'Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal' hijacked US foreign policy

Retired colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Powell's right-hand man for 16 years in the public and private sectors, also skewered President George W. Bush, saying the US leader was "not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either.""I would say that we have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran," Wilkerson, who was Powell's chief of staff at the State Department, said Wednesday at a policy forum at the New America Foundation."The case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process," he said."What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made," he said.