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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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/101605Z.shtml

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Arming the Left: Is the time now? --by Charles Southwell*
http://legitgov.org/essay_southwell_arming_the_left_is_the_time_now_102203.html