“A former Pentagon officer turned whistleblower says a group of hawks in the Bush Administration, including the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, is running a shadow foreign policy, contravening Washington’s official line.
‘What these people are doing now makes Iran-Contra [a Reagan administration national security scandal] look like amateur hour. . . it’s worse than Iran-Contra, worse than what happened in Vietnam,’ said Karen Kwiatkowski, a former air force lieutenant-colonel.
‘[President] George Bush isn’t in control . . . the country’s been hijacked,’ she said, describing how ‘key [governmental] areas of neoconservative concern were politically staffed’.” —Sydney Morning Herald
The essential point of this accusation is that foreign policy analysis is now routinely bypassing civil service and military professionals and routed instead through ideologically-chosen political appointees. This neatly fits with Seymour Hersh’s profoundly important examination of the breakdown in cooperation between the CIA and the executive branch around the uraniumgate lies in his recent article for the New Yorker, “The Stovepipe”, which I summarized here several weeks ago. Although one might question the evidence for Kwiatkowski’s assertion that Bush is not in control and that the foreign-policy machinery has been hijacked out from under him, that he is not willingly collaborating or at least acquiescing to this process, I do not doubt it. Readers of FmH know that I have felt since his dysadministration took power (and, let us not mince words, I do mean “took”) that he has largely been a puppet of his senior appointees. The evidence becomes clearer and clearer both on the basis of the ever-mounting indicators of his intellectual dullness, for those who needed convincing, and his track record in office. Discerning observers are fools to hide behind pat confidence that ‘it can’t happen here’; historians will cite numerous precedents for regimes with puppet rulers where the actual authority was vested covertly in their more ruthless and controlling ministers. A courageous press, and a united Democratic opposition, would focus heavily on this between now and the 2004 elections. Those cynical progressives who are fond of dismissing partisan politics with generalizations about how the two parties are no different (I know, I’ve largely been one of them… until the Bush people seized power) would be well-advised to pay more attention to the extraordinary nature of the palace coup these Republican ideologues have pulled off in a manner we would have never seen under President Gore.
