Foreign policy realists

A great many of experts in the foreign policy arena are weighing in with strong criticisms of the Bush administration. Yesterday I linked to Melvin Laird in the upcoming Foreign Affairs. Soon I will read Brent Scowcroft in the New Yorker.

Former Powell Chief of Staff Lawrence B. Wilkerson has also been on the warpath. In today's Los Angeles Times he writes of the foreign policy cabal in the White House.

But it's absolutely true. I believe that the decisions of this cabal were sometimes made with the full and witting support of the president and sometimes with something less. More often than not, then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice was simply steamrolled by this cabal.

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."

I think we can assume that Wilkerson believes the ways of the past, and of his former boss, were superior to this cabal:

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.