Bush's cabinet in disarray

[seemslikeadream]

Published: May 8 2004 5:00 | Last Updated: May 8 2004 5:00

As a former co-owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, President George W. Bush needs no lessons in the value of team discipline. He must therefore be mortified by the breakdown in collective discipline at the highest levels of his administration.


Whatever their differences in private, senior cabinet members have largely held their tongues in public. The outward semblance of unity has now fractured, exacerbated by the chaos in Iraq and the controversy over the role of the US military in the torture and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners.

Mutual recrimination and the rewriting of history are pervasive. Thus we read in Bob Woodward's peep-hole account of the path to war that Colin Powell, secretary of state, likens neoconservatives at the department of defence to a Gestapo cell. This week, in GQ magazine, a senior Powell aide speaks of Paul Wolfowitz, the leading Pentagon hawk, in the same breath as Lenin. The neo-cons' retort that the department of state should be renamed the department of nice is almost shockingly polite by comparison.

Tensions between the Pentagon and state department are not new. The present divisions are more reminiscent of the Reagan administration when George Schultz and Caspar Weinberger fought almost daily over policy towards the Soviet Union. Then as now, the warring camps were pushing competing visions of American power.

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