What was it about Joe Wilson that led Scooter Libby and unnamed others in the Bush administration to concoct and execute a possibly illegal smear compaign against him in the summer of 2003? Was it really the Niger piece in the NY Times in July? or the anonymous statements to Kristof? Surely the Bushies would not have risked so much just to discredit that description of one man's junket to a poor African country....a story that could never get any traction on its own? Why would Libby, a rational attorney, and powerful figure, become "obsessed" over an op piece that was scarcely noticed by the country? Why is it that to this day, the whole Bush/neocon attack is on Joe Wilson and his credibility?
The answer is that the Niger trip and op piece were not the CAUSE for the smearing/outing of Valerie Plame. They were the OPPORTUNITY...the opening that the Bushies and neocons had been waiting for since Bill Moyers interviewed Wilson on February 28, 2003; the purported Plame/Wilson nepotism gave them the opening they had been waiting for.
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Plame/Wilson nepotism wasn't much of a charge, but clearly it was their ticket into the newspapers, and the resultant outing of Wilson's wife would be a huge and "chilling" step, a warning to Wilson and to others, that the neocon/Bush game plan was not to be trifled with.
But that was not enough; having shown, by the evil outing of Plame, their willingness to ruin/risk a career/life/lives, they still had to discredit Wilson. It was for the latter purpose, imho, they then made up the charge that he had lied about Cheney sending him, and tried to make him into a liar over his statements about the forged Niger document, even though Wilson has proved to be correct on basically everthing. Sen. Pat Roberts, of course, then incorporated these charges into the
three Republican Senators "bipartisan" Congressional Report, thus "ossifying" the charge that Wilson was a liar.
When (and why) did Libby/Bushies/neocons decide to look for an opportunity to lower the boom?
Recall that Wilson says that a dossier was being prepared on him in March of 2003, March 8, according to dKosopedia: and the immediate antecedent seems to be this: the Wilson interview with Bill Moyers on PBS's NOW on February 28, 2003. In this interview, Wilson presented himself very effectively as an experienced and knowledgeable expert on Iraq, Saddam, Bush, and, perhaps most importantly the neocons, their plans, and notably, why they would fail. The neocons certainly noticed this appearance: Richard Perle was invited to appear on the program, and declined.
Read this heavily edited transcript. read it and discover why Joe Wilson needed to be "taken out." His predictions have been uncannily accurate. Joe Wilson is not a liar or a hack.
MOYERS: With war in Iraq more imminent than ever, we're going to talk tonight to the last senior American diplomat to meet with Saddam Hussein. Joseph Wilson was the Deputy Chief of Mission, the acting ambassador at the US Embassy in Iraq 12 years ago during Desert Shield, the lead-up to the first Gulf War.
He was a member of the American Foreign Service for 23 years. Our ambassador to two African countries. And served as the political advisor to the Commander in Chief of US Forces in Europe. He now heads his own international business firm and is an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington. Thank you for joining us.
.....
MOYERS: You're not against using force. So help me understand the distinction between the quantity of force you would use and the quantity of force that George W. Bush is proposing to you.
WILSON: Well, first of all, I think there's a question of objective. I'm not against the use of force for the purposes of achieving the objective that has been agreed upon by the United Nations in the international community....If and when it becomes necessary. I think that is legitimate. Essentially, you could a lot of that just by the air. You do...
MOYERS: Precision bombing?
WILSON: ...precision bombing. They've got more surveillance planes out there now. You've got the U2s. The French or moving some Mirages on. You've got the place blanketed.
MOYERS: You are calling for coercive inspections.
WILSON: That's right. Muscular disarmament, coercive inspections, coercive containment, whatever you want to call it. I don't think containment's the right word because we're really talking about disarmament.
MOYERS: Does it seem to you that the President, George Bush, is prepared to accept a disarmed Hussein? Or does he want a dead Hussein?
WILSON: I think he wants a dead Hussein.
.....
WILSON: I think war is inevitable. Essentially, the speech that the President gave at the American Enterprise Institute was so much on the overthrow of the regime and the liberation of the Iraqi people that I suspect that Saddam understands that this is not about disarmament
MOYERS: Knowing this about -- why do you think knowing this that the President Bush is so eager for war?
WILSON: Well, that's a -- I think that's a very good question. I think that there is a sense in the administration that the time has run out for Saddam Hussein and the only way that they can achieve the disarmament objective that they want is to go in. But more importantly...
MOYERS: And you agree with that, don't you?
WILSON: Well, no, I don't think that that's the only way. That's where I disagree. I mean, I think that there are several other steps that can be taken before you have to go to total war for the purposes of achieving disarmament.
......
MOYERS: So this is not just about weapons of mass destruction.
WILSON: Oh, no, I think it's far more about re-growing the political map of the Middle East.
MOYERS: What does that mean?
WILSON: Well, that basically means trying to install regimes in the Middle East that are far more friendly to the United States -- there are those in the administration that call them democracies. Somehow it's hard for me to imagine that a democratic system will emerge out of the ashes of Iraq in the near term. And when and if it does, it's hard for me to believe that it will be more pro-American and more pro-Israeli than what you've got now.
