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The president is fighting a twilight struggle against two cunning, ruthless foes—not just Islamofascism, but also the American foreign-policy bureaucracy
National Review, Nov 21, 2005
The president is fighting a twilight struggle against two cunning, ruthless foes--not just Islamofascism, but also the American foreign-policy bureaucracy. That bureaucracy has recently lashed out at George W. Bush. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff for Colin Powell, wrote in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times that Bush's foreign policy had been made by a "secretive, little-known cabal" led by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
Secretive little-known cabals ought to be run by people less well-known than the vice president and the secretary of defense. Wilkerson argues that the State Department has the primary burden of shaping American foreign policy, but since the first president to heed the foreign-policy advice of someone other than his secretary of state was George Washington, the chains of command have been tangled for some time. Brent Scowcroft, former everything, was the subject of a New Yorker profile, in which he expounded his brand of foreign-policy "realism" in all its Larry David-esque unloveliness. Of democracy in the Middle East: "The bad guys are always better organized. Always." Of Lebanon's Cedar Revolution: "something we have to worry about." Of mankind in general: "I'm a realist in the sense that I'm a cynic about human nature." Status-quo worship gave us 9/11. Scowcroft wants us to be hopeless and insecure. Any takers?
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COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
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