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Avanti_Ken
"Ralph W" <ralphW@private.net> wrote in message
news:ec16a878b936e749f4998677d68112b9@msgid.frell.theremailer.net...

A veteran Foreign Service officer warns that when Colin Powell departs
in a second Bush term, America will lose its last bulwark against the
radical ideologues who are planning "more Iraqs."

by Anonymous

Editor's note: "Anonymous" is a veteran Foreign Service officer
currently serving as a State Department official. The views expressed
are personal and not related to his official position.

SECRETARY OF STATE Colin Powell is not staying for a second Bush term.
When he goes, the last bulwark against complete neoconservative
control of U.S. foreign policy goes with him. The implications are
enormous, yet the American electorate appears to be blinded by the
Bush campaign's deliberate manipulations of 9/11.

..Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ignored military advice and
excluded Department of State career professionals from Iraq planning.
Power was concentrated in the hands of a clique of neocon ideologues
he placed in key policy positions, including Deputy Secretary of
Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy
Douglas Feith. In the first term of George W. Bush, protégés of now
disgraced former Defense Policy Board member and neocon godfather
Richard Perle achieved control or subordination of every executive
branch foreign-policymaking body -- except the Department of State.

..Even after being dumped on by the Pentagon neocons and witnessing
the debacle of the Pentagon's Jay Garner's post-conflict solution, the
State Department's Civil and Foreign Service staff took up the slack
when the Pentagon unceremoniously fled responsibility for Iraq
reconstruction and stabilization. Now, Powell's departure is seen
within the department as an invitation to a lynching.

The realization that the same neocons who dismissed State's accurate
"Future of Iraq Project," prepared before the war, may now take over
at State in the second term is widely viewed inside the department as
a threat to the very integrity of the country's diplomatic first line
of defense. Corridor discussion has turned desperate -- maybe former
Secretary of State James Baker will intervene, maybe former National
Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft will talk to someone, maybe 41 will
talk to 43.

State personnel are used to comings and goings of Democratic and
Republican administrations, serving all equally and fairly. Not since
Vietnam, however, has the U.S. diplomatic establishment viewed the
future with such a degree of alarm. Retired U.S. ambassadors and
diplomats have raised their own public concerns in signed public
statements about the direction of U.S. foreign policy -- but that
concern pales compared with the quiet revolt brewing against a neocon
takeover at Foggy Bottom.

After 9/11, Wolfowitz, Feith and his subordinate, Harold Rhode,
recruited David Wurmser as a contractor from the conservative think
tank the American Enterprise Institute to set up what became known
internally as the "Wurmser-Maloof" project. F. Michael Maloof, neocon
fellow traveler and former aide to Richard Perle, and Wurmser created
a hidden intelligence unit, the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group,
under Feith at the Pentagon. The purpose of the group was to end-run
the CIA and create the rationale for invading Iraq. The parallel
operations model was previously followed by Oliver North at the
National Security Council and Elliott Abrams at State in their ill-
fated Iran-Contra strategy. It should have come as no surprise that
another neocon think-tank insider, Abram Shulsky, an Abrams colleague
from their days as staffers to Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, would end
up heading up what became the Office of Special Plans, the secret
intelligence unit at the Pentagon under Feith. The weapons of mass
destruction disinformation that was fed to the president and to the
American public came directly from Shulsky's shop.

After setting up this operation at the Pentagon for Wolfowitz and
Feith, Wurmser, with the help of Perle, was sent in early 2002 to
burrow in at State as senior advisor to John Bolton, under secretary
for arms control and international security.

In December 2002, Wolfowitz, Feith, Wurmser and Vice President
Cheney's national security advisor, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, acting
together, maneuvered Condoleezza Rice into appointing Elliott Abrams
to the position of special assistant to the president and senior
director for the Middle East at the National Security Council. This
appointment gave the neocons everything they wanted -- the NSC,
Executive Office of the President, Office of the Vice President, the
Pentagon, a cornered director in George Tenet at CIA, and Wurmser at
State.

The neocons had control of the information reaching the president and
a channel for their pseudo-intelligence product from Wolfowitz and
Feith's secret Pentagon Office of Special Plans. The only wild card
was Colin Powell and State's elite and independent Bureau of
Intelligence and Research (INR).

Neither Powell nor his deputy, Richard Armitage, who is also leaving
with Powell, seems to have been fooled by Wurmser's desire to leave
the Pentagon and join John Bolton's staff -- in effect, to come work
for Powell. They cornered and then neutralized Wurmser. Wurmser's
target was to get at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, a thorn
in the neocons' side and Powell's intelligence ace-in-the-hole against
Tenet's "slam-dunk" sellout at the CIA.


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