Janine Wedel - Shadow Elite - How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market

As early as Iran-Contra, members of the Neocon core cultivated, and were cultivated by, brokers to help accomplish their goals with foreign nations or entities. In this case, the key figure was Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi-born businessman and exile living in the UK. Chalabi, founder and president of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), was a key player in helping take the United States to war. While Chalabi did not belong to the Neocon core, they shared mutual interests: They wanted to overthrow Hussein and he wanted to be the president. Perle and company helped Chalabi secure many millions in U.S. taxpayer dollars beginning in the 1990s and hoped to install him as president of the new Iraq. Chalabi would feed vital “information” to the administration, the U.S. Congress, and the public—information that would play a winning role in the campaign to sell the war. 80

Personalizing the Pentagon

,

the Vice Presidency, and the Process

A good part of that campaign would be waged by the Neocon core within government bureaucracy, and won, thanks to their skill at bypassing and personalizing it, according to a wealth of accounts from inside officials. Neocon core members put their antibureaucratic views into practical action and marshaled past experience, drawing on the core’s staples—Perle as ringleader; loyalty- and ideology-based recruitment at the expense of professional expertise; the supplanting of official intelligence and information—while substantially innovating government processes. Members of the Neocon core and their allies thwarted both bureaucratic and professional authority, creating within government personalized practices and network-based structures while circumventing standard ones and marginalizing officials who were not part of their network. A chorus of insiders variously placed in the bureaucracy under Bush II is strikingly unified in their outrage and irritation at what they observed. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, who participated in the policy process as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005, is one of them. As he put it to me: “We were up against a ruthless machine that had its people in every corner of the bureaucracy, with a vision and a strategy for carrying out the vision.” 81

The upshot is that the decision to go to war clearly was made—but we don’t know where. When I asked Wilkerson how the decision was reached, he replied without hesitation. “I don’t know. I can point to no document, to no point when a decision was made to go to war.” Paul R. Pillar, a veteran CIA officer in charge of coordinating the intelligence community’s assessments regarding Iraq, was equally adamant: “There was no process. . . . No one has identified a single meeting, memorandum, showdown in the situation room when the question was on the agenda as to whether this war should be launched. It was never discussed. . . . That is the respect in which this case is markedly different from anything I’ve seen in the past. . . . There’s well established machinery for this . . .: For the decision to go to war in Vietnam there was meeting after meeting, policy briefing after briefing. The Iraq war was qualitatively different in that there was no such process. . . . In Iraq such machinery never got used.” 82

One of many aberrations in the run-up to the Iraq War is that the vice president’s office played a key role. War policy and conduct traditionally is in the Pentagon’s purview, with the National Security Council, located in the White House, also advising the president on national security and foreign policies. A substantial role for a vice president’s office in national security policy, let alone such a huge one as that of Cheney’s shop, is virtually unprecedented in U.S. history, according to a number of scholars and observers. 83

Cheney’s office was successful because it undermined bureaucracy and expertise. It operated through an “alternate national security staff” that undercut the actual National Security Council, according to Wilkerson. He speaks of a covert “cabal” constructed by Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, with the agendas led by key Neocon core members in those offices and with “insular and secret workings” that were “efficient and swift—not unlike the decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy.” I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who had gotten his start as a student of Wolfowitz, later worked for him in Reagan’s State Department, and in Bush II’s White House was an embedded Neocon core member—serving simultaneously as Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff and his national security adviser—ran this informal national security operation. (Libby resigned, of course, after being indicted in 2005 in the Joseph Wilson/Valerie Plame CIA “outing” case.) As Wilkerson concludes: “Many of the most crucial decisions from 2001 to 2005 were not made within the traditional NSC process.” 84

Sources from within the Bush NSC concur. Flynt Leverett, a senior staff member, told me: “I have no objection to people who have different views than I do working through the system. But the neocons worked around processes in ways I thought were illegitimate. There were constant efforts to pressure the intelligence community to provide assessments that would support their [the neocons’] views. If they couldn’t get what they wanted out of the intelligence community, they simply created their own intelligence.” Libby, together with the vice president, helped assemble discredited claims that were used to make the case for invading Iraq. 85

With regard to decision making in the Pentagon, Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, and Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, were well placed to influence and justify the decision to go to war. They and other members of the Neocon core contend that the intelligence community had seriously underestimated threats to the security of the United States. Feith was entrusted with devising a strategy for executing Bush’s “war on terror.” To facilitate the mission, members of the core set up alternative structures: two secretive offices in the Pentagon that dealt with policy and intelligence after September 11—the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group, established in October 2001, and the Office of Special Plans, founded in September 2002. Duplicating job descriptions of existing government units, they exerted influence, at least in part, by bypassing or altering standard government entities and workings, such as intelligence-gathering and decision processes, and supplanting them with their own. Feith oversaw both offices.

With relationships the nuts and bolts of personalized bureaucracy, Perle, ever the ringmaster, helped recruit staff for these offices. Loyalty, as determined by being in or close to the Neocon core network, appears to have been the principal guideline for staffing these offices, as well as for parts of the existing bureaucracy. As Perle himself explained, underlining the longtime Neocon theme of questioning the efficacy of government expertise, the reason for the Office of Special Plans was to “bring in people with fresh eyes to review the intelligence that the CIA and other agencies had collected.” Feith’s offices, along with the Near East South Asia directorate (NESA), which spawned the Office of Special Plans (OSP), marginalized professional civil servants and brought in neoconservative-affiliated staff. Feith put into policy his view that government should have more political appointees and fewer bureaucrats. Thus the replacements were not only not bureaucrats or experts on the Middle East, but people from “agenda-bearing think tanks,” as U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Karen Kwiatkowski has put it. She worked for NESA, located next to OSP, and, upon her retirement after more than twenty years of active-duty service, became a vocal critic of Feith’s operations and a valuable source of inside-the-Pentagon information. The OSPs’ eighteen or so staff members consisted of a cadre of “neocon-friendly appointees or contractors,” as Kwiatkowski described them, who overshadowed the others—several military personnel and professional civil servants who were made “largely invisible . . . and dispensable,” as she has described it. 86