"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.
Lawerenc Wilkerson has been letting the Bush administration have it lately: Ex-Powell Aide Suggests Pre-War Memo Was Kept From Bush by Marc Perelman The Forward 11/11/05.
Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to then-secretary of state Colin Powell during President Bush's first term, said in a November 7 speech that the National Security Council had prepared a pre-war memo recommending that hundreds of thousands of troops and other security personnel were needed.
... Wilkerson, a retired U.S. army colonel, said he believed that then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice or her deputy, Stephen Hadley, had blocked the memo, but he acknowledged that he had no clear evidence. In the end, about 135,000 U.S. troops were sent - a decision that critics said has hurt America's ability to defeat the insurgency in Iraq and has led to increased American casualties. In July 2003, USA Today reported the existence of the NSC memo, which examined the level of troops in peacekeeping operations and concluded that some 500,000 troops would need to be deployed to Iraq. USA Today raised doubts as to whether the president saw the memo. However, Wilkerson's assertion seemed to take the matter a step further, suggesting that aides who supported the war intentionally kept the president in the dark.
The military isn't always right in their advice, of course. But the fact that such an important evaluation was kept from the president is another indication of how extreme the groupthink around Iraq had become in this administration's policymaking circles.
This should always be kept in mind when you hear Bush and Rummy saying that they've given the uniformed military all the troops they requested. It's may be technically true. It's also a way of avoiding responsibility for the fact that they tried a radical experiment of invading and occupying Iraq with a minimal force. The conquest worked. The occupation began failing on the day that the looters went wild in Baghdad.
“This was not a 'troop estimate,'” Wilkerson said of the alleged NSC memo, in an e-mail to the Forward. “It was a comprehensive analysis - succinct to be sure - of the potential post-war situation, which incidentally, as one would expect, included estimates of security, engineer, police, and other forces DOD might have to provide, as well as those of other agencies/departments (at least that's my memory of the preliminary stuff).” Wilkerson added, “The reason I suspect it got stopped is simply that they knew [Cheney] and [Rumsfeld] dissented strongly and did not want to reopen that box of worms."
When Wilkerson first started making news with his critical comments on the Bush administration, I suspected it was a way for Colin Powell to rehabilitate his permanently wounded reputation as a "moderate".
Now, I'm beginning to think that Wilkerson may have had a serious attack of conscience, especially over the torture scandal, which he has also addressed. The torture policy is such a radical break with past military policy (if not entirely with practice) that it has violated the sense of honor and respect for the integrity of the military institutions and traditions. I expect to see more and more former and even current military officers speaking out about this.
This is one of the ways in which the torture policy is just too big of a thing to be swept under the carpet like a run-of-the-mill corruption case.
Jimmy Carter writes in Our Endangered Values (2005):
Aside from the humanitarian aspects, it is well known that, under excruciating torture, a prisoner will admit almost any suggested crime. Such confessions are, of course, not admissible in trials in civilized nations. The primary goal of torture or the threat of torture is not to obtain convictions for crimes, but to engender and maintain fear. Some of our leaders have found that it is easy to forgo human rights for those who are considered to be subhuman, or "enemy combatants." (my emphasis)
"Wars are easy to get into, but hard as hell to get out of." - George McGovern and Jim McGovern 06/06/05
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