Recently, Col. Larry Wilkerson, USMC Retired, and former chief of staff at the state dept. under Colin Powell spoke at a luncheon for the New America Foundation think tank. In this luncheon he became a marine once again and began a verbal onslaught against those who are most damaging to the country and the constitution who swore to protect, President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. He let'em have it too.

The Washington Post printed a couple of good columns on it, one by Dana Milbank and the other by Dan Froomkin.

This is from Milbank's column:

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."

This is pretty serious stuff here. This guy was obviously a heavyweight in the party and I think he's upset his friend Colin Powell basically got dumped on.

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."

Lots of people believe George W. Bush was a tough guy, a no nonsense kind of person who didn't take any crap off of those other nancy-boy nations. Turns out he was still nothing more than the Crawford Tx. village idiot.

Here's a link to the text of the speech:

Speech

His final words:

I will tell you, as a military man, the bottom line is not everything. It’s far from everything. One of the reasons Colin Powell answered the question when he was asked, after the first Gulf War, why he sent five carriers – one of the reasons he said because he didn’t have six – (scattered laughter) – was because he understood that the bottom line is not everything. When you start taking a paring knife to the military to cut it -- like a businessman would cut his business -- you are damaging and perhaps destroying the potential of that military to win future conflicts. You never know what you are going to need on the battlefield, so you’d better have six of them. Five of them won’t show up, four of them won’t be able to communicate, and I could go on. But you need overlap, you need redundancy. You need, as Powell used to say “decisive force.” People say he said “overwhelming force;” most often he said “decisive force.” And when you are dealing with government in many ways, whether it’s Katrina, Rita, responding to a nuclear attack or whatever, you’d better have 10 cases of water where you think you need one. You’d better have 15 million MREs where you think you need only a million because you never know in a crisis, and the best way to be prepared is to have lots more than you think you’re going to need or want. And that’s just the reality of the way you do business in government and in the military as opposed to the way you do it at GE – oh, I shouldn’t use GE – (scattered laughter) – you know, wherever you do business. It’s very – it’s a very different environment. So when you have businessmen making the decisions within government, it’s not necessarily bad, but you’ve got to be willing to listen to other people who might have different opinions to those you have.

posted by Stithmeister @ 8:38 PM
 
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