. Really they
are countries which, with the exception of places
like Daubi don't have much of a post oil future.
So selling oil is something they must do. It's not like
they're going to stop. Oil is also a "fungable" commodity.
You sell it into the open market or through contracts.
It's not like they can decide to not sell oil to the
US because they don't like the US.

The other issue with the middle east is WMDs and
the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. The Bushies have been
pushing the idea that "they" are going to attack
"us" because they "hate our freedom".

Without addressing the flawed logic here, I would
point out that the US has proven that it can exact
a very heavy price for anyone who harbors people
who attack it. And this is without nuclear weapons.
The citizens of the US pay a lot of money for our
military. The force that we can bring to bear should
be sufficient to deter anyone who might attack us,
whether they do so with conventional weapons or
with WMDs. That is, after all, one reason we spend
all this money on the military: to deter attack.

So accepting Wilkerson's premise that the US must
remain in the quagmire that the Bushies have
gotten us into because "much worse will happen"
if we don't is, at best, not received truth and
probably deeply mistaken.

Wilkerson said some good things and I'm sure given
who he is and his background, it took courage. But
I also found him a bit of a Bush apologist. It was
interesting to note that he never criticized Bush,
Rumsfeld or Cheney. The way to fix it was not to
get rid of the Republican gang, he implied, but
by putting into place processes that would stop
them from doing evil. Of course he did not know
what these processes were exactly.

Ian

Steve --
You "are" the Barbara Walters of the D.C. foreign policy world. Good show getting these folks to open up.
Congrats,
s. saker

Oh man, think of all the crap Powell gave to Clinton, and none to Bush.

He must really, really hate gay soldiers!

again, steve, terrific work... wilkerson's speech was perhaps one of the most important statements by a credible public servant i have ever heard... i am glad it's getting the press as well... it deserves it and you deserve kudos for helping make it happen...

I think one should understand the Bush policy towards Iraq as deliberately provoking a civil war. An Iranian friend of mine tells me you can hear this theory on Iranian radio these days. The logic of desiring a civil war is a bit beyond me, but consider two things:one, in the 1980's the US happily armed both sides of the Iran Iraq war so that the fighting would continue as long as possible; two, if your hypothesis is that the Bush administration wants civil war, it's actions are logical---otherwise, not.

This story has been given a fair amount of play for almost two days, and I'm not aware of anyone yet making charges of anti-Semitism on account of Wilkerson's use of the term 'cabal'. Is it because of who Wilkerson is, or because the 'cabal' was Cheney and Rumsfeld? Surely the Weekly Standard will spring into action soon...

Perhaps, no one has mentioned the word "antisemitic" because Larry is most certainly NOT antisemitic...just ask all of the persons working at the State Department who claim to be of the Jewish faith and who also claim to be his friends. You might want to do a little better at trying to attack Wilkerson...perhaps you might like to get an education. Rather than making false personal attacks...perhaps you'd rather attack the crux of his arguments and this is coming from a conservative Republican.
[French cabale, from Medieval Latin cabala.]
ca·bal (kə-băl', -bäl')
n.
A conspiratorial group of plotters or intriguers: “Espionage is quite precisely it—a cabal of powerful men, working secretly” (Frank Conroy).
A secret scheme or plot.
intr.v., -balled, -bal·ling, -bals.
To form a cabal; conspire.

[French cabale, from Medieval Latin cabala.]

I have just listened to the entire tape and had the transcript in hand. Wilkerson, and The Washington Note, have made history. This is an incredible speech, and this blog continues to shake the foundations of a wrong-headed Bush administration foreign policy.

This blog gives me hope in our democracy, and Clemons and TWN and Wilkerson and others TWN is pulling together are making a difference. Who would have thought it possible?

I'm sorry, but I have no respect for a guy who saw this 'cabal' (Rumsfeld, Cheney) taking over, who saw a President assisted by a bunch of 'yessir' spineless advisors (Condi, etc.) and finds that the right time to tell the people he serves (the citizens of this country) of the dangers of this behaviour is after they did all the wrong. I'm sorry, this guy is no hero, he's an accomplice.

Palo - Sorry. I completely disagree with you. Washington is full of people who are maximizing gains and who are risk averse. This is not a town where either total honesty and candor is rewarded -- and that goes for all political parties, including the Greens and Libertarians in addition to the major parties. To see someone of the system make the comments that Larry Wilkerson did is extraordinary because it breaks through the system of complicit maintains of secrets and opaqueness in public policy.

Wilkerson has taken an enormous risk saying what he did -- and he has my admiration for it.

