Cabal is the word of the moment in Washington. It was used in a blistering newspaper piece Sunday by Secretary of State Powell’s former chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, to describe the group that made the “most important decisions about U.S. national security – including vital decisions about postwar Iraq.”

The word cabal means, according to the dictionary, a “clique (usually secret) that seeks power usually through intrigue.” The word has a long history of describing governments within governments, clandestine cells subverting democracies. And this is why it’s amazing to read in Mr. Wilkerson’s column that the “cabal” that hijacked foreign policy was comprised of “a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.” He adds, “I believe that the decisions of this cabal were sometimes made with the full and witting support of the president and sometimes with something less.”

Come again? President Bush sometimes approved the decisions made by his vice president and defense secretary and this is evidence that a clandestine camarilla was running the government.

Now the charge of cabalism against neoconservatives is nothing particularly new. The strange alliance of anti-war leftists and Bush I realists has made this charge repeatedly as a way to explain why the president they hate does not share their fetish for preserving Middle Eastern dictatorships. But at least when the word appears in the American Conservative or the American Prospect, it refers to relatively obscure political appointees. The slur may be nonsense, but, if one accepts their fictions, at least their arguments are coherent.

Mr. Wilkerson’s comments disclose more than his recent boosters would admit. For he is saying in essence that the president and his appointees should not make the country’s foreign policy decisions. This is apparent when he says, as he did in his recent screed, that his old boss “held a youthful, inexperienced president’s hand” and on a weekly basis “trooped over to the Oval Office and cleaned all the dog poop off the carpet.” We get it. The secretary of state should have overruled the president.

Why have so many of the president’s critics exempted Secretary Powell from their usual line that the administration lied to get the war they wanted? It was, after all, Mr. Powell who briefed the United Nations Security Council on Saddam Hussein’s stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Wilkerson was among the anonymous senior officials who, at the time, assured reporters that the intelligence shared in this presentation was free of neoconservative influence.

The answer is because Mr. Powell empowered the Foreign Service in his tenure in a way that, say, Secretary Rumsfeld did not do at the Pentagon. Mr. Powell appointed senior career diplomats to high posts, he generally listened to their advice, on Sudan he based his policy on what these unelected bureaucrats had to say.

It’s likely that he empowered Mr. Wilkerson to sabotage, at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Bolton’s nomination to be ambassador to the United Nations. The charge leveled by the committee at the time was that Mr. Bolton was abusive to the analysts to whom he should have listened. The result of this approach was that the State Department often pursued the policy of the bureaucracy while most of the rest of the government pursued the president’s policy.

No one – certainly not this columnist, who has covered the State Department for years — is saying that national security bureaucrats should be ignored. America’s analysts, diplomats, and spies are hard working patriots, often-courageous ones. Their expertise is vital. But they are also not elected. Their job is not to determine our foreign policy, it is to get intelligence, offer analysis, and, when politicians make decisions, to implement the policies on which the democracy has decided.

There is a lesson in all of this now that Washington awaits the conclusion of Patrick Fitzgerald’s prosecution of senior White House officials. The fact that the press doesn’t yet know what Mr. Fitzgerald will do has not stopped the speculation that he will focus on a White House’s effort to out the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame to get even with her husband, Joseph Wilson, who claimed that he had knowledge of White House deception. We’ll see.

But the deeper issue involves the conflation of intelligence and policy making. The increasingly conventional wisdom is that the decision to go to war was determined by fabricated and hyped intelligence. But this is not why the president toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime. Ultimately the decision to go to war was based on a calculation that America and the world could not tolerate the risk that a dictator, who was already out of compliance with Security Council resolutions demanding he disarm, would not, if left in place, collaborate with terrorists. The United Nations opted to give Saddam a final opportunity to come clean. The Iraqi dictator squandered that opportunity.

Since then, unelected bureaucrats and former officials have been attempting to make the war illegitimate by leaking secrets. The effect of this campaign has been to undermine the president’s policy and the country’s war. There must be a word for a tight knit group that seeks power through intrigue and in secret.