[Mb-civic] Frank Rich

[Mike Blaxill]

 Karl and Scooter's Excellent Adventure 
    By Frank Rich 
    The New York Times

    Sunday 23 October 2005

    There were no weapons of mass destruction.
There was no collaboration between Saddam Hussein
and Al Qaeda on 9/11. There was scant Pentagon
planning for securing the peace should bad stuff
happen after America invaded. Why, exactly, did
we go to war in Iraq?

    "It still isn't possible to be sure - and
this remains the most remarkable thing about the
Iraq war," writes the New Yorker journalist
George Packer, a disenchanted liberal supporter
of the invasion, in his essential new book, "The
Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq." Even a former
Bush administration State Department official who
was present at the war's creation, Richard Haass,
tells Mr. Packer that he expects to go to his
grave "not knowing the answer."

    Maybe. But the leak investigation now
reaching its climax in Washington continues to
offer big clues. We don't yet know whether Lewis
(Scooter) Libby or Karl Rove has committed a
crime, but the more we learn about their
desperate efforts to take down a bit player like
Joseph Wilson, the more we learn about the real
secret they wanted to protect: the "why" of the
war.

    To piece that story together, you have to
follow each man's history before the invasion of
Iraq - before anyone had ever heard of Valerie
Plame Wilson, let alone leaked her identity as a
C.I.A. officer. It is not an accident that Mr.
Libby's and Mr. Rove's very different
trajectories - one of a Washington policy
intellectual, the other of a Texas political
operative - would collide before Patrick
Fitzgerald's grand jury. They are very different
men who play very different White House roles,
but they are bound together now by the sordid
shared past that the Wilson affair has exposed.

    In Mr. Rove's case, let's go back to January
2002. By then the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan
had succeeded in its mission to overthrow the
Taliban and had done so with minimal American
casualties. In a triumphalist speech to the
Republican National Committee, Mr. Rove for the
first time openly advanced the idea that the war
on terror was the path to victory for that
November's midterm elections. Candidates "can go
to the country on this issue," he said, because
voters "trust the Republican Party to do a better
job of protecting and strengthening America's
military might and thereby protecting America."
It was an early taste of the rhetoric that would
be used habitually to smear any war critics as
unpatriotic.

    But there were unspoken impediments to Mr.
Rove's plan that he certainly knew about:
Afghanistan was slipping off the radar screen of
American voters, and the president's most
grandiose objective, to capture Osama bin Laden
"dead or alive," had not been achieved. How do
you run on a war if the war looks as if it's
shifting into neutral and the No. 1 evildoer has
escaped?

    Hardly had Mr. Rove given his speech than
polls started to register the first erosion of
the initial near-universal endorsement of the
administration's response to 9/11. A USA
Today/CNN/Gallup survey in March 2002 found that
while 9 out of 10 Americans still backed the war
on terror at the six-month anniversary of the
attacks, support for an expanded, long-term war
had fallen to 52 percent.

    Then came a rapid barrage of unhelpful news
for a political campaign founded on supposed
Republican superiority in protecting America: the
first report (in The Washington Post) that the
Bush administration had lost Bin Laden's trail in
Tora Bora in December 2001 by not committing
ground troops to hunt him down; the first
indications that intelligence about Bin Laden's
desire to hijack airplanes barely clouded
President Bush's August 2001 Crawford vacation;
the public accusations by an F.B.I.
whistle-blower, Coleen Rowley, that higher-ups
had repeatedly shackled Minneapolis agents
investigating the so-called 20th hijacker,
Zacarias Moussaoui, in the days before 9/11.

    These revelations took their toll. By
Memorial Day 2002, a USA Today poll found that
just 4 out of 10 Americans believed that the
United States was winning the war on terror, a
steep drop from the roughly two-thirds holding
that conviction in January. Mr. Rove could see
that an untelevised and largely underground war
against terrorists might not nail election
victories without a jolt of shock and awe. It was
a propitious moment to wag the dog.

