Oct. 21 (Bloomberg) -- The Bush administration has ``courted disaster'' in Iraq, Iran and North Korea and is so inept that it could not cope with a major domestic disaster, according to Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Wilkerson said Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld formed a ``cabal'' to formulate U.S. foreign policy in isolation from other government institutions, seriously weakening the nation's decision-making process.

``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,'' Wilkerson said in a speech Oct. 19 to the New America Foundation, a Washington research institute.

The Bush administration has ``flummoxed'' the interagency decision-making process, Wilkerson said. He chastised Congress for abandoning oversight and warned that, without more accountability, ``it's going to get even more dangerous than it already is.''

Wilkerson, 60, left office in January along with Powell at the end of President George W. Bush's first term. A retired colonel, he is a former director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College and a former associate director of policy planning at the State Department. He also served under Powell when Powell was chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs under President George H.W. Bush.

Other Critics

Wilkerson's criticism echoes that of others who've left the current administration, including former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke, although not Powell, who has remained largely silent. Wilkerson said Powell was ``not happy'' with his decision to speak out.

Telephoned requests for comment to the White House, Pentagon and State Department were not immediately returned.

Opinion polls show Americans broadly dissatisfied with Bush's stewardship. A USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll released Oct. 17 found just 39 percent of U.S. adults approve of how he's handling his job, the lowest level of his presidency. On Oct. 19, Republicans as well as Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee attacked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for more than three hours for failing to present a clear strategy for bringing troops home from Iraq, and they accused her of presenting an unrealistically optimistic picture of the situation there.

Rice `Extremely Weak'

Wilkerson said Rice, as national security adviser during Bush's first term, was ``extremely weak.'' Rather than ensure a broad airing of views within the White House, ``she made a decision that she would side with the president to build her intimacy with the president.''

She did not play the role of ``the balancer'' or ``the person who would make sure that every dissent got to the president that made sense,'' Wilkerson said.

What ``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, according to a transcript posted on the New America Foundation Web site. Wilkerson did not respond to e-mails seeking elaboration on his comments.

`Why?'

Wilkerson was scathing in his criticism of the Bush administration's foreign policy decisions. He said he still cannot explain why the U.S. invaded Iraq.

``So many decisions'' defy explanation, he said. ``Why did we wait three years to talk to the North Koreans? Why did we wait four-plus years to say we at least back the EU-3 approach to Iran? Why did we create the national director of intelligence and add further to the bureaucracy, which was what caused the problem in the first place?''

While Wilkerson's criticism is his strongest to date, and perhaps among the strongest of any former Bush administration official, it's not his first attack on Bush's foreign policymaking.

In an interview with GQ magazine last May, Wilkerson likened former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz to the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin. ``I don't care whether Utopians are Vladimir Lenin in a sealed train going to Moscow or Paul Wolfowitz. Utopians, I don't like. You're never going to bring Utopia, and you're going to hurt a lot of people in the process trying to do it.''

He also described U.S. sanctions on Cuba as the ``dumbest policy on the face of the earth.''

To contact the reporter on this story: Janine Zacharia in Washington at jzacharia@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: October 21, 2005 11:39 EDT