MOYERS: Tell me what you think about the arguments of one of those men, Richard Perle, who is perhaps the most influential advocate in the President's and the administration's ear arguing to get rid of Saddam Hussein. What do you think about his argument?
WILSON: Well, he's certainly the architect of a study that was produced in the mid-'90s for the Likud Israeli government called "a clean break, a new strategy for the realm." And it makes the argument that the best way to secure Israeli security is through the changing of some of these regimes beginning with Iraq and also including Syria. And that's been since expanded to include Iran.
MOYERS: So help us understand why removing Saddam Hussein and expanding that movement, throughout the Middle East which would benefit Israel?
WILSON: Well, I think those are the sorts of questions that you need to ask to Richard Perle. The argument that I would make...
MOYERS: We asked him but he didn't want to come on the show.
WILSON: Yeah. The argument that it seems to me -- I've done democracy in Africa for 25 years. And I can tell you that doing democracy in the most benign environments is really tough sledding. And the place like Iraq where politics is a blood sport and where you have these clan, tribal, ethnic and confessional cleavages, coming up with a democratic system that is pluralistic, functioning and, as we like to say about democracies, is not inclined to make war on other democracies, is going to be extraordinarily difficult.
And let me just suggest a scenario. Assuming that you get the civic institutions and a thriving political culture in the first few iterations of presidential elections, you're going to have Candidate A who is likely going to be a demagogue. And Candidate B who is likely going to be a populist. That's what emerges from political discourse.
Candidate A, Candidate B, the demagogue and the populist, are going to want to win elections of the presidency. And the way to win election is enflame the passions of your population. The easy way for a demagogue or a populist in the Middle East to enflame the passion of the population is to define himself or herself by their enemies.
And the great enemy in the Middle East is Israel and its supplier, the United States. So it's hard to believe, for me, that a thriving democracy certainly in the immediate and near-term and medium-term future is going to yield a successful presidential candidate who is going to be pro-Israel or pro-America.
....
MOYERS: So you anticipate many unanticipated consequences to a war with Iraq?
WILSON: Not to anticipate unanticipated consequences is a dangerous thing to do. And my military planners used to always tell me, "Hope is not a plan of action." So you don't want to base things on how you hope the outcome is going to turn out.
MOYERS: Talk to me a moment about the notion of preemptive action and regime change. Preemptive action means an attack.
WILSON: That's right. That's right. We have historically reserved as part of our right of legitimate self-defense the authority to go in and take out an enemy before that enemy has an opportunity to take us out. Now what I worry about most is that we've lose focus on the war on terrorism where we've actually gone after al Qaeda and where we should continue to go after al Qaeda both in militarily as well as with our intelligence and our police assets.
We've got lost focus on that. The game has shifted to Iraq for reasons that are confused to everybody. The millions of people who are on the streets of our country and of Europe, as I said the other day, it strikes me as -- it may prove that Abraham Lincoln is right. You cannot fool all the people all the time.
They have been sold. We have been sold a war on disarmament or terrorism or the nexus between terrorism and weapons of mass destruction or liberation. Any one of the four. And now with the President's speeches, you clearly have the idea that we're going to go in and take this preemptive action to overthrow a regime, occupy its country for the purposes, the explicit purposes of fostering the blossoming of democracy in a part of the world where we really have very little ground, truth or experience.
And, certainly, I hope along with everybody that the President in his assessment is correct. And that I am so wrong that I'm never invited to another foreign policy debate again.
MOYERS: You're not likely to be after this. (LAUGHTER)
WILSON: Because if I am right, this could be a real disaster.
How scarily accurate are those last couple of lines?????
The Niger story was small potatoes compared to the potential impact of all that Joe Wilson had to say in the PBS interview, and the credibility he had. The excuse given for Libby's obsession was that supposedly Wilson claimed that Cheney sent him to Niger. But that is ridiculous; the neocons never believed that; they can read, and they knew he never said it, never wrote it; in fact, they made it up to cover their tracks.
[UPDATE: isbister points out that Wilson published some of these opinions in an article in the March 3, 2003 issue of the Nation, which went on line on Feb. 13.]
Joe Wilson was and is an enemy of the entire war/Bush/neocon agenda. This, not some "Niger travelogue", is why Scooter was obsessed with him. This is why the Plame outing, as hazardous as it was, was deemed worthwhile. This is why Scooter is lying: to tell the truth would be to admit that Wilson was on the enemies list long before Plame became an issue, and they were waiting to jump on him, and Plame was not the reason.
This is why the Bushies
continue to try to smear Wilson as a liar. They almost never mention Niger, even less do they talke about yellowcake, or the war. They still want to discredit Wilson, because he is a debunker of the first magnitude, a reality-based career public servant, regardless of who his wife is. He had to go down. He was too good, too smart, too informed, and too willing to talk. The Wilson-Plame relationship gave them the opportunity to "take him out." That is all that was important to them about the Niger piece.
On a related note, According to CyberDem and Agathena, it was not long after this that Bill Moyers retired and the NOW program was truncated... another takeout.
I hope Patrick Fitzgerald is not next.