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On Meet the
Press today host Tim Russert replayed archive video of White House press spokesman
Scott McClellan declaring that he had spoken with Karl Rove about the Plame
leak and Karl had nothing to do with it,
as well as on Sept. 30th, 2003 Pres. Bush himself saying, “I want to
know who it is”…that person “will be taken care of”. A key piece of
this tangled story is that at that time, a special prosecutor had not yet been
appointed and the only investigation into this potential act of treason, exposing
a covert agent, was under then-Attorney General Ashcroft. Thus, the White House could make false
bravura declarations with confidence that their man at the Justice department had
their rear guard covered. Alas, as
happens in real life and good drama, an unexpected thing happened. The CIA, more alarmed by the collapse of
one of its most successful undercover operations, which had been investigating
nuclear weaponry abroad, forced the case to be referred to a special counsel,
named by Ashcroft’s office. The
CIA was also still chafing at being blamed for bad intelligence, which we now
know had been largely ignored and edited to suit the campaign for war. Then in
2004, the special prosecutor’s powers were expanded by two judges because of “the
gravity of the case.” Aha! Now
those emphatic pledges of justice being served may be extracted with a pound of
flesh the major actors never intended to pay. The
resistance, literally and figuratively, is not dead. Tomorrow former Admiral
Brent Scowcroft, Bush 41’s National Security Advisor, will do more than differ
on strategic advice for Bush 43’s war on terror, he will break ranks, joining other
Old Guard defectors – this week - Melvin
Laird, Nixon’s last Defense Secretary and Gen. Powell’s longtime aide de camp
Col. Larry Wilkerson (Marine Corps War College) among other politicians,
academics and pundits who earlier joined the opposition, now more believed by
the majority of Americans than the loyalists. The plot tragedy is that another six months of weapons
inspectors and coalition building and this story would have played differently on
the world stage. Deceit, impatience and hubris defeat another grand scheme. There is an
opera or ancient tale from Rome or Greece that this drama resembles, but I can’t
quite decide which – perhaps Russian literature. Columnist Rich, as usual,
writes with his theater critic’s eye for players and staging, plot twists and
minor characters that puts current history into context. If only this had been a Comedy of
Errors instead… - kwc Karl
and Scooter's Excellent Adventure There were no weapons
of mass destruction. There was no collaboration between Saddam Hussein and Al
Qaeda on 9/11. There was scant Pentagon planning for securing the peace should
bad stuff happen after America invaded. Why, exactly, did we go to war in Iraq?
"It still isn't
possible to be sure - and this remains the most remarkable thing about the Iraq
war," writes the New Yorker journalist George Packer, a disenchanted
liberal supporter of the invasion, in his essential new book, "The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq." Even a former Bush administration
State Department official who was present at the war's creation, Richard Haass,
tells Mr. Packer that he expects to go to his grave "not knowing the
answer." Maybe. But the leak
investigation now reaching its climax in Washington continues to offer big
clues. We don't yet know whether Lewis (Scooter) Libby or Karl Rove has
committed a crime, but the more we learn about their desperate efforts to take
down a bit player like Joseph Wilson, the more we learn
about the real secret they wanted to protect: the "why" of the war. To piece that story
together, you have to follow each man's history before the invasion of Iraq -
before anyone had ever heard of Valerie Plame Wilson, let alone leaked her
identity as a C.I.A. officer. It is not an accident that Mr. Libby's and Mr.
Rove's very different trajectories - one of a Washington policy intellectual,
the other of a Texas political operative - would collide before Patrick
Fitzgerald's grand jury. They are very different men who play very different White House roles, but
they are bound together now by the sordid shared past that the Wilson affair has exposed. In Mr. Rove's case,
let's go back to January 2002. By then the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan had
succeeded in its mission to overthrow the Taliban and had done so with minimal
American casualties. In a triumphalist speech to the Republican National
Committee, Mr. Rove for the first time openly advanced the idea that the war on
terror was the path to victory for that November's midterm elections.
Candidates "can go to the country on this issue," he said, because
voters "trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and
strengthening America's military might and thereby protecting America." It
was an early taste of the rhetoric that would be used habitually to smear any
war critics as unpatriotic. But there were
unspoken impediments to Mr. Rove's plan that he certainly knew about:
Afghanistan was slipping off the radar screen of American voters, and the
president's most grandiose objective, to capture Osama bin Laden "dead or
alive," had not been achieved. How do you run on a war if the war looks as
if it's shifting into neutral and the No. 1 evildoer has escaped? Hardly had Mr. Rove
given his speech than polls started to register the first erosion of the
initial near-universal endorsement of the administration's response to 9/11. A
USA Today/CNN/Gallup survey in March 2002 found that while 9 out of 10
Americans still backed the war on terror at the six-month anniversary of the
attacks, support for an expanded, long-term war had fallen to 52 percent. Then came a rapid
barrage of unhelpful news for a political campaign founded on supposed
Republican superiority in protecting America: the first report (in The
Washington Post) that the Bush administration had lost Bin Laden's trail in
Tora Bora in December 2001 by not committing ground troops to hunt him down;
the first indications that intelligence about Bin Laden's desire to hijack
airplanes barely clouded President Bush's August 2001 Crawford vacation; the
public accusations by an F.B.I. whistle-blower, Coleen Rowley, that higher-ups
had repeatedly shackled Minneapolis agents investigating the so-called 20th
hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, in the days before 9/11. These revelations took
their toll. By Memorial Day 2002, a USA Today poll found that just 4 out of 10
Americans believed that the United States was winning the war on terror, a
steep drop from the roughly two-thirds holding that conviction in January. Mr.
