Date: July 17, 2005 4:15:13 AM PDT
Subject: [ctrl] Follow the Uranium
July 17, 2005
Follow the Uranium
By FRANK RICH
"I am saying that if anyone was involved in that type of activity which I referred to,
they would not be working here."
- Ron Ziegler, press secretary to Richard Nixon, defending the presidential aide
Dwight Chapin on Oct. 18, 1972. Chapin was convicted in April 1974 of perjury in
connection with his relationship to the political saboteur Donald Segretti.
"Any individual who works here at the White House has the confidence of the
president. They wouldn't be working here at the White House if they didn't have the
president's confidence."
- Scott McClellan, press secretary to George W. Bush, defending Karl Rove on
Tuesday.
WELL, of course, Karl Rove did it. He may not have violated the Intelligence
Identities Protection Act of 1982, with its high threshold of criminality for outing a
covert agent, but there's no doubt he trashed Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame. We
know this not only because of Matt Cooper's e-mail, but also because of Mr. Rove's
own history. Trashing is in his nature, and bad things happen, usually through under-
the-radar whispers, to decent people (and their wives) who get in his way. In the
2000 South Carolina primary, John McCain's wife, Cindy, was rumored to be a drug
addict (and Senator McCain was rumored to be mentally unstable). In the 1994
Texas governor's race, Ann Richards found herself rumored to be a lesbian. The
implication that Mr. Wilson was a John Kerry-ish girlie man beholden to his wife for
his meal ticket is of a thematic piece with previous mud splattered on Rove political
adversaries. The difference is that this time Mr. Rove got caught.
Even so, we shouldn't get hung up on him - or on most of the other supposed leading
figures in this scandal thus far. Not Matt Cooper or Judy Miller or the Wilsons or the
bad guy everyone loves to hate, the former CNN star Robert Novak. This scandal is
not about them in the end, any more than Watergate was about Dwight Chapin and
Donald Segretti or Woodward and Bernstein. It is about the president of the United
States. It is about a plot that was hatched at the top of the administration and in
which everyone else, Mr. Rove included, are at most secondary players.
To see the main plot, you must sweep away the subplots, starting with the Cooper e-
mail. It has been brandished as a smoking gun by Bush bashers and as exculpatory
evidence by Bush backers (Mr. Rove, you see, was just trying to ensure that Time
had its facts straight). But no one knows what this e-mail means unless it's set
against the avalanche of other evidence, most of it secret, including what Mr. Rove
said in three appearances before the grand jury. Therein lies the rub, or at least
whatever case might be made for perjury.
Another bogus subplot, long popular on the left, has it that Patrick Fitzgerald, the
special prosecutor, gave Mr. Novak a free pass out of ideological comradeship. But
Mr. Fitzgerald, both young (44) and ambitious, has no record of Starr- or Ashcroft-
style partisanship (his contempt for the press notwithstanding) or known proclivity for
committing career suicide. What's most likely is that Mr. Novak, more of a common
coward than the prince of darkness he fashions himself to be, found a way to spill
some beans and avoid Judy Miller's fate. That the investigation has dragged on so
long anyway is another indication of the expanded reach of the prosecutorial web.
Apparently this is finally beginning to dawn on Mr. Bush's fiercest defenders and on
Mr. Bush himself. Hence, last week's erection of the stonewall manned by the almost
poignantly clownish Mr. McClellan, who abruptly rendered inoperative his previous
statements that any suspicions about Mr. Rove are "totally ridiculous." The morning
after Mr. McClellan went mano a mano with his tormentors in the White House press
room - "We've secretly replaced the White House press corps with actual reporters,"
observed Jon Stewart - the ardently pro-Bush New York Post ran only five
paragraphs of a wire-service story on Page 12. That conspicuous burial of what was
front-page news beyond Murdochland speaks loudly about the rising anxiety on the
right. Since then, White House surrogates have been desperately babbling talking
points attacking Joseph Wilson as a partisan and a liar.
These attacks, too, are red herrings. Let me reiterate: This case is not about Joseph
Wilson. He is, in Alfred Hitchcock's parlance, a MacGuffin, which, to quote the
Oxford English Dictionary, is "a particular event, object, factor, etc., initially presented
as being of great significance to the story, but often having little actual importance for
the plot as it develops." Mr. Wilson, his mission to Niger to check out Saddam's
supposed attempts to secure uranium that might be used in nuclear weapons and
even his wife's outing have as much to do with the real story here as Janet Leigh's
theft of office cash has to do with the mayhem that ensues at the Bates Motel in
"Psycho."
This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the
Wilsons. The real culprit - the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman
phrase from the Nixon tapes - is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons
and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite
resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on
9/11. That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-
conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair.
So put aside Mr. Wilson's February 2002 trip to Africa. The plot that matters starts a
month later, in March, and its omniscient author is Dick Cheney. It was Mr. Cheney
(on CNN) who planted the idea that Saddam was "actively pursuing nuclear weapons
at this time." The vice president went on to repeat this charge in May on "Meet the
Press," in three speeches in August and on "Meet the Press" yet again in September.
Along the way the frightening word "uranium" was thrown into the mix.
By September the president was bandying about the u-word too at the United
Nations and elsewhere, speaking of how Saddam needed only a softball-size helping
of uranium to wreak Armageddon on America. But hardly had Mr. Bush done so
than, offstage, out of view of us civilian spectators, the whole premise of this
propaganda campaign was being challenged by forces with more official weight than
Joseph Wilson. In October, the National Intelligence Estimate, distributed to
Congress as it deliberated authorizing war, included the State Department's caveat
that "claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa," made public in a British
dossier, were "highly dubious." A C.I.A. assessment, sent to the White House that
month, determined that "the evidence is weak" and "the Africa story is overblown."
AS if this weren't enough, a State Department intelligence analyst questioned the
legitimacy of some mysterious documents that had surfaced in Italy that fall and were
supposed proof of the Iraq-Niger uranium transaction. In fact, they were blatant
forgeries. When Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic
Energy Agency, said as much publicly in the days just before "shock and awe," his
announcement made none of the three evening newscasts. The administration's
apocalyptic uranium rhetoric, sprinkled with mushroom clouds, had been hammered
incessantly for more than five months by then - not merely in the State of the Union
address - and could not be dislodged. As scenarios go, this one was about as subtle
as "Independence Day" and just as unstoppable a crowd-pleaser.
Once we were locked into the war, and no W.M.D.'s could be found, the original plot
line was dropped with an alacrity that recalled the "Never mind!" with which Gilda
Radner's Emily Litella used to end her misinformed Weekend Update commentaries
on "Saturday Night Live." The administration began its dog-ate-my-homework cover-
up, asserting that the various warning signs about the uranium claims were lost "in
the bowels" of the bureaucracy or that it was all the C.I.A.'s fault or that it didn't
matter anyway, because there were new, retroactive rationales to justify the war. But
the administration knows how guilty it is. That's why it has so quickly trashed any
insider who contradicts its story line about how we got to Iraq, starting with the former
Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill and the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke.
Next to White House courtiers of their rank, Mr. Wilson is at most a Rosencrantz or
Guildenstern. The brief against the administration's drumbeat for war would be just
as damning if he'd never gone to Africa. But by overreacting in panic to his single Op-
Ed piece of two years ago, the White House has opened a Pandora's box it can't
slam shut. Seasoned audiences of presidential scandal know that there's only one
certainty ahead: the timing of a Karl Rove resignation. As always in this genre, the
knight takes the fall at exactly that moment when it's essential to protect the king.
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Alamaine
Grand Forks, ND, US of A
www.ctrl.org
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