he credentials are impeccable and the statements damning, adding further to the difficulty I have respecting the Bush administration; their policies and methods. I'm referring to a column, an op-ed piece, featured this morning in the Los Angeles Times and headlined "The White House Cabal." The author is Lawrence B. Wilkerson who, as chief of staff to Colin Powell, had a door adjoining the secretary of State's office during his 27 months of service. He served between 2002 and 2005.
At the outset of the piece he state's "In President Bush's first term, some of the most important decisions about U.S. national security - including vital decisions about postwar Iraq - were made by a secretive, little known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld."
Mr. Bush and his cronies have long held their line of reasoning despite the facts. Some of their indisputable facts - things they knew for certain: Saddam Hussein had weapons mass destruction and was building nuclear weapons; they were convinced (by criminals like Ahmad Chalabi), that our forces would be greeted as liberators; and there was not an insurgency in Iraq, it was just a bunch of losers who were disorganized and no real threat.
If you look to the first term of GWB's administration the performance would have been even worse than it was without the Powell damage control. And to quote further from the writing of Lawrence Wilkerson,
"At least once a week, it seemed, Powell trooped over to the Oval Office and cleaned all the dog poop off the carpet. He held a youthful, inexperienced president's hand. He told him everything would be all right because he, the secretary of State, would fix it. And as best he could, he did. Now General Powell has retired from public life."
Now we have a president with an approval rating of 38% and the same "cabal" surrounding and influencing him; Cheney, the Vice President; Donald Rumsfeld the Secretary of Defense and Carl Rove who'll plot the course for the President's return to popularity ...somehow.
Today the 2000th American serviceman will be killed in Iraq. We hear talk of the need for our presence there for a further decade. As the Chief Executive said before an audience of military personnel, today, Iraq has become the center of terrorist activity. It wasn't when we invaded.
So many of the problems this nation faces are imposed upon us by the direction and actions of this administration.
And they impeached and tried to remove from office Bill Clinton, who gave this nation fine and successful leadership for 8 years! What has our current president achieved of which he or we can be proud?
Are we "better off today than we were four years ago?"...to borrow a Republican line from the past.
Are we more united as a people as Bush had promised over and over while campaigning: "I'm a uniter not a divider"?