I can't tell you how to feel -- but I can tell you that your attitude, if applied broadly in Washington, would never give anyone an incentive or the sort of support that they need to be truthful to the American public.

Just to be clear -- Daniel Ellsberg, whom I admire, was part of the "machine" for a very long time before he began the process of copying the Pentagon papers.

Our democracy depends on people who are part of the system to blow the whistle. You can debate timing -- but I want people to reveal what they know about the decisionmaking process of this government.

So, as you can tell -- I have little patience with your knee-jerk critique of Larry Wilkerson's courageous honesty and clarity.

best regards,

Steve Clemons

Palo - Sorry. I completely disagree with you. Washington is full of people who are maximizing gains and who are risk averse. This is not a town where either total honesty and candor is rewarded -- and that goes for all political parties, including the Greens and Libertarians in addition to the major parties. To see someone of the system make the comments that Larry Wilkerson did is extraordinary because it breaks through the system of complicit maintains of secrets and opaqueness in public policy.

Wilkerson has taken an enormous risk saying what he did -- and he has my admiration for it.

I can't tell you how to feel -- but I can tell you that your attitude, if applied broadly in Washington, would never give anyone an incentive or the sort of support that they need to be truthful to the American public.

Just to be clear -- Daniel Ellsberg, whom I admire, was part of the "machine" for a very long time before he began the process of copying the Pentagon papers.

Our democracy depends on people who are part of the system to blow the whistle. You can debate timing -- but I want people to reveal what they know about the decisionmaking process of this government.

So, as you can tell -- I have little patience with your knee-jerk critique of Larry Wilkerson's courageous honesty and clarity.

best regards,

Steve Clemons

Steve,

I can't tell you how to feel -- but I can tell you that your attitude, if applied broadly in Washington, would never give anyone an incentive or the sort of support that they need to be truthful to the American public

It is not a question of MY attitude. It is Wilkerson's. I would be more sympathetic an appreciative of his comments if there was any hint of mea culpa on his speech. Was he not part of the lying machine that took the country to War under false pretenses? He was. Did he in any way alert the country of that? He didn't.
I appreciate your political utilitarianism about encouraging the holders of power to speak the truth, and I hope you appreciate the impatience of those that demand the truth to be spoken when it matters.
I'm sorry, I also have little patience, but for those that describe the decisions that kill thousands in a way that resembles a chess match. Wilkerson was an enabler of an imperial adventure.

I am glad that Wilkerson has expressed his opinion; however, I do not share his respect for Colin Powell. Despite what Steve has to say about the risk averse environment in Washington, "a good soldier's" first duty is to his country not to a corrupt administration. Colin Powell has badly failed his country and its citizens. The sooner he leaves public life, the better. I also hope he takes his dishonest, incompetent son, Michael, with him.

This article is from today's WaPo:
http://tinyurl.com/ddy7v

Colonel Finally Saw Whites of Their Eyes

By Dana Milbank
Thursday, October 20, 2005; A04

"As Colin Powell's right-hand man at the State Department, Larry Wilkerson seethed quietly during President Bush's first term. Yesterday, Colonel Wilkerson made up for lost time.

He said the vice president and the secretary of defense created a "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal" that hijacked U.S. foreign policy. He said of former defense undersecretary Douglas Feith: "Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man." Addressing scholars, journalists and others at the New America Foundation, Wilkerson accused Bush of "cowboyism" and said he had viewed Condoleezza Rice as "extremely weak." Of American diplomacy, he fretted, "I'm not sure the State Department even exists anymore."

And how about Karen Hughes's efforts to boost the country's image abroad? "It's hard to sell [manure]," Wilkerson said, quoting an Egyptian friend.

The man who was chief of staff at the State Department until early this year continued: "If you're unilaterally declaring Kyoto dead, if you're declaring the Geneva Conventions not operative, if you're doing a host of things that the world doesn't agree with you on and you're doing it blatantly and in their face, without grace, then you've got to pay the consequences."

With Bush's approval ratings dropping below 40 percent, the administration's vaunted loyalty and party discipline are suffering. David Frum, a former White House speechwriter, is campaigning against confirmation of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. Bruce Bartlett, who worked for the president's father, was fired by his think tank this week because he is publishing a book titled "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy."

And, on Capitol Hill yesterday, Republicans joined in criticizing the administration about Iraq. When Rice said at a hearing that "we have made significant progress" in Iraq, Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee (R.I.) replied: "Well, we all wish that were true, but we can't kid ourselves, either."

