October 25, 2005
Critics on Iraq Policy Come Out of the Woodwork Too Late
by Ivan Eland
With the continued quagmire in Iraq and the likely indictments of senior Bush administration officials for trying to shore up the shaky rationale for the invasion, one would think that things couldn’t get much worse for the administration. But where success has a thousand architects, failure leads to much finger pointing. The administration’s latest headache comes from Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff. In a well-publicized recent speech before the New America Foundation, which I attended, Wilkerson lambasted the “Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal” that got control of U.S. foreign policy from a president “not versed in international relations and not too much interested either.”
Wilkerson’s scathing remarks were designed to deflect criticism from his former boss. As one anti-war Republican Senate staff member told me, Wilkerson “summoned his courage about three years too late.” The typically politically correct, inside-the-beltway audience was too polite to ask why Powell and Wilkerson didn’t resign over the invasion of a foreign nation that they privately opposed.
Those taking a more optimistic view might say, “better late than never.” Like Richard Clarke and Paul O’Neil before him, a disgruntled former administration official like Wilkerson draws a lot of public attention to horrendous administration policy. In his speech, Wilkerson praised a new book by Democrat George Packer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, called The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq. The book will be just one of many new books exposing the administration’s incompetence in the Iraqi occupation, but will certainly get a boost from Wilkerson’s speech and the extensive media coverage of it.
Packer traveled to Iraq multiple times to research the book. Although valuable for cataloging the Bush administration’s bungling, however, the book falters by implying that a more competent administration could have been more successful in the Herculean task of restructuring an entire society’s political, economic, and social system. In other words, the author presents an essentially Wilsonian Democratic critique of a Wilsonian Republican occupation, thus avoiding the larger question of whether such grand nation-building can ever be successful.
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http://antiwar.com/eland/?articleid=7757
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