[Peace-discuss] More connections

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The middle-of-the-road journalist, Frank Rich -- who used to
be a theatre critic -- gives a good account of why Plame-gate
might matter.  Myself, I fear the mountain may labor and bring
forth a mouse: but I hope I'm wrong.  --CGE]

    It's Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby
    By Frank Rich
    The New York Times
    Sunday 16 October 2005

    There hasn't been anything like it since Martha Stewart
fended off questions about her stock-trading scandal by
manically chopping cabbage on "The Early Show" on CBS. Last
week the setting was "Today" on NBC, where the image of
President Bush manically hammering nails at a Habitat for
Humanity construction site on the Gulf Coast was juggled with
the sight of him trying to duck Matt Lauer's questions about
Karl Rove.

    As with Ms. Stewart, Mr. Bush's paroxysm of panic was
must-see TV. "The president was a blur of blinks, taps,
jiggles, pivots and shifts," Dana Milbank wrote in The
Washington Post. Asked repeatedly about Mr. Rove's serial
appearances before a Washington grand jury, the jittery Mr.
Bush, for once bereft of a script, improvised a passable
impersonation of Norman Bates being quizzed by the detective
in "Psycho." Like Norman and Ms. Stewart, he stonewalled.

    That stonewall may start to crumble in a Washington
courtroom this week or next. In a sense it already has. Now,
as always, what matters most in this case is not whether Mr.
Rove and Lewis Libby engaged in a petty conspiracy to seek
revenge on a whistle-blower, Joseph Wilson, by unmasking his
wife, Valerie, a covert C.I.A. officer. What makes Patrick
Fitzgerald's investigation compelling, whatever its outcome,
is its illumination of a conspiracy that was not at all petty:
the one that took us on false premises into a reckless and
wasteful war in Iraq. That conspiracy was instigated by Mr.
Rove's boss, George W. Bush, and Mr. Libby's boss, Dick Cheney.

    Mr. Wilson and his wife were trashed to protect that
larger plot. Because the personnel in both stories overlap,
the bits and pieces we've learned about the leak inquiry over
the past two years have gradually helped fill in the
über-narrative about the war. Last week was no exception. Deep
in a Wall Street Journal account of Judy Miller's grand jury
appearance was this crucial sentence: "Lawyers familiar with
the investigation believe that at least part of the outcome
likely hangs on the inner workings of what has been dubbed the
White House Iraq Group."

    Very little has been written about the White House Iraq
Group, or WHIG. Its inception in August 2002, seven months
before the invasion of Iraq, was never announced. Only much
later would a newspaper article or two mention it in passing,
reporting that it had been set up by Andrew Card, the White
House chief of staff. Its eight members included Mr. Rove, Mr.
Libby, Condoleezza Rice and the spinmeisters Karen Hughes and
Mary Matalin. Its mission: to market a war in Iraq.

    Of course, the official Bush history would have us believe
that in August 2002 no decision had yet been made on that war.
Dates bracketing the formation of WHIG tell us otherwise. On
July 23, 2002 - a week or two before WHIG first convened in
earnest - a British official told his peers, as recorded in
the now famous Downing Street memo, that the Bush
administration was ensuring that "the intelligence and facts"
about Iraq's W.M.D.'s "were being fixed around the policy" of
going to war. And on Sept. 6, 2002 - just a few weeks after
WHIG first convened - Mr. Card alluded to his group's
existence by telling Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times
that there was a plan afoot to sell a war against Saddam
Hussein: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce
new products in August."

    The official introduction of that product began just two
days later. On the Sunday talk shows of Sept. 8, Ms. Rice
warned that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom
cloud," and Mr. Cheney, who had already started the nuclear
doomsday drumbeat in three August speeches, described Saddam
as "actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear
weapons." The vice president cited as evidence a front-page
article, later debunked, about supposedly nefarious aluminum
tubes co-written by Judy Miller in that morning's Times. The
national security journalist James Bamford, in "A Pretext for
War," writes that the article was all too perfectly timed to
facilitate "exactly the sort of propaganda coup that the White
House Iraq Group had been set up to stage-manage."

