[Mb-civic] The Peter Principle and the NeoCon Coup

[Michael Butler]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-scheer16nov16.story

ROBERT SCHEER

The Peter Principle and the Neocon Coup
 Robert Scheer

 November 16, 2004

 The bloodletting has begun.

 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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