ROVE THE LEAKER
Jonathan Alter
Newsweek
07-25-05
Like a lot of President Bush's critics, I supported the Iraq War at first. Because of the evidence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction laid out by Colin Powell, I agreed that we needed to disarm Saddam Hussein. I even think it's possible that 25 years from now, historians will conclude that the Iraq War helped accelerate the modernizing of the Middle East, even if it doesn't fully democratize it.
But if that happens, Bush might not get as much credit as he hopes, because his leadership on Iraq has been a fiasco. He didn't plan for it: The early decisions that allowed the insurgency to get going were breathtakingly incompetent. He didn't pay for it: Bush is the first president in history to cut taxes during a war, one now costing nearly $1 billion a week. Most important, he didn't tell the American people the truth about it: Taking a nation to war is the most solemn duty of a president, and he'd better make certain there's no alternative and no doubt about the evidence.
Why do I mention this now? Because for all of the complexities of the Valerie Plame case, for all the questions raised about the future of investigative journalism and the fate of an influential aide to an American president, this story is fundamentally about how easy it was to get into Iraq and how hard it will be to get out.
We got in because we "cooked" the intelligence, then hyped it. That's why the "Downing Street Memo" is not a smoking gun but a big "duh." For two years we've known that White House officials were determined to, in the words of the British intelligence memo, "fix" the intelligence to suit policy decisions. When someone crossed them, they would "fix" him, too, as career ambassador Joseph Wilson found when he came back from Africa with a report that threw cold water on the story that Saddam Hussein sought yellowcake uranium from Niger.
Was Plame "fair game," as Karl Rove told Chris Matthews? George H.W. Bush didn't think so. Even after Wilson embarrassed the president publicly, Bush Sr. wrote Wilson - whom he had appointed to various ambassadorial posts - to congratulate him for his service and sympathize with him over the outing of his wife. The old man was head of the CIA in the 1970s and knows the consequences of blowing the identities of covert operatives.
But does his son? A real leader wouldn't hide behind Clintonian legalisms like "I don't want to prejudge." Even if the disclosure was unintentional and no law was broken, Rove's confirmed conduct - talking casually to two reporters about a CIA operative - was dangerous and wrong.
To get an idea of how destructive, I talked to Melissa Mahle, a former CIA covert operative turned author whose career parallels Plame's. She explained what happens when someone's cover is blown. It isn't pretty, especially when, like Plame, you have been under "nonofficial cover" (working for a phony front company or nonprofit), which is more sensitive than "official cover" (pretending to work for another government agency). The GOP's spinners are making it seem that because Plame had a desk job in Langley at the time she was outed, she wasn't truly undercover. But Mahle says being outed doesn't just waste millions of taxpayer dollars; it compromises hundreds of other people in the field you may have worked with in the past.
If Bush isn't a hypocrite on national security, he needs, at a minimum, to yank Rove's security clearance. "Whether you do it (discuss the identity of CIA operatives) intentionally or unintentionally, you have not met the requirements of that security clearance," Mahle said.
The bigger question is what this scandal does to the CIA's ability to develop essential human intelligence. Here's where the Iraq War comes in again. The sooner we beef up our intelligence, the sooner we crack the insurgency and get to bring our troops home. What does it say to the people doing the painstaking work of building those spy networks when the identity of one of their own becomes just a weapon in the partisan wars of Washington? For a smart guy, Karl Rove was awfully stupid.
Snave's note: So it's from Newsweek, so what? I applaud Alter for writing the article.
Newsweek
07-25-05
Like a lot of President Bush's critics, I supported the Iraq War at first. Because of the evidence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction laid out by Colin Powell, I agreed that we needed to disarm Saddam Hussein. I even think it's possible that 25 years from now, historians will conclude that the Iraq War helped accelerate the modernizing of the Middle East, even if it doesn't fully democratize it.
