The Rebels Within


Clearly a number of high ranking military types in Washington are upset enough with the Bushite plans for world domination that they are talking about their concerns to reporters like Sy Hersh of the New Yorker and several at the Washington Post. Earlier in the week, a number of State Department people in Washington and Iraq were talking to columnist Sidney Blumenthal about the delusions being enforced by Condi Rice and the Bushites.

"Delusion" is not my word. Blumenthal writes that while State Department people in Iraq were doing their jobs and reporting back their best information and analyses of what really is going on, the Bushites in Washington were not only refusing to deal with these reports, but in at least some cases, were killing the messengers by "reassigning" them elsewhere:

The Bush administration's preferred response to increasing disintegration is to act as if it has a strategy that is succeeding. "More delusion as a solution in the absence of a solution," said a senior state department official.

These professional diplomats have further tarnished their reputations with the Bushites by being right in the past, especially where the Bushwhackers have been tragically wrong. But it is the people who were and are right who pay the price.

"Foreign service officers, as a rule, are self-abnegating in serving any administration. The state department's Intelligence and Research Bureau was correct in its scepticism before the war about Saddam Hussein's possession of WMDs, but was ignored. The department was correct in its assessment in its 17-volume Future of Iraq project about the immense effort required for reconstruction after the war, but it was disregarded. Now its reports from Iraq are correct, but their authors are being punished. Foreign service officers are to be sent out like tethered goats to the killing fields. When these misbegotten projects inevitably fail, the department will be blamed. Passive resistance to these assignments reflects anticipation of impending disaster, including the likely murder of diplomats."

An additional result is that the brand new Secretary of State has already detached herself from the department she supposedly heads:

" Amid this internal crisis of credibility, the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, has washed her hands of her department. Her management skills are minimal. Now she has left coercing people to fill the PRTs to her counsellor, Philip Zelikow, who, by doing the dirty work, is trying to keep her reputation clean. "