The Asia Times Online has an interesting Rove piece on its front page today,
The Bomb and Karl Rove . This article puts things in perspective --
actions have consequences.
It's not just the outing of a CIA operative, the scandal is so much more far reaching than that. Here are the points that I find most compelling:
Like every important government crisis, the outing of undercover Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer Valerie Plame by the President George W Bush's chief political adviser, deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, perhaps among others, must be seen in many contexts at once.
More below the fold.
...
It's true that the harm to the Wilsons cannot be compared to the deaths of thousands in the misbegotten conflict, but it's also true that the resolution of the scandal is likely to have a lasting impact on American politics, and even on the American system of government. Perhaps the most important political question is whether the Bush administration is to be held accountable for any of its actions, or whether it now enjoys complete impunity and a free field of action to do whatever it likes - from waging war to designing and presiding over systems of torture to breaking domestic law. There are also other contexts to consider.
If [Frank] Rich is right that the scandal is really about the Iraq War, then we have to ask what the war was about. The administration's chief answer is weapons of mass destruction and, more particularly, nuclear weapons. The atomic signature is scrawled all over the scandal. It is present, of course, in the uranium the president falsely said Iraq was seeking from Niger. And Plame, as it turns out, worked for the CIA on proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. To defend its nuclear lies, the administration destroyed a (possible) source of nuclear truth.
The smear campaign thus did double damage in the nuclear-weapon field: it propped up, however briefly, the erroneous justification for the war, while shutting down authentic information on the broader problem. The nuclear issue popped up again in a State Department memo former secretary of state Colin Powell brought with him on Air Force One shortly after Wilson's op-ed piece appeared. It is now famous because the memo disclosed Plame's identity as Wilson's wife. Less noticed is that the bulk of the memo was devoted to rebutting the Niger uranium allegation.
This must be one of the most rebutted claims in history. Before Wilson ever spoke up, it had been disproved by several government agencies; the director of the UN's Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammed ElBaradei; and, of course, the State Department.
....
The fictional danger of an Iraqi bomb bursting in an American city was, of course, the chief justification for the war, but it was more than that. It was the linchpin of the broader policy of preventive military strikes - necessary, the president said, to forestall the hostile states from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. In his words, "As a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed."
....
While the US military was looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, where there were none, it was in effect ignoring them in North Korea, which reportedly was either acquiring or expanding a nuclear arsenal, and in Iran, which was pressing forward down the nuclear path. It's worth recalling that the Vietnam War, too, was in part the product of misguided nuclear strategy. Policymakers, well aware that they could not win a nuclear "general war" with the Soviet Union in the Central European theater, hoped instead to win a "limited war" with conventional arms on the "periphery". When it went wrong, the consequence was the Watergate crisis, born directly of Richard Nixon's fury at antiwar protesters.
That chain of reasoning died with the Cold War, but nuclear danger lived on to produce new and possibly more dangerous illusions. The worst is that the spread of weapons of mass destruction and their associated technology and know-how can be stopped, or prevented in advance, by arms. Once that conclusion was accepted, mere hints of danger, wisps of fact and speculations became actionable, bomb-able. But if there is one thing in this world that cannot be bombed out of existence, it is an illusion. And illusions, when rigidly defended, breed encounters with the law....
But this is the Bomb, the "Chain Reaction" that was unleashed upon the world:
....Thus did a mistaken revolution in nuclear policy, proceeding under the guise of the "war on terror", produce - the lies
that produced
- the war
that produced
- the whistleblowing
that produced
- the smears
that produced
- the blown cover
that produced
- the cover-up
that produced
- the legal investigation
that produced
- the political and legal crisis that now swirls around Karl Rove.
Please Mr. Fitzgerald, indict Karl, et al, and impeach Chimpy!!!