But if that happens, Bush might not get as much credit as he hopes, because his leadership on Iraq has been a fiasco. He didn't plan for it: The early decisions that allowed the insurgency to get going were breathtakingly incompetent. He didn't pay for it: Bush is the first president in history to cut taxes during a war, one now costing nearly $1 billion a week. Most important, he didn't tell the American people the truth about it: Taking a nation to war is the most solemn duty of a president, and he'd better make certain there's no alternative and no doubt about the evidence.
Why do I mention this now? Because for all of the complexities of the Valerie Plame case, for all the questions raised about the future of investigative journalism and the fate of an influential aide to an American president, this story is fundamentally about how easy it was to get into Iraq and how hard it will be to get out.
We got in because we "cooked" the intelligence, then hyped it. That's why the "Downing Street Memo" is not a smoking gun but a big "duh." For two years we've known that White House officials were determined to, in the words of the British intelligence memo, "fix" the intelligence to suit policy decisions. When someone crossed them, they would "fix" him, too, as career ambassador Joseph Wilson found when he came back from Africa with a report that threw cold water on the story that Saddam Hussein sought yellowcake uranium from Niger.
Was Plame "fair game," as Karl Rove told Chris Matthews? George H.W. Bush didn't think so. Even after Wilson embarrassed the president publicly, Bush Sr. wrote Wilson - whom he had appointed to various ambassadorial posts - to congratulate him for his service and sympathize with him over the outing of his wife. The old man was head of the CIA in the 1970s and knows the consequences of blowing the identities of covert operatives.
But does his son? A real leader wouldn't hide behind Clintonian legalisms like "I don't want to prejudge." Even if the disclosure was unintentional and no law was broken, Rove's confirmed conduct - talking casually to two reporters about a CIA operative - was dangerous and wrong.
To get an idea of how destructive, I talked to Melissa Mahle, a former CIA covert operative turned author whose career parallels Plame's. She explained what happens when someone's cover is blown. It isn't pretty, especially when, like Plame, you have been under "nonofficial cover" (working for a phony front company or nonprofit), which is more sensitive than "official cover" (pretending to work for another government agency). The GOP's spinners are making it seem that because Plame had a desk job in Langley at the time she was outed, she wasn't truly undercover. But Mahle says being outed doesn't just waste millions of taxpayer dollars; it compromises hundreds of other people in the field you may have worked with in the past.
If Bush isn't a hypocrite on national security, he needs, at a minimum, to yank Rove's security clearance. "Whether you do it (discuss the identity of CIA operatives) intentionally or unintentionally, you have not met the requirements of that security clearance," Mahle said.
The bigger question is what this scandal does to the CIA's ability to develop essential human intelligence. Here's where the Iraq War comes in again. The sooner we beef up our intelligence, the sooner we crack the insurgency and get to bring our troops home. What does it say to the people doing the painstaking work of building those spy networks when the identity of one of their own becomes just a weapon in the partisan wars of Washington? For a smart guy, Karl Rove was awfully stupid.
Snave's note: So it's from Newsweek, so what? I applaud Alter for writing the article.
4 Comments:
I think this sentence is interesting: "I supported the Iraq War at first. Because of the evidence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction laid out by Colin Powell"
I think this really says a lot. Pretty much everyone I talk to who supported the war did not do so because of the overwhelming amount of evidence (which was clearly phony even then). It just got down to trust. Post-9-11 people decided to trust Bush. They were willing to go along with "reputable" people like Powell, and the result is that the questionable intelligence was something people willingly overlooked. Folks listened to the intelligence, but it all got down to trust in the leadership, and that is almost always a recipe for disaster. Trust is the absence of fact, and it's depressing the extent to which we gave Bush so much power. This has nothing to do with the post, I guess, I'm just ramblin'. Alter does raise the question of accountability though, about whether or not anything should happen to Rove. I'll go ahead and make my prediction right now: not one thing will be done to Rove. He may receive a reprimand of some sort, a minor one, but these guys have displayed a pretty predictable pattern of acting like thugs and accepting no responsibility for it. There's no reason to think that will be different in this case. I mean, it would be nice, but Rove will undoubtedly escape from all this without any problem. I am now depresed.
