IlliniPundit hosted quite a back and forth this week on the War in Iraq. He asked a simple question, but couldn't get a simple answer. Turns out there are also some ex-Intel folk who post over there. Not surprisingly, they seem to have a favorable view about what is happening in the middle east.

So I was surprised to see this speech from Lawrence Wilkerson this week. Colonel Wilkerson is the former Chief of Staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell. A man with decades of experience in the armed forces, and in the upper echelons of power, Wilkerson was harshly critical of the way the Bush Administration is running our country. Money quotes follow:

I would say that we have courted disaster, in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran, generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita and I could go on back, we haven't done very well on anything like that in a long time. And if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence. Read it some time again.

... the case that I saw for 4 plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberration, bastardizations, [UI], changes to the national security [UI] process. What I saw was a cabal between the Vice President of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the Secretary of Defense and [UI] on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.

And then when the bureaucracy was presented with those decisions and carried them out, it was presented in such a disjointed incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn't know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out.

Which is just totally unacceptable, in my opinion. As a teacher I have seen several former students suit up and take off to fight in this war. I have kids with parents stationed in Iraq. I honestly don't want to hear this.

But there is money to be made. Wilkerson continues:

God bless Eisenhower in 1961 in his farewell address the military industrial complex and don't you think they aren't ... today in a concentration of power that is just unparalleled. It all happened because of the end of the Cold War.

... tell you how many contractors who did billion dollars or so business with the Defense Department that we have in 1988 and how many do we have now. And they're always working together. If one of them is the lead on the satellite program, I hope there's some Lockheed and Grumman and others here today [UI] if one of them's a lead on satellites, the others are subs. And they've learned their lesson there in every state.

They've got every Congressman, every Senator, they got it covered. Now, it's not to say that they aren't smart businessmen. They are, and women. They are. But it's something we should be looking at, something we should be looking at. So you've got this collegiality there between the Secretary of Defense and the Vice President. And then you've got a President who is not versed in international relations. And not too much interested in them either.

There is money to be made. Lots of it. Blood for oil, blood for weapons, blood for profits. Even the folks on the inside are waking up.

Why can't Chomsky be wrong once in a while? Why does it always have to turn out this way.

Here's the video.