[Peace-discuss] Pointlessness of Plame

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Alex Cockburn offers what seems to me to be a good reading of
the Plame matter, agreeing more or less with the view I 
mentioned some weeks ago, that "it won't make much difference
to administration war policy" and is at worst a distraction
for those like Congressional Democrats who aren't willing to
attack the war directly.  --CGE]
 

The Plame Affair and the Function of Scandals

Given the enormous disaster of the US onslaught on Iraq, the
monstrous suffering engendered by the occupation, the violence
around the world that this same occupation has spawned, how
strange it is that the counter-attack on the Bush
administration should have come in the form of the Plame scandal.

Millions of words have now been written about the outing of
Valerie Plame, CIA-tasked wife of Joe Wilson, who undercut the
claims of the Bush administration that Saddam's Iraq was on
the edge of having nuclear capability. A special prosecutor,
Patrick Fitzgerald, has now labored for months. Judy Miller
sits in jail for not answering Fitzgerald's questions. Bush's
senior political adviser, Karl Rove, stands in danger of
indictment for lying to Fitzgerald. He already has been
exposed as a liar.

These are all big events, yet after all these months I find it
hard to understand what the fuss is all about, and to take the
Plame scandal seriously.

Supposedly Valerie Plame was exposed as a CIA employee as a
reprisal by the White House against her husband. But I've
never fully understood how this exposure was meant to damage
Wilson.

In left-wing circles, at least when there was a serious left,
it was supposed to be damaging to one's political credibility
to be called "a CIA agent".

But we're not dealing here with left-wing circles. We're
dealing with right-wing circles where employment by the CIA is
deemed honorable and a badge of pride. Wilson, for all his
popularity among liberals these days, is a right-winger who
endorsed the attack on Iraq. Why wouldn't the disclosure of
his wife Valerie's employer have enhanced his standing?

Again, why was it supposed to be shamefully discrediting to
Wilson that his wife put him up as a suitable person to go to
Niger to investigate charges that that country was exporting
yellowcake uranium to Iraq?

The answer to such questions is in. Wilson wasn't damaged. The
White House maimed only itself. The scandal has satisfactorily
demonstrated how truly stupid big-time operators like Rove and
his colleagues in the White House can be.

The outing of Plame was no big deal, and maybe wasn't even
technically a crime under the terms of the Intelligence
Identities Protection Act of 1982. Ironically it was former
CIA director Bush Sr who pushed for it as a reprisal against
lefties who truly sought to damage the CIA by exposing its
undercover operatives.

At the level of substance the Bush administration should be
reeling in the face of savage attack for the ghastly failure
of its mission in Iraq. Yet in the American media that scale
of that failure is muffled by prudent reporters and editors.

The fact that America faces as big a national humiliation as
it endured in Vietnam is not one much discussed. The antiwar
movement is limping along, and the Democratic Party is
desperate to be seen as a "loyal" opposition. Many of its
leaders call not for an end to the war, but a war fought with
more troops, with greater efficiency.

So the Plame scandal becomes the focus of attack, because the
real reasons are deemed too contentious to be raised in
public. In the same way, thirty years ago, Nixon was never
impeached for a secret, illegal war on Cambodia, but because
it turned out he had not been truthful about a cover-up of
political mischief at home.

This is often the way with scandals. There is much in
conventional political life that cannot be said, because to
say anything substantive would be to undermine those unstated
non-aggression pacts that buttress the ruling elites.

In the United States, among the elites, there is a
non-aggression pact about Israel and the consequences of US
sponsorship of that nation in all its enterprises, many of
them shameful. The topic simply cannot be raised. The same is
true of many other vital aspects of the nation's affairs:
trade, nuclear policy, the supervision of the Federal Reserve
and so forth.

By contrast, the Plame scandal is something the elites can
happily chew upon, even though I'm sure that most ordinary
citizens long ceased to take an interest in the intricacies of
the scandal. What will be the outcome? Rove may have to
resign, may even be indicted. She may languish in prison now,
but Judy Miller has been made a martyr to freedom of the
press, an ironic consequence, given that with her stories
fomenting the attack on Iraq she disgraced the name of journalism.

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