Rove could see that an untelevised and largely underground war against
terrorists might not nail election victories without a jolt of shock and awe.
It was a propitious moment to wag the dog. Enter Scooter, stage right. As James Mann details in his definitive
group biography of the Bush war cabinet, "Rise of the Vulcans," Mr.
Libby had been joined at the hip with Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz since
their service in the Defense Department of the Bush 41 administration, where
they conceived the neoconservative manifesto for the buildup and exercise of
unilateral American military power after the cold war. Well before Bush 43 took
office, they had become fixated on Iraq, though for reasons having much to do with their ideas about
realigning the states in the Middle East and little or nothing to do with the
stateless terrorism of Al Qaeda. Mr. Bush had specifically disdained such interventionism
when running against Al Gore, but he embraced the cause once in office. While
others might have had cavils - American military commanders testified before
Congress about their already overtaxed troops and equipment in March 2002 - the
path was clear for a war in Iraq to serve as the political Viagra Mr. Rove needed for the
election year.
But here, too, was an impediment: there had to be that "why" for the
invasion, the very why that today can seem so elusive that Mr. Packer calls
Iraq "the
'Rashomon' of wars."
Abstract (and highly debatable) neocon notions of marching to Baghdad to make
the Middle East safe for democracy (and more secure for Israel and
uninterrupted oil production) would never fly with American voters as a trigger
for war or convince them that such a war was relevant to the fight against
those who attacked us on 9/11. And though Americans knew Saddam was a despot
and mass murderer, that in itself was also insufficient to ignite a popular
groundswell for regime change. Polls in the summer of 2002 showed steadily
declining support among Americans for going to war in Iraq, especially if we
were to go it alone. For Mr. Rove and Mr.
Bush to get
what they wanted most, slam-dunk midterm election victories, and for Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney to get
what they wanted most,
a war in Iraq for reasons predating 9/11, their real whys for going to war had to be replaced by
fictional, more salable ones. We wouldn't be invading Iraq to further Rovian
domestic politics or neocon ideology; we'd be doing so instead because there
was a direct connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda and because Saddam was on
the verge of attacking America with nuclear weapons. The facts and intelligence
had to be fixed to create these whys; any contradictory evidence had to be
dismissed or suppressed. Mr. Libby and Mr.
Cheney were in the boiler room of the disinformation factory. The vice
president's repetitive hyping of Saddam's nuclear ambitions in the summer and
fall of 2002 as well as his persistence in advertising bogus Saddam-Qaeda ties
were fed by the rogue
intelligence operation set up in his own office. As we know from many journalistic accounts,
Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby built their "case" by often making an end
run around the C.I.A., State Department intelligence and the Defense Intelligence
Agency. Their ally in cherry-picking intelligence was a similar cadre of neocon
zealots led by Douglas Feith at the Pentagon. This is what Col.
Lawrence Wilkerson, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's wartime chief of
staff, was talking about last week when he publicly chastised the
"Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal" for sowing potential disaster in Iraq, North
Korea and Iran. It's this cabal that in 2002 pushed for much of the bogus
W.M.D. evidence that ended up in Mr. Powell's now infamous February 2003
presentation to the U.N. It's this cabal whose propaganda was sold by the war's
unannounced marketing arm, the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, in which both
Mr. Libby and Mr. Rove served in the second half of 2002. One of WHIG's goals,
successfully realized, was to turn
up the heat on Congress so it would rush to pass a resolution authorizing war
in the politically advantageous month just before the midterm election. Joseph Wilson wasn't a
player in these exalted circles; he was a footnote
who began to speak out loudly only after Saddam had been toppled and the
mission in Iraq had been "accomplished." He challenged just one
element of the W.M.D. "evidence," the uranium that Saddam's
government had supposedly been seeking in Africa to fuel its ominous mushroom
clouds. But based on what we
know about Mr. Libby's and Mr. Rove's hysterical over-response to Mr. Wilson's
accusation, he scared them silly. He did so because they had something to hide.
Should Mr. Libby and Mr. Rove have lied to investigators or a grand jury in
their panic, Mr. Fitzgerald will bring charges. But that crime would seem a
misdemeanor next to the fables that they and their bosses fed the nation and
the world as the whys for invading Iraq. http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/102305Z.shtml |
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