The Cabal

White House insiders, faced with the probability of indictments, are starting to come clean on how decisions are made there, and their displeasure with it. I agree that this kind of thing would be more powerful if it wasn't done after the fact. However, Colin Powell's chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson is best-suited to unravel this tale of monomania, ruthlessness and secrecy:

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.

He's talking about the government being hijacked by a select few, away from the bureaucracies and decision-making processes that ensure that the ship of state moves slowly through the water, and toward a small group who imposes their will on the nation, even if it means going through illegal means to do so. I don't know if I'd call it hijacked, however; everyone in that room is complicit by their silence, from the President on down to even Mr. Wilkerson. He continues:

Its insular and secret workings were efficient and swift — not unlike the decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy. This furtive process was camouflaged neatly by the dysfunction and inefficiency of the formal decision-making process, where decisions, if they were reached at all, had to wend their way through the bureaucracy, with its dissenters, obstructionists and "guardians of the turf."

But the secret process was ultimately a failure. It produced a series of disastrous decisions and virtually ensured that the agencies charged with implementing them would not or could not execute them well.

I watched these dual decision-making processes operate for four years at the State Department. As chief of staff for 27 months, I had a door adjoining the secretary of State's office. I read virtually every document he read. I read the intelligence briefings and spoke daily with people from all across government.

I knew that what I was observing was not what Congress intended when it passed the 1947 National Security Act. The law created the National Security Council — consisting of the president, vice president and the secretaries of State and Defense — to make sure the nation's vital national security decisions were thoroughly vetted. The NSC has often been expanded, depending on the president in office, to include the CIA director, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Treasury secretary and others, and it has accumulated a staff of sometimes more than 100 people.

But many of the most crucial decisions from 2001 to 2005 were not made within the traditional NSC process.

We know much of this-- the stovepiping of intelligence, Don Rumsfeld setting up his own intelligence shop at the Pentagon, Dick Cheney making countless trips to Langley to browbeat the agency into giving him the intelligence he needed to sell the war he wanted-- but to hear it from somebody in the room is striking. The closing paragraphs sound like someone who is still protective of his boss. However, seeing how the worm has turned since his boss exited stage right, one must give this a level of creedence.

The administration's performance during its first four years would have been even worse without Powell's damage control. 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 he did — everything from a serious crisis with China when a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft was struck by a Chinese F-8 fighter jet in April 2001, to the secretary's constant reassurances to European leaders following the bitter breach in relations over the Iraq war. It wasn't enough, of course, but it helped.

Today, we have a president whose approval rating is 38% and a vice president who speaks only to Rush Limbaugh and assembled military forces. We have a secretary of Defense presiding over the death-by-a-thousand-cuts of our overstretched armed forces (no surprise to ignored dissenters such as former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki or former Army Secretary Thomas White).

It's a disaster. Given the choice, I'd choose a frustrating bureaucracy over an efficient cabal every time.

Republicans don't like government; any one of them would tell you that. However, their solution to government appears not to be streamlining and ensuring a lack of corruption, but transforming government into oligarchy. That cannot be acceptable to any citizen who believes they live in a democracy under a Constitution that provides checks and balances.