Wilkerson adds a new dimension to the criticism. A 31-year military veteran and former director of the Marine Corps War College, he worked for Powell in the public and private sectors for much of the past 16 years, and he was often described by colleagues as the man who would say what Powell was thinking but was too discreet to say.

Wilkerson's beef with the administration was, for the most part, not ideological. He argues that U.S. forces must remain in Iraq, and he describes George H.W. Bush as "one of the finest presidents we've ever had."

Rather, the colonel objected to the administration's secrecy, which allowed Cheney, Rumsfeld and others to subvert the foreign policy apparatus that has been in place since 1947.

"What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld," he said. By cutting out the bureaucracy that had to carry out those decisions, "we have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran, and generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina." If there is a nuclear terrorist attack or a major pandemic, Wilkerson continued, "you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that'll take you back to the Declaration of Independence."

Wilkerson, part military man and part academic, said "hell" a lot but also used words such as "desultory" and "titular." Peering from large wire-rimmed glasses, armed with a flag lapel pin, he spoke with barely restrained anger. He had given critical quotes about the administration before, but yesterday's New America Foundation speech was his coming out as an administration critic.

He had barbs for lawmakers ("truly abandoned their oversight responsibilities") and said past presidents had also circumvented the national security structure. But, he said, "the case that I saw for four-plus years was a case I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process."

Wilkerson blamed Bush, "not versed in international relations and not too much interested," for letting the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal to take over. He blamed Rice for dropping her role as honest broker to "build her intimacy with the president." And he blamed whoever gave Feith "carte blanche to tell the State Department to go screw itself."

The cabal's end run around the bureaucracy, he argued, stalled nuclear diplomacy with North Korea and Iran. He said top officials "condoned" prisoner abuse and left the Army "truly in bad shape."

"You and I and every other citizen like us is paying the consequences," he said, "whether it was a response to Katrina that was less than adequate certainly, or the situation in Iraq which still goes unexplained."

The colonel said his old boss is not pleased with his decision to go public with his criticism. Powell, he said, "is the world's most loyal soldier." Wilkerson said he admired that, but he took a different view of loyalty: not to the administration, but to the country."

Just jumping into the fray here...I refer all to the Rude Pundit's post from yesterday (below-and I apologize in advance if I've violated some blog/internet etiquette rule by posting RP's rant in its entirety). I find its message of courage in speaking truth to power particularly instructive. In addition to Wilkerson, will there be others-Warner, Specter, McCain, Hagel?

10/20/2005
The Republican In Fall:
The Senate Republican keeps a plastic baggie of Tucks in his coat pocket, for these days, in this strangely chilled autumn, he is shitting blood on a regular basis. Every day, the Republican reads the newspapers, and every day, his stomach heaves at what he sees: Patrick Fitzgerald's Sword of Damocles, hanging by that damned single hair, ready to take off the head of the administration; the tumble of Tom DeLay; the monkeyfuck insane House of Representatives that keeps pushing the cruelest legislation possible; the debacle that is the Harriet Miers nomination; the murderous war in Iraq; the rife incompetence of the White House. The Republican tries to avoid seeing all of this information, but partly he knows he must face it - it is his party, after all, and his job; and partly he can't avoid it. Indeed, he's directed his staff to keep him updated on each scandal.

The Republican has been in the Congress for a long time now. He has seen scandals come and go. He knows of a few that never surfaced in the public, like when Bob Dole was caught in the Senate cloakroom, his penless hand being used as a dildo by a moaning Jeanne Kirkpatrick as he was being blown by Kirkpatrick's female assistant; like when Exxon gave Frank Murkowski a stuffed caribou, its fiberglass carcass filled with cash; like when Alphonse D'Amato threatened to have Lawrence Eagleburger whacked. Yes, the Republican has seen so much he has dealt with by winking and looking away. But now, now.

The Republican knows he's going to be called upon to defend his President, to defend his party, to defend conservatism. He will be given talking points on discrediting Fitzgerald that he is to repeat like a mantra of the damned on every Sunday morning talk show. He will put on a good show of playing hardball with Harriet Miers until, ultimately, as expected, he votes for her. He will grill Rumsfeld and Rice and generals big and small about the war and foreign policy before voting for whatever the White House asks. His leadership will tell him turn this around on the Democrats, that they are making mountains out of molehills, that you don't wanna fight, you just wanna move the country forward. And he knows that if he doesn't do any of this, Karl Rove or someone under him will fuck him over - ensure that his state gets few defense contracts or homeland security funds, close a base or two there, dry up that corporate campaign funding trough, put up a true blue Bush lover against him, have his children followed after school, threaten to rape his wife.

