The Peter Principle and the Neocon Coup
The bloodletting has begun.
November 16, 2004
latimes.com
Robert Scheer:
I'm not referring to the latest attempt to reconquer Iraq,
but rather the wholesale political revenge campaign
being waged by the hard-liners in the Bush
administration against anybody and everybody inside
the government who challenged the way the second
Persian Gulf war in a decade was marketed and run.
Out: Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose political
epitaph should now read, "You break it, you own it" for
his prescient but unwanted warning to the president on
the danger of imperial overreach in Iraq.
Out: Top CIA officials who dared challenge, behind the
scenes, the White House's unprecedented exploitation
of raw intelligence data in order to sell a war to a
Congress and a public hungry for revenge after 9/11.
Out: Veteran CIA counterterrorism expert and Osama
bin Laden hunter Michael Scheuer, better known as the
best-selling author "Anonymous," whose balanced and
devastating critiques of the Iraq war, the CIA and the
way President Bush is handling the war on terror have
been a welcome counterpoint to the "it's true if we say
it's true" idiocy of the White House PR machine.
Meanwhile, incompetence begat by ideological
blindness has been rewarded. The neoconservatives
who created the ongoing Iraq mess have more than
survived the failure of their impossibly rosy scenarios for a peaceful and
democratic Iraq under U.S. rule. In fact, despite calls for their resignations -
from the former head of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. Anthony Zinni, among
others - the neocon gang is thriving. They have not been held responsible for the
"16 words" about yellowcake, the rise and fall of Ahmad Chalabi, the Abu
Ghraib scandal, the post-invasion looting of Iraq's munitions stores and the
disastrous elimination of the Iraqi armed forces.
As of today, the neocons on Zinni's list of losers - Deputy Secretary of Defense
Paul D. Wolfowitz; the vice president's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby; National
Security Council staffer Elliott Abrams; Undersecretary of Defense for Policy
Douglas J. Feith and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld - are all still
employed even as Bush's new director of central intelligence, Porter J. Goss, is
eviscerating the CIA's leadership.
This is the culmination of a three-year campaign by the president's men to
scapegoat the CIA for the fact that 9/11 occurred on Bush's watch.
So far, half a dozen of the nation's top spymasters have been forced out abruptly
- a strange way to handle things at a time when Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are
still seeking to attack the U.S. Ironically, this all comes as Goss is suppressing a
lengthy study, prepared for Congress by the CIA's inspector general, that,
according to an intelligence official who has read it, names individuals in the
government responsible for failures that paved the way for the 9/11 attacks.
Thus Bush, with Goss as his hatchet man, is having it both ways: He can be seen
to be cleaning house at the CIA - when he is simply punishing independent
voices - while denying Congress access to an independent audit of actual
intelligence failures.
We should remember that as flawed as its performance was under former
Director George J. Tenet, the CIA at least sometimes tried to be a counterweight
to the fraudulent claims of Rumsfeld's and Dick Cheney's neoconservative staffs.
All of the nation's traditional intelligence centers were bypassed by a rogue
operation based in Feith's Office of Special Plans. Feith was given broad access
to raw intelligence streams - the better to cherry-pick factoids and fabrications
that found their way into even the president's crucial prewar State of the Union
address.
Now, by successfully discarding those who won't buy into the administration's
ideological fantasies of remaking the world in our image, the neoconservatives
have consolidated control of the United States' vast military power.
With the ravaging of the CIA and the ousting of Powell - instead of the
more-deserving Rumsfeld - the coup of the neoconservatives is complete. They
have achieved a remarkable political victory by failing upward.
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