Surely, surely it's a testiment to the state of the US media that eventhough Newsweek broke this major story, there seems to be little to no movement from anyone else.
Honestly the manistream groups are going to look back on these years as a travesty to everything which gave them the right to be called journalists.
I definitely agree with the stance posited by one of those interviewed by the author that, at the very least, Rove needs to have his security clearance pulled. The last time I checked, it was not the policy of the United States government to disclose highly classified information. But for me, on the Iraq War, the WMD question was not the most major one. Did Saddam fund terrorism? What else would you call giving the equivalent of US$25,000 to the families of each suicide bomber? Was he a mass-murderer who attempted genocide and had shown no respect for the borders of his neighbors, including past uses of WMD? Check. Had he violated over a dozen UN resolutions, including a final one that promised "serious consequences" should he continue to fail to abide by the agreements he signed over a decade prior? Check. And was it reasonable to believe that Saddam was or would develop WMD should the proper opportunity arise, based upon his past actions?
I don't like war. I think it's truly awful. However, much like the amputation of gangrenous body parts, it is occasionally necessary. The nature of opposition parties is to OPPOSE. The nature of individuals, especially those who we should want to represent us but in actuality only rarely do, is to think. Snave, you said that it's pretty clear that I dislike politicians. That's true, but incomplete. I save my greater disgust for political parties, and my reasoning goes back to 1796 and Washington's farewell address. He may have been speaking of the Jeffersonian Republicans and the Federalists at the time, but his words still ring more than a touch true today with the modern Republicans and Democrats.
I'm not sure Saddam posed much of a direct threat to the United States, or really to other nations in his region. I think the evidence has shown that his WMD program had been non-operational for quite some time before we invaded Iraq. I definitely think he posed a threat to his own people, though... I'm glad he isn't in power in Iraq anymore, but I do think we might have been able to achieve that same goal with some carefully-executed special ops. Why send in our troops? To secure territory and build permanent bases in Iraq? That's kind of what it looks like to me.
While it is probably true that Saddam would have eventually developed WMD should the proper opportunity have arisen, based upon his past actions, I think it has been demonstrated that there were no WMDs at the time of invasion, thus our attack was of a pre-emptive nature. I don't like war either MC, and I especially don't like it when one nation invades another without provocation. In Gulf War I, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and I didn't mind our involvement then. In Gulf War II, Iraq hadn't invaded anyone, and to me it just seems like we invaded them... because we didn't like their leader? Because we actually thought he was a threat to world stability, or even to Middle East stability? I would imagine there are a lot of other world leaders Bush and his neoconservative PNAC-type friends don't like. How many more countries would they invade, and under what pretenses? And for what purpose?
I believe that North Korea was more of a threat to the United States than Iraq at the time the U.S. invaded Iraq. I still believe this is the case today. This may be due in large part to the fact that I live in the part of the U.S. that is supposedly reachable by N. Korean nuclear missiles. I would have dealt with the N. Korean problem long before dealing with Saddam.
Instead we're stuck in a situation that will be extremely difficult to solve, and I don't think there was much of a strategy planned for the entire affair other than "Get Saddam". Without a real strategy for ending the war, and with a lot of terrorists/insurgents there fighting our troops, AND with the general hatred of the U.S. in that region (the flames of which I believe are being fanned daily by our Iraq activities, thus bringing more insurgents to that country)... I have to ask myself, is the Iraq War winnable? If it actually is, what would victory look like? To eradicate terrorism would the administration end up trying to eradicate Islam itself? The harder we go after the Islamic fundamentalists, the angrier the Islamic nations could become in general. The whole thing almost smells like a Crusade.
I hope daily that our troops can get the Iraqi army trained adequately, begin to quell some of the insurgent violence to a point at which it is under control, and get safely home. I know they are doing their jobs the best they can in a crummy situation, because most all of them are dedicated and have a sense of duty. I'm glad we have our fine military, even if I don't agree with what their Commander In Chief and his administration has them doing.
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