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Email article Main page content: Transcript: Colonel Wilkerson on US foreign policy Published: October 20 2005 00:17 | Last updated: October 20 2005 00:17 The following is a partial transcript of remarks made by Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to former secretary of state Colin Powell, to the New America Foundation, a Washington think-tank. I want to thank Steve and the New America Foundation for giving me this opportunity and thank some of my friends for turning out. I see an assis tant secretary over here, I think hes left that post now, who used to s pend some time in my office. I see some journalists in here who have been trying religiously to get me over the last 3 or 4 months. I was out in Montana recently fly fishing in Yellowstone National Park, s tanding in a river and mistakenly brought my cell phone. And it went off and I answered it and I wont say who it was, but it was someone from the New York Times wanting to interview me about the detain ee abusage.
got out of the Madison Ri ver, got up on the bank, told my son-in-law to keep fishing and talked t o the gentleman for about a half an hour. And if any of you have any que stions on that issue, of course, Id be glad to address them. I have two approaches to what Steve was alluding to as my topic today. Th e one is the approach of an academic for some 6 years at the Naval War C ollege at Newport and then the Marine Corps War College at Quantico. I taught some of the brightest people in America, 35 to 40 year old milit ary officers of all services, both genders, and all professional skills within the services.
But they know very little about such esoteric subjects as the national se curity decision-making process. So you go through a lot trying to get th em up to speed so that they can then deal with what youre going to thro w at them at a really rapid pace after theyre up to speed. Some of them tell you Id like to go back to my battalion. I dont like this world of strategy, international relations, politics, inter-agency activities an d so forth. Others take to it, like I think probabl y Colin Powell did at the National War College in the mid to late 70s, and become bigger because of the experience and then go on hopefully to gain stars and be fairly influential in their own professions.
to the Secretary of Defense, the President of the United States and the Nation al Security Council. So this was a monumental change and I will tell you, because I was there in the midst of the fight, I was in the arena, so to speak, it was tough . It was very, very tough to force the armed forces into jointness, whic h is the jargon that we used to describe it. Today we desperately need a Goldwater Nichols Act for the entire federal government. We need to force the inter-agency process, for example, to conform to Pre sident Clintons PDD 56, if youre familiar with that. It was a document that described, it could be improved on, but it described very well how America should deal with crisis.
My boss answer was simply, no, I wont because youve got it already. Now there are many critics who will say you cannot in our system of gover nment force the executive branch to do something that it doesnt want to do. The framers of the 1947 act I dont think would agree with that. Now, before I turn to the formal part of my presentation here, which is a little bit of history, let me just say that the other side, the reason my views are bifurcated, the other side is my practical experience.
and watching probabl y one of the finest Presidents weve ever had, thats how I feel about G eorge H W Bush, exercise one of the greatest adeptnesses at foreign po licy Ive ever seen. So many things happened in George H W Bushs 4 years that I think when historians write about it with dispassion 25, 30 years from now, theyre going to give that man enormous credit for knowing how to make the proc ess work. Took him a while, took them about 9 to 10 months to get their act together. I saw the Clinton administration up close and personal and it took them a little longer than that to get their ac t together. And in a very intimate way, I saw the George W Bush adminis tration from 2001 to early 2005. So I have 2 approaches, if you will, the academic over here and the pract itioner over here. The ground is so r ich for an academic and for a person whos taught the National Security Act and what has come out of the National Security Act, that I sometimes get too candid, if you will. On the other hand, as a practitioner and as a citizen of this great repub lic, I kind of believe that I have an obligation to say some of these th ings and I believe furthermore that the peoples representatives over on the Hill in that other branch of government have truly abandoned their oversight responsibilities in this regard and have let things atrophy to the point that if we dont do something about it, its going to get eve n more dangerous than it already is.
But these were probably some people who I think rivaled those who got tog ether that hot summer in Philadelphia and put together the Constitution. We have had some peaks and valleys in our history, but I think post-Wor ld War II and World War II itself was a peak and we had some really good people thinking hard about these issues. And one of the things that the y probably wouldnt tell you if they were here today, unless they had a few drinks, and Harry Truman would have had a few, is that they didnt w ant another FDR. They even amended th e Constitution to make sure they didnt get one for more than 8 years. They didnt want the lack of transparency into principle decisions that got people killed. Even thou gh theyve been successful in arguably one of the greatest conflicts the world has seen. And so they set about trying to insure that this wouldn t happen again. I dont think even his critics would have argued that FDR wasnt a brilli ant politician and a brilliant leader. You can perhaps count them on 2 hands and make persuasive arguments for t he additions. So we need a system of checks and balan ces and institutional fabric that can withstand anybody, or at least nea rly so. You have to have a system t hat is so elastic, so resilient, so able to take punches that at one tim e one branch can supplant another or one branch can come up and check an other.
You may have problems even if you have someone whos brilliant. Although I wouldnt say Woodrow Wilson concentrated power quite the way FDR did a nd, of course, the war and the depression gave him ample opportunity to do things to abridge civil liberties, for example, that even Abraham Lin coln didnt go to in a conflict that produced far more casualties and ar guably was more passionately fought, certainly in terms of the families of America. But too much power, too much secrecy, they want to get rid of that. They also wanted to institutionalize, more or less, the very thing that had b rought about their success in World War II. They wanted to institutional ize that product, that success, that whatever. They want ed to put one person in charge of those armed forces. Talk about secrecy, Harry Truman, when he took over in April of 1945, did nt even know about the atomic bomb. He had had hints because hed writt en, as chairman of the investigating committee in the Senate, hed writt en to Stemson and he had said Ive heard about this land buying out in W ashington, tremendous acres, numbers of acres are being bought. And Stemson had said, please, Mr Senator, its too big for you , essentially. Give you a sense of the times and the seriousn ess of what was happening.
and Stemson briefed the President with essential ly 2 papers in the Oval Office 12 days after he took office and he found out exactly how serious this was, and exactly what he had to deal with in terms of the nations nuclear program. So the process these people were going through was to try and make the sy stem more transparent, make decision making more transparent, make shari ng of information and critical data more the likelihood rather than the exception. And they set about doing this through a legislative process. I heard the same thing over and over again from my armed fo...
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