"WHY???" ~ Ernest_at_the_Beach
The State Department’s War With the White House
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1125170/posts “The State Department is in Kerry pre-inauguration mode,” a senior Bush administration official tells NewsMax, warning that the department’s bureaucracy is desperate to get President Bush out of the White House.
How desperate?
Well, last year the State Department invited billionaire financier George Soros, President Bush’s archenemy, to be its keynote speaker at an internal program known as “The Secretary’s Open Forum.”
Soros is giving tens of millions of dollars to a shadowy network of 527 organizations to help defeat Bush. After GOP senators got wind of the invitation, the department played down the Soros event but did not cancel it.
Controversy over Bob Woodward’s new book, as well as claims that Secretary of State Colin Powell has been frozen out of major policy decisions over Iraq, have obscured the enormous clout the entrenched State Department bureaucracy still wields and how ardently it wants to help defeat President Bush this November.
Though Powell has been described as the ultimate “good soldier” – disagreeing in private but supporting the president and his policies in public – he has left the State Department bureaucracy on automatic, without any check on its efforts to undermine the White House.
Please Don’t Betray Me
Even President Bush has made light of the problem, according to our source, telling political appointments he made to the State Department, “Don’t go native on me over there.”
On major issues a deep divide remains between the White House and bureaucrats at Foggy Bottom, including:
Weapons of Mass Destruction: The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) has been at the forefront challenging the administration’s claims to have had legitimate intelligence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. INR is believed to be the source of leaks intended to counter administration claims.
Senior Bush officials have seen so many obvious INR leaks published in the New York Times, it has becoming a running joke that some INR analysts must have Times reporters on their speed dials.
Some INR bureaucrats in this supposedly objective “intelligence organization” make no bones about their dislike for the Bush White House, and have posted demeaning cartoons about the president in their offices.
INR is a media favorite among the agencies that complete the U.S. intelligence community.
See No Evil
As one official put it: “[INR] never sees any evil and objected to all WMD findings against Iraq. It also objected to WMD findings against Iran, Cuba and North Korea.”
INR reflects the perennial liberalism of the State Department and its close ties with the Democratic Party.
INR is viewed as so clearly biased that even liberal experts are reluctant to cite it. For example, Ken Pollack, a former Clinton National Security Council official, noted in January’s Atlantic Monthly that INR is not taken seriously in Washington because it makes knee-jerk objections to everything and even disputed Iraqi WMD findings before the first Iraq war. [ See:
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/int2004-01-13.htm ]
Syria: Related to the WMD controversy is Syria’s involvement in those weapons.
Though some U.S. intelligence and Israeli sources have evidence that Saddam’s regime moved its WMDs to Syria shortly before the U.S. invasion in March 2003, the State Department has opposed making any public charges against Syria.
North Korea: Administration officials such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were outraged when State Department officials kept from them vital information about North Korea’s atomic weapons program.
In April 2003, the North Koreans told a U.S. government delegation in Beijing, “[A]s we had previously told you in New York, we have finished reprocessing all 8,000 of our plutonium fuel rods.”
The North Korean statement floored the Bush administration because the State Department had kept these revelations from the White House National Security Council and the Pentagon.
Because of this and other acts of defiance, decision-making on North Korean matters has been removed from the State Department.
Still, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and State’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs are pushing for a quick Clinton-style deal with North Korea that would get a promise on paper from the communist regime, with no full verification clauses.
Libya: The White House was so fearful the State Department would “mess up the Libya account,” our source says, that the White House was placed in charge of the developing detente between Col. Moammar Gadhafi and the U.S.
Even so, the administration has had its hands tied.
Our administration source says the White House is salivating for a second term to clean house at the State Department.
At the same time, State bureaucrats are dragging their feet on Bush’s initiatives, hoping to hold out until a Kerry administration.
For the moment Powell has enormous public, media and congressional support, and any effort by the White House to seek his early departure would not be smart politically. But the administration knows it has its hands tied because it cannot implement policy.
Powell has resisted many Bush political appointees suggested for State, and has sharply limited the number of political appointees that the president can make as ambassadors.
Additionally, early in the administration, Condoleezza Rice, the president’s national security adviser, agreed to fill many of the top positions in the White House’s National Security Council with State Department career foreign service officers and career federal appointees, many of whom were promoted during the Clinton years.
Richard Clarke was just one of many such pro-Clinton bureaucrats who came to fill out the Bush administration’s national security team.
‘Strategic Error’
“It was a strategic error,” Dr. Constantine Menges said of the Bush administration’s decision to keep so many State Department officials and Clinton holdovers at the NSC.
State’s agenda is often at odds with the president’s, confirmed Menges, who served on President Reagan’s NSC as Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and who authored “Inside the National Security Council.”
“It is a mistake to appoint career State Department foreign service officers to virtually all the senior regional positions in the NSC, as was done by Dr. Rice,” Dr. Menges said. “The president needs to have independent advice about international affairs and also about what is happening within the administration from competent foreign policy experts of his own party.”
The decision to populate the senior NSC staff with so many State Department officials, Menges argued, “created ‘two State Departments,’ and that does not provide any president with the range of information and ideas he needs.”
But a second may bring significant changes, an administration source tells NewsMax.
Powell’s retirement in the event of Bush’s re-election, which has long been rumored, is a certainty, Parade magazine reported Sunday.
Its selection as Powell’s most likely replacement: Condoleezza Rice.