A REAL patriot

Yesterday's Washington Post has an excellent article about General Colin Powell's former right-hand man at the State Department, Colonel Larry Wilkerson.

Wilkerson harshly criticized the Bush administration just about across the board during a speech he delivered to the New America Foundation.
He said the vice president and the secretary of defense created a "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal" that hijacked U.S. foreign policy. He said of former defense undersecretary Douglas Feith: "Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man." Addressing scholars, journalists and others at the New America Foundation, Wilkerson accused Bush of "cowboyism" and said he had viewed Condoleezza Rice as "extremely weak." Of American diplomacy, he fretted, "I'm not sure the State Department even exists anymore."

And how about Karen Hughes's efforts to boost the country's image abroad? "It's hard to sell [manure]," Wilkerson said, quoting an Egyptian friend.

The man who was chief of staff at the State Department until early this year continued: "If you're unilaterally declaring Kyoto dead, if you're declaring the Geneva Conventions not operative, if you're doing a host of things that the world doesn't agree with you on and you're doing it blatantly and in their face, without grace, then you've got to pay the consequences."

Wilkerson is hardly an ideologically-drive critic. He maintains to this day that Bush's father, George HW Bush, was one of the finest presidents we've ever had. Instead, his opposition to Dubya is centered on he and his administrations penchant for secrecy which allow Cheney, Rumsfeld and other subvert long-standing American foreign policy objectives.

That's all very interesting in it's own right. Wilkerson is a formidable presence in the foreign policy debate. He's a 31 year military veteran and former director of the Marine Corps War College. Which means that he's both a soldier and an academic well qualified to wade in and speak to the issues he addressed at the New America Foundation. But it was the very last paragraph in the WaPo piece that struck a cord with me. In particular the last sentence:
The colonel said his old boss is not pleased with his decision to go public with his criticism. Powell, he said, "is the world's most loyal soldier." Wilkerson said he admired that, but he took a different view of loyalty: not to the administration, but to the country.

Right there in a nutshell Wilkerson nails why I am an Indie. Loyalty ought to be to the country not to a political party or to any cabal within a political party.