Go to Original
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.
-------
Jump to today's TO Features:
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. t r u t h o u t has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is t r u t h o u t endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
"Go to Original" links are provided as a convenience to our readers and allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted on TO may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the "Go to Original" links.
Print This Story
E-mail This Story