The Republican knows he's placed himself in a corner. Because he knows that chances are this time things are different. If that hair breaks, if Fitzgerald goes after the head of the snake, the public's gonna turn on his party. He's seen that happen before, too, with both parties. And he's gotta pick his side: the administration or self-preservation. His learned behavior of the last five years is gonna say to him to prop up the White House, ride this out. All those times he's been beaten by Rove, screamed at by the mad President, scowled at by Cheney - the abuse that makes his reflex tell him to cower. His natural instinct is now to go down with the ship, if necessary.

The Republican, as he looks over this morning's news, wonders what it would be like to break ranks, to name evil where he sees it. To say, as other conservatives have, that this administration has failed, that it is a shit-encrusted assault on the very foundations of the things the Republican loves about America, about politics, about governing. The Republican knows that it would only take one - that once he turns, others will join him, like a branch that pushes through a logjam. And he could save his party from this amateur, this manchild, this pretender, this Bush. He could lead the way, showing that the Republicans put the good of the nation above loyalty to criminals. God, what a magnificent thing that would be: the hearings, the resignations, the housecleaning that would elevate discourse and set the country at least back on the proper path.

For the Republican knows, at the end of the day, each and every individual in his party, in the Congress, bears the weight of complicity in letting things go this far. And if the Capitol crumbles, it will be because men and women like him failed to act as individuals with consciences instead of as good soldiers in a lost platoon.

Yes, he should act, now, but he will not. Such things are what noble men do, but he is not a noble man; he is just a Republican. And the fall has just begun.

// posted by Rude One @ 12:02 PM

saper_aude, you completely misunderstood my post, which was sarcasm. Almost every time someone in an op-ed, column, or blog criticized the war decision-making being hijacked by a small group of neoconservative ideologues, someone would leap to make charges of anti-Semitism. It happened to Gen. Zinni in the pages of the NYTimes, it happened countless times on this and other blogs. Yet this time so far there's blessed silence from the intellectual defenders of the war... All the noise is coming from the blowhard who's made a good living turning the two-minute hate into almost two hours of Hate Radio.

Apologies for misspelling your handle, sapere. My Latin isn't as strong as it was forty years ago.

MC, since you raised the subject, yes, it's Not Done to reproduce entire posts. A link is much better, with an excerpt of the most salient part. Speaking for myself I could have done without the Jeanne Kirkpatrick bit, and the next couple of paragraphs would have been stronger for it.

How to make a link:
[a href="http://url.url.net"]Rude Pundit[/a]

Replace the square brackets with pointy ones, the fake URL with the actual one, and the text between the two sets of brackets becomes a link.

eb,

Thanks...

Thank you for explaining your statement. I stand corrected and apologize for being a bit rough on you.

I guess I kept thinking of what Steve Clemons called my knee-jerk reaction to Larry Wilkerson's 'courageous honesty'. I understand Steve's job directing a public policy think tank means necessarily valuing access to the inner workings of those who make policy at the highest level. But in many ways, his apology of Wilkerson's position is symptomatic of what's wrong with Washington: D.C has indeed become Judith Miller Town, a place more interested in 'access' to the powerful than in the political consequences of their actions. It seems great to hear Wilkinson criticize the Bush Administration, but nobody at the Forum even attempted to ask the Larry Wilkerson why he stayed with it till the end. Courageous was Greg Thielmann, who resigned in disgust for the manipulation of intelligence that Wilkerson and his boss Colin Powell willfully peddled at the U.N before the Iraq invasion. Where was Wilkerson when the administration labeled as 'appeasers' those who doubted its mendacious claims? He was there. Where was Wilkerson when the administration tried its racket job on the whisleblowers like Amb. Wilson? He was there. Where was Wilkerson when Colin Powell prepared his infamous speech waving test tubes full of white powder and showing the world cartoons of iraqi mobile biological weapons labs, calling the evidence "facts, not the figment of anyone's imagination"? He was right there. Where was Wilkerson when Thielmann tried to call attention to this manipulation of the facts? He wasn't there. Where was Wilkerson when Steve Clemons was crusading against the nomination of the poster child of the neocon cabal, John Bolton? He wasn't there. Courage? Honesty? Gimme a break. How courageous is to jump ship when your corrupt boat is sinking and you sold all the tickets to unsuspected customers?

Regarding Wilkerson's statement that " We can't leave Iraq. ... It makes no sense." Would like to bring to your attention to a think piece by Gen. Odom, former Director of NSA.
He makes the case that all the dire predictions of things that could happen have already happened.

