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  Colonel Larry Wilkerson Condemns US ‘Ineptitude’

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Lateline Broadcast: 21/03/2006

Within 24 months, we're going to have to withdraw from Iraq, whether the situation there, politically, economically and so forth, is adequate or not because we've stretched our ground forces to the point of breaking. We have officers who are leaving the Army and the Marine Corps now because they don't want to do a third and possibly a fourth tour in Afghanistan or Iraq.

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Ex-Govt staffer condemns US ‘ineptitude’

Reporter: Tony Jones

TONY JONES: Well, as the chaos in Iraq continues, more and more former supporters of the war are reviewing their respective positions, including some of those involved in putting the case for invasion. Colonel Larry Wilkerson served in the US military for 31 years, seeing action in Vietnam and also spending time in Korea and Japan. In 1989,he began working for Colin Powell - a relationship which lasted 16 years, ending only when Powell stood down as US Secretary of State at the beginning of last year. By then, Colonel Wilkerson was Colin Powell's chief of staff and instrumental in preparing his testimony and speeches leading up to the invasion of Iraq three years ago. Colonel Wilkerson joins us now from the ABC's Washington studio. Larry Wilkerson, thanks for being there.

COLONEL LARRY WILKERSON, FORMER CHIEF OF STAFF TO COLIN POWELL: Good to be here.

TONY JONES: Can I ask, when did you first come to the conclusion that the invasion of Iraq was the worst ineptitude in governance, decision-making and leadership in 50 years?

COLONEL LARRY WILKERSON: Well, it took a great deal of study, both as an academic, looking back over the time period in which I was involved and also reviewing my notes and looking at things during that time period itself, that is the time period when I was involved. Let me just correct one thing - I'm not saying that the decision to go to war or the war itself in and of itself was an inept decision. What I'm saying is the aftermath, the lack of planning, the lack of post-invasion thought, even, was an ineptitude of the first order and possibly even the greatest ineptitude of the history of America.

TONY JONES: You're a Vietnam veteran. Do you seriously think it is worse than Vietnam?

COLONEL LARRY WILKERSON: I'm coming seriously to believe that the leadership that I saw and have studied since as an academic with regard to Vietnam, is being parallelled, if not exceeded, by the leadership, both uniformed and civilian, in this conflict and I pray to God that we don't have four or five more years of this before someone comes to the conclusion in the leadership that enough is enough and we do something to change the situation dramatically.

TONY JONES: You have talked about a cabal influencing President Bush in his decision-making. Who's in that cabal, what do you mean by that?

COLONEL LARRY WILKERSON: If you look at our Government structure since World War II, principally since the 1947 National Security Act set up the decision-making process and the national security structure that we have today, you can find during that 50-plus-year period many times when the statutory process was flummoxed, it was adumbrated and obscured and deviated from, choose your verb. We have had accumulations of power during that period, for example, that our founding fathers would find egregious. I only need cite one when Henry Kissinger was both National Security Adviser and Secretary of State to give you some idea of how this has happened in the past. Today, what we have is the most powerful Vice President in the history of the republic. We have a Vice President who has a staff that equates to the National Security Council staff, that is the statutory staff under the law. We have a Vice President who gets numerous bites at the apple, so to speak, with the President of the United States and who has inordinate and dramatic influence on the President of the United States, through not just his own demeanour and his own feelings and opinion but also through the enormous staff that he has that, as I said, is the equivalent of the statutory staff. So, while in the past we might have had accumulation of power in a man who was both Secretary of State and National Security Adviser - we might have had different concentrations of power during Iran Contra and so forth that led to failures - we now have a unique concentration of power and it is in the office of the Vice President and it is amplified by the fact that the office of the Vice President tends to depend largely on the Defence Department when it comes to advice and consent with regard to many of the most important national security decisions and that's what I call a cabal.

TONY JONES: Let me take you back to just a little more than three years ago, when as Colin Powell's Chief of Staff you were tasked with gathering the intelligence from the CIA that he took to the UN Security Council on February 6th. Can you tell us, first of all, what sort of pressure was there to come up with the right sort of information to make that case for war?

COLONEL LARRY WILKERSON: I actually - I was the head of the taskforce but Secretary Powell was the real head, Secretary Powell and DCI director of central intelligence George Tenet. I must tell you, in my view Secretary Powell did everything he could possibly to limit the, what I would call the "unsourced information", that is to say, non-intelligence community information that went in to that presentation, even though subsequently, as we all know now, a lot of that information proved to be false, especially the information dealing with stockpiles of biological and inactive nuclear program. When we started the process we were handed a script, essentially a 48-page script, on WMD from the White House and that was to be the secretary's presentation at the United Nations. We took the script out to the CIA and examined it thoroughly and found it to be unsourced in a way we could corroborate. We found it to be a Chinese menu of everything that could possibly be cherry-picked with regard to Iraq and WMD so within several hours, we discarded that and under the tutelage of the DCI, George Tenet, we reverted to and used exclusively the national intelligence estimate they had done in response to the Congress in October 2002. As everyone now knows, that turned out to be fallacious in a number of key areas, too, but at least we moved away from that cherry-pick script to the national intelligence estimate.

TONY JONES: The national intelligence estimate, as you said, proved to be fallacious in quite a few areas, including a number of areas highlighted by Colin Powell before the UN Security Council, as he made the case for war to the entire world in a very sincere fashion. Does he now regret his involvement in making that speech?