    Enter Scooter, stage right. As James Mann
details in his definitive group biography of the
Bush war cabinet, "Rise of the Vulcans," Mr.
Libby had been joined at the hip with Dick Cheney
and Paul Wolfowitz since their service in the
Defense Department of the Bush 41 administration,
where they conceived the neoconservative
manifesto for the buildup and exercise of
unilateral American military power after the cold
war. Well before Bush 43 took office, they had
become fixated on Iraq, though for reasons having
much to do with their ideas about realigning the
states in the Middle East and little or nothing
to do with the stateless terrorism of Al Qaeda.
Mr. Bush had specifically disdained such
interventionism when running against Al Gore, but
he embraced the cause once in office. While
others might have had cavils - American military
commanders testified before Congress about their
already overtaxed troops and equipment in March
2002 - the path was clear for a war in Iraq to
serve as the political Viagra Mr. Rove needed for
the election year.

    But here, too, was an impediment: there had
to be that "why" for the invasion, the very why
that today can seem so elusive that Mr. Packer
calls Iraq "the 'Rashomon' of wars." Abstract
(and highly debatable) neocon notions of marching
to Baghdad to make the Middle East safe for
democracy (and more secure for Israel and
uninterrupted oil production) would never fly
with American voters as a trigger for war or
convince them that such a war was relevant to the
fight against those who attacked us on 9/11. And
though Americans knew Saddam was a despot and
mass murderer, that in itself was also
insufficient to ignite a popular groundswell for
regime change. Polls in the summer of 2002 showed
steadily declining support among Americans for
going to war in Iraq, especially if we were to go
it alone.

    For Mr. Rove and Mr. Bush to get what they
wanted most, slam-dunk midterm election
victories, and for Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney to
get what they wanted most, a war in Iraq for
reasons predating 9/11, their real whys for going
to war had to be replaced by fictional, more
salable ones. We wouldn't be invading Iraq to
further Rovian domestic politics or neocon
ideology; we'd be doing so instead because there
was a direct connection between Saddam and Al
Qaeda and because Saddam was on the verge of
attacking America with nuclear weapons. The facts
and intelligence had to be fixed to create these
whys; any contradictory evidence had to be
dismissed or suppressed.

    Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney were in the boiler
room of the disinformation factory. The vice
president's repetitive hyping of Saddam's nuclear
ambitions in the summer and fall of 2002 as well
as his persistence in advertising bogus
Saddam-Qaeda ties were fed by the rogue
intelligence operation set up in his own office.
As we know from many journalistic accounts, Mr.
Cheney and Mr. Libby built their "case" by often
making an end run around the C.I.A., State
Department intelligence and the Defense
Intelligence Agency. Their ally in cherry-picking
intelligence was a similar cadre of neocon
zealots led by Douglas Feith at the Pentagon.

    This is what Col. Lawrence Wilkerson,
then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's wartime
chief of staff, was talking about last week when
he publicly chastised the "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal"
for sowing potential disaster in Iraq, North
Korea and Iran. It's this cabal that in 2002
pushed for much of the bogus W.M.D. evidence that
ended up in Mr. Powell's now infamous February
2003 presentation to the U.N. It's this cabal
whose propaganda was sold by the war's
unannounced marketing arm, the White House Iraq
Group, or WHIG, in which both Mr. Libby and Mr.
Rove served in the second half of 2002. One of
WHIG's goals, successfully realized, was to turn
up the heat on Congress so it would rush to pass
a resolution authorizing war in the politically
advantageous month just before the midterm
election.

    Joseph Wilson wasn't a player in these
exalted circles; he was a footnote who began to
speak out loudly only after Saddam had been
toppled and the mission in Iraq had been
"accomplished." He challenged just one element of
the W.M.D. "evidence," the uranium that Saddam's
government had supposedly been seeking in Africa
to fuel its ominous mushroom clouds.

    But based on what we know about Mr. Libby's
and Mr. Rove's hysterical over-response to Mr.
Wilson's accusation, he scared them silly. He did
so because they had something to hide. Should Mr.
Libby and Mr. Rove have lied to investigators or
a grand jury in their panic, Mr. Fitzgerald will
bring charges. But that crime would seem a
misdemeanor next to the fables that they and
their bosses fed the nation and the world as the
whys for invading Iraq.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/102305Z.shtml