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/odom.php?articleid=7487

This is transcript of Amy Goodman's interview of Odom.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/04/144240#transcript

I applaud Col. Wilkerson for speaking out. I have to say, I agree with Billmon's assessment regarding this insightful view deep inside the world of conservative policy and bureaucracy. Here's an excerpt and link:

"Like Richard Clarke, Wilkerson strikes me as reasonably representative of the technicians who actually run the empire -- and his assumptions largely appear to reflect those of his class. American supremecy is a taken as a given, requiring no legal or moral justification. Not because America has any grand historical mission to spread the blessings of democracy to the heathen, but because American power maintains the world order and keeps the peace, or at least something approximating it. It also keeps the sea lanes open and the oil flowing and the wheels of industry turning, not just here but around the world.

"It does appear to have dawned on Wilkerson that the U.S. hegomony isn't viewed as quite such an execise in utilitarian benevolance by the rest of the world, but I'm not sure he understands exactly why this is. I think he puts far too much blame on the cabal's shenanigans -- although these admittedly have made things worse -- and not enough on the fact that empires, even the practical, no nonsense type favored by the realists, are anachronisms in the modern world."

the link:
http://billmon.org/archives/002283.html

I'm with Palo on this one. A day late and a dollar short. Do we really need more confirmation that Feith is dumb as dirt?

Wilkerson was not a true believer, but he was an enabler.

Plus no exit plan -- we broke it, we have to stay there and pick up the pieces, now that's gonna work out just swell, isn't that pretty much the same thing Condi's said the past week?

"We can’t leave Iraq. We simply can’t. I can make that case. No one in this administration has made that case. They have simply pontificated. That’s all they’ve done. Now, I’m not evaluating the decision to go to war. That’s a different matter. But we’re there, we’ve done it, and we cannot leave. I would submit to you that if we leave precipitously or we leave in a way that doesn’t leave something there we can trust, if we do that, we will mobilize the nation, put 5 million men and women under arms and go back and take the Middle East within a decade. That’s what we’ll have to do. So why not get it right now?"

My question for Wilkerson - which anyone who believes we ought to stay in Iraq needs to answer - is, what is do-able for us there? What can the USA accomplish by staying? How can we do it, how long will it take, and what will it cost?

I'm all for staying and helping fix the mess we've made there, if there's a worthwhile difference we can make. But what's the reason to believe we can help them? Iraq in October 2005 is worse than Iraq in October 2004, which is in turn worse than Iraq in October 2003. Where's the scintilla of evidence that our presence is actually helping?

Juan Cole has suggested that we pull out of Iraq's cities, perhaps to a couple of those 'enduring bases' we've been quietly building, and maintaining enough of a force to prevent foreign invasions and internal battles involving massed troops. (Air power ought to suffice.) ISTM that this is the best we can do; what more can we accomplish by being more involved than that?

The burden's on Wilkerson, and on anyone else who believes we should continue to keep over 100,000 troops on the ground in Iraq, to explain what more they would accomplish than Dr. Cole's plan would, how they would do that, and why we should expect that they can.

I have read the transcript of Wilkerson's speech and two things come to mind --

1. He sounds incoherent through much it. His thoughts are meandering and often his sentences lack syntax. Is this the way it came off in the room or just on paper?

2. Was he predicting a coup if the US is hit with another disaster? It's all very roundabout, but it seems that this is what he's implying.

Thank You so much for printing this and thanks to Col Wilkerson for speaking out.
I need to read again to absorb so much info.
I only wish he had spoken up sooner, although I'm not sure he would have been heard, most likely smeared and trashed.

I have spent most of Bush's presidency feeling like an outsider in my own country. Nothing that man has done has made sense to me. Even on 9/11 I wondered what a coward he was hiding the day away. Tony Blair was back in london within the hour of his city being bombed and we did not hear from bush or Cheney. Right then, I knew what kind of men they were.

Great transcript and very informative. I really only have one thing to say and that is to all those who feel Col. Wilkerson was acoward in not speaking up sooner. There is one simple thing about affecting change and that is that "you cannot rock the boat unless you are on it."

Having abondoned ship early on may have cleared him of being a part of the problem but staying with them and trying to put in his two cents is more valuable an effort than just giving up and hitting the lecture circuit. Maybe his comments would have been more valuable in 2003 but was the country willing to listen then? Just look at all the defectors who spoke out and few gave them credibility. Paul O'Neil, Joe Wilson... just to name the headliners and all were smeared as having a vendetta against the administration.

I prefer people like Col. Wilkerson be on the boat trying to steer it's course than jumping ship and watching it sink.