COLONEL LARRY WILKERSON: Well, you'd have to ask him that. I characterise it this the way - when I realised I was the taskforce leader, so I had six days and six nights and I had a taskforce that literally got no sleep in order to put this together. When we watched it at the UN Security Council I felt that it was a very ineffective presentation. So one of the things I talked about with my taskforce was, we don't really think this is a very effective presentation, so why is the press spinning this as an effective presentation? We answered our own question almost immediately. It was because the most trusted man in America, in terms of the national leadership, a man who had poll ratings as high as Mother Teresa's gave it and so the real affect of that presentation, the drama of that presentation, the credibility of that presentation was because of the man who gave it, Colin Powell. It was not because of the effectiveness of the presentation. We all agreed that the presentation was not very effective.

TONY JONES: Do you think in what case that Colin Powell's international prestige was, in effect, used by people who wanted war at any cost?

COLONEL LARRY WILKERSON: Well, that's a difficult question to answer because I would put people who wanted war at any cost in a different category from those at the pinnacle of our national leadership. And to say they had the power to use Colin Powell is to say a little bit much, I think. You're asking me was the President of the United States, the Vice President of the United States, were they using Colin Powell -

TONY JONES: Actually, I'm not. In fact, I'm asking about the CIA because it was the CIA who provided the key intelligence, most of which proved to be wrong.

COLONEL LARRY WILKERSON: In that case, I'd have to tell you that I've come to believe that we have a tremendous problem in this country and we've not solved this problem with the restructuring that we've done with our intelligence community. In a word, we have a broken intelligence community and until we fix that and until we take the infrastructure, the institutions, the leadership and so forth and make it better, we're never going to have perfect intelligence, but we need to have at least a good intelligence community. We're going to be in trouble. We're going to be in trouble again and again and again and the intelligence failures over the last few years already create a legacy that's just daunting when you consider the fact that we are a superpower and we are the leader of the free world and we have such an inept intelligence community.

TONY JONES: Let me ask you this - the Vietnam War damaged the morale of the US military, of which you were a member for so many decades. It damaged the morale for decades and I'm wondering, do you think Iraq is likely to have the same damaging effect?

COLONEL LARRY WILKERSON: I think, unquestionably. I'm hearing from lieutenants, captains, majors, generals, many in uniform, many of whom were my students in years passed when I taught at the nation's war colleges. I'm hearing from the civilians who were foreign service officers, civil service and so forth in our embassy in Baghdad and I can tell you that the morale in the uniformed military is being impacted and I can also tell you that our ground forces are stretched to the point where you hear talk about withdrawal from Iraq. Within 24 months, we're going to have to withdraw from Iraq, whether the situation there, politically, economically and so forth, is adequate or not because we've stretched our ground forces to the point of breaking. We have officers who are leaving the Army and the Marine Corps now because they don't want to do a third and possibly a fourth tour in Afghanistan or Iraq. We have people who are beginning to question their leaders, just as they did in Vietnam. We have families that are beginning to fall apart because of second and third tours in Iraq. This is a situation with which I am well familiar. The signs are there and the signs are available for anyone to see, which is what makes me consider Secretary Rumsfeld an inadequate Secretary of Defence at best because he doesn't seem to see those signs, or if he does, he's not doing anything about it.

TONY JONES: We've just seen in the news tonight that the US military will conduct a criminal investigation into an alleged massacre of Iraqi civilians by US marines last November. Could we be seeing the same pattern of abuse that happened in Vietnam, where civilians were routinely seen as the enemy?

COLONEL LARRY WILKERSON: Well, I don't know the details of that particular case but I can tell you that from what I'm hearing from lieutenants and captains, in particular, people who are actually on the ground confronting the enemy and confronting the Iraqis everyday, would lead me to believe that, yes, the answer to your question is when you get this kind of deterioration in morale and when you get this kind of endless deployment and you get this kind of tour after tour after tour and no light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak, then you do have a deterioration in the ability of leaders to compel their troops to follow the rules of war, the law of war and so forth and it does present leaders with a tremendous problem.

TONY JONES: Now, you were, I believe, a Republican for many years, you worked with the Republican administration and the Republican secretary of state. Do you think the Republicans and the Republican President will end up paying the price, the political price, for this war?

COLONEL LARRY WILKERSON: Yes and I'm very concerned about that as a citizen. My mum wrote me a letter the other day and she said, "Son," - she's 86 years old - she said, "Son, please don't become a Democrat". And I told my mum, I called her and I said, "Mum, you know what? I want my party back. I don't want to become a Democrat. I want my party back." The Republican Party that I knew, that I grew up in, a moderate party, a party that believed in fiscal discipline, a party that believed in small government, a party that had genuine conservative values. This is not a conservative leadership. This is a radical leadership. I called them neo-Jacobins. They are radical. They're not conservative. They've stolen my party and I would like my party back.

TONY JONES: Larry Wilkerson, once again, as with many articulate people, we'd quite like to speak to you for a lot longer. We have to leave you now. Perhaps you'll come back and join us on another occasion. We thank you for taking the time to talk to us tonight.

COLONEL LARRY WILKERSON: Thank you for allowing me to.

TONY JONES: It's a pleasure.
 

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