Karen Kwiatkowski
Career officer does eye-opening stint inside Pentagon
Sat Aug 9 14:51:43 2003
64.140.159.11

Career officer does eye-opening stint inside Pentagon


Akron Ohio Beacon Journal
Thu, Jul. 31, 2003
Career officer does eye-opening stint inside Pentagon
By Karen Kwiatkowski, a recently retired Air Force Lieutenant colonel.


After eight years of Bill Clinton, many military officers breathed a sigh of
relief when George W. Bush was named president. I was in that plurality. At
one time, I would have believed the administration's accusations of
anti-Americanism against anyone who questioned the integrity and good faith
of President Bush, Vice President Cheney or Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld.

However, while working from May 2002 through February 2003 in the office of
the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Near East South Asia and Special
Plans (USDP/NESA and SP) in the Pentagon, I observed the environment in
which decisions about post-war Iraq were made.

Those observations changed everything.

What I saw was aberrant, pervasive and contrary to good order and
discipline. If one is seeking the answers to why peculiar bits of
``intelligence'' found sanctity in a presidential speech, or why the
post-Hussein occupation has been distinguished by confusion and false steps,
one need look no further than the process inside the Office of the Secretary
of Defense. I can identify three prevailing themes.

€ Functional isolation of the professional corps. Civil service and
active-duty military professionals assigned to the USDP/NESA and SP were
noticeably uninvolved in key areas of interest to Undersecretary for Policy
Douglas Feith, Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. These included
Israel, Iraq and to a lesser extent, Saudi Arabia.

When the New York Times broke the story last summer of Richard Perle's
invitation of Laurent Muraviec to brief the Defense Policy Board on Saudi
Arabia as the next enemy of the United States, this briefing was news to the
Saudi desk officer. He even had some difficulty getting a copy of it, while
receiving assignments related to it.

In terms of Israel and Iraq, all primary staff work was conducted by
political appointees, in the case of Israel a desk officer appointee from
the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and in the case of Iraq, Abe
Shulsky and several other appointees. These personnel may be exceptionally
qualified; Shulsky authored a 1993 textbook Silent Warfare: Understanding
the World of Intelligence.

But the human resource depth made possible through broad-based teamwork with
the professional policy and intelligence corps was never established, and
apparently, never wanted by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld organization.

€ Cross-agency cliques: Much has been written about the role of the founding
members of the Project for a New American Century, the Center for Security
Policy and the American Enterprise Institute and their new positions in the
Bush administration. Certainly, appointees sharing particular viewpoints are
expected to congregate, and an overwhelming number of these appointees
having such organizational ties is neither conspiratorial nor unusual. What
is unusual is the way this network operates solely with its membership
across the various agencies -- in particular the State Department, the
National Security Council and the Office of the Vice President.

Within the Central Intelligence Agency, it was less clear to me who the
appointees were, if any. This might explain the level of interest in the CIA
taken by the Office of the Vice President. In any case, I personally
witnessed several cases of staff officers being told not to contact their
counterparts at State or the National Security Council because that
particular decision would be processed through a different channel. This
cliquishness is cause for amusement in such movies as Never Been Kissed or
The Hot Chick. In the development and implementation of war planning it is
neither amusing nor beneficial for American security because opposing points
of view and information that doesn't ``fit'' aren't considered.

€ Groupthink. Defined as ``reasoning or decision-making by a group, often
characterized by uncritical acceptance or conformity to prevailing points of
view,'' groupthink was, and probably remains, the predominant characteristic
of Pentagon Middle East policy development. The result of groupthink is the
elevation of opinion into a kind of accepted ``fact,'' and uncritical
acceptance of extremely narrow and isolated points of view.

The result of groupthink has been extensively studied in the history of
American foreign policy, and it will have a prominent role when the history
of the Bush administration is written. Groupthink, in this most recent case
leading to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, will be found, I believe, to
have caused a subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a
co-optation through deceit of a large segment of the Congress.

I am now retired. Shortly before my retirement I was allowed to return to my
primary office of assignment, having served in NESA as a desk officer
backfill for 10 months. The transfer was something I had sought, but my wish
was granted only after I made a particular comment to my superior, in
response to my reading of a February Secretary of State cable answering a
long list of questions from a Middle Eastern country regarding U.S. planning
for the aftermath in Iraq. The answers had been heavily crafted by the
Pentagon, and to me, they were remarkably inadequate, given the late stage
of the game. I suggested to my boss that if this was as good as it got, some
folks on the Pentagon's E-ring may be sitting beside Hussein in the war
crimes tribunals.

Hussein is not yet sitting before a war crimes tribunal. Nor have the key
decision-makers in the Pentagon been forced to account for the odd set of
circumstances that placed us as a long-term occupying force in the world's
nastiest rat's nest, without a nation-building plan, without significant
international support and without an exit plan. Neither may ever be required
to answer their accusers, thanks to this administration's military as well
as publicity machine, and the disgraceful political compromises already made
by most of the Congress. Ironically, only Saddam Hussein, buried under tons
of rubble or in hiding, has a good excuse.

• Pentagon Whistleblower Reveals CIA/DoD Fiascos — envirosagainstwar.org, Sat Aug 9 22:57
• Secret meetings held about Iran — Knut Royce, Sat Aug 9 14:59
• Manucher Ghorbanifar — rainesco, Sat Aug 9 18:24