    The administration's doomsday imagery was ratcheted up
from that day on. As Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus of The
Washington Post would determine in the first account of WHIG a
full year later, the administration's "escalation of nuclear
rhetoric" could be traced to the group's formation. Along with
mushroom clouds, uranium was another favored image, the Post
report noted, "because anyone could see its connection to an
atomic bomb." It appeared in a Bush radio address the weekend
after the Rice-Cheney Sunday show blitz and would reach its
apotheosis with the infamously fictional 16 words about
"uranium from Africa" in Mr. Bush's January 2003 State of the
Union address on the eve of war.

    Throughout those crucial seven months between the creation
of WHIG and the start of the American invasion of Iraq, there
were indications that evidence of a Saddam nuclear program was
fraudulent or nonexistent. Joseph Wilson's C.I.A. mission to
Niger, in which he failed to find any evidence to back up
uranium claims, took place nearly a year before the
president's 16 words. But the truth never mattered. The
Bush-Cheney product rolled out by Card, Rove, Libby & Company
had been bought by Congress, the press and the public. The
intelligence and facts had been successfully fixed to sell the
war, and any memory of Mr. Bush's errant 16 words melted away
in Shock and Awe. When, months later, a national security
official, Stephen Hadley, took "responsibility" for allowing
the president to address the nation about mythical uranium, no
one knew that Mr. Hadley, too, had been a member of WHIG.

    It was not until the war was supposedly over - with
"Mission Accomplished," in May 2003 - that Mr. Wilson started
to add his voice to those who were disputing the
administration's uranium hype. Members of WHIG had a
compelling motive to shut him down. In contrast to other
skeptics, like Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic
Energy Agency (this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner), Mr.
Wilson was an American diplomat; he had reported his findings
in Niger to our own government. He was a dagger aimed at the
heart of WHIG and its disinformation campaign. Exactly who
tried to silence him and how is what Mr. Fitzgerald presumably
will tell us.

    It's long been my hunch that the WHIG-ites were at their
most brazen (and, in legal terms, reckless) during the many
months that preceded the appointment of Mr. Fitzgerald as
special counsel. When Mr. Rove was asked on camera by ABC News
in September 2003 if he had any knowledge of the Valerie
Wilson leak and said no, it was only hours before the Justice
Department would open its first leak investigation. When Scott
McClellan later declared that he had been personally assured
by Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby that they were "not involved" with
the leak, the case was still in the safe hands of the attorney
general then, John Ashcroft, himself a three-time Rove client
in past political campaigns. Though Mr. Rove may be known as
"Bush's brain," he wasn't smart enough to anticipate that
Justice Department career employees would eventually pressure
Mr. Ashcroft to recuse himself because of this conflict of
interest, clearing the way for an outside prosecutor as
independent as Mr. Fitzgerald.

    "Bush's Brain" is the title of James Moore and Wayne
Slater's definitive account of Mr. Rove's political career.
But Mr. Rove is less his boss's brain than another
alliterative organ (or organs), that which provides
testosterone. As we learn in "Bush's Brain," bad things
(usually character assassination) often happen to Bush foes,
whether Ann Richards or John McCain. On such occasions, Mr.
Bush stays compassionately above the fray while the ruthless
Mr. Rove operates below the radar, always separated by "a
layer of operatives" from any ill behavior that might
implicate him. "There is no crime, just a victim," Mr. Moore
and Mr. Slater write of this repeated pattern.

    THIS modus operandi was foolproof, shielding the president
as well as Mr. Rove from culpability, as long as it was about
winning an election. The attack on Mr. Wilson, by contrast,
has left them and the Cheney-Libby tag team vulnerable because
it's about something far bigger: protecting the lies that took
the country into what the Reagan administration National
Security Agency director, Lt. Gen. William Odom, recently
called "the greatest strategic disaster in United States history."

    Whether or not Mr. Fitzgerald uncovers an indictable
crime, there is once again a victim, but that victim is not
Mr. or Mrs. Wilson; it's the nation. It is surely a joke of
history that even as the White House sells this weekend's
constitutional referendum as yet another "victory" for
democracy in Iraq, we still don't know the whole story of how
our own democracy was hijacked on the way to war.

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