Category: Old Dish

The Wall Street Journal has begun the campaign – to thank Karl Rove for exposing a CIA operative because her husband’s report on uranium in Niger was flawed:

Democrats and most of the Beltway press corps are baying for Karl Rove’s head over his role in exposing a case of CIA nepotism involving Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame. On the contrary, we’d say the White House political guru deserves a prize–perhaps the next iteration of the “Truth-Telling” award that The Nation magazine bestowed upon Mr. Wilson before the Senate Intelligence Committee exposed him as a fraud.

Just a thought experiment: can you imagine the WSJ calling to give, say, Sid Blumenthal a medal for outing a CIA operative to counter misinformation in the Bosnia campaign? Fox’s John Gibson echoes:

I say give Karl Rove a medal, even if Bush has to fire him. Why? Because Valerie Plame should have been outed by somebody. And if nobody else had the cojones to do it, I’m glad Rove did – if he did do it, and he still says he didn’t.

For the partisan right, outing CIA operatives in wartime is the patriotic thing to do. There’s only one real option worthy of Bush: give Rove the Medal of Freedom.

NRO’s Byron York has the scoop. John Podhoretz, Bush uber-loyalist, even suggests Judith Miller was the original source for the identity of Wilson’s wife. I think that’s called “going on the offensive.” JPod has no actual evidence fingering Miller, just his usual eagerness to say anything that might please his political masters. But, hey, I have no idea who leaked this stuff. I guess it could be Miller. Or, say, any other journalist or appointee in Washington. This much I do know: the Bushies aren’t going to go down without a fight. And this could get much nastier.

Greg Gutfield listens to his fellow Huffpuffers and learns how to respond to terrorism (and get laid).

In “Animal House,” the phrase was just “Double Secret Probation,” not “Double Super Secret Probation.” My readers’ erudition never fails to impress.

“[A] pundit should not recommend a policy without adequate regard for the ability of those in charge to execute it, and here I stumbled. I could not imagine, for example, that the civilian and military high command would treat “Phase IV” — the post-combat period that has killed far more Americans than the “real” war — as of secondary importance to the planning of Gen. Tommy Franks’s blitzkrieg. I never dreamed that Ambassador Paul Bremer and Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the two top civilian and military leaders early in the occupation of Iraq — brave, honorable and committed though they were — would be so unsuited for their tasks, and that they would serve their full length of duty nonetheless. I did not expect that we would begin the occupation with cockamamie schemes of creating an immobile Iraqi army to defend the country’s borders rather than maintain internal order, or that the under-planned, under-prepared and in some respects mis-manned Coalition Provisional Authority would seek to rebuild Iraq with big construction contracts awarded under federal acquisition regulations, rather than with small grants aimed at getting angry, bewildered young Iraqi men off the streets and into jobs. I did not know, but I might have guessed.” – Eliot A. Cohen, one of the most decent and honest hawks in Washington. I echo everything he writes, and take the same responsibility for being too trusting of the Bush administration in advance.

THERE’S MORE: I especially share the following:

“disdain for the general who thinks Job One is simply whacking the bad guys and who, ever conscious of public relations, cannot admit that American soldiers have tortured prisoners or, in panic, killed innocent civilians. Contempt for the ghoulish glee of some who think they were right in opposing the war, and for the blithe disregard of the bungles by some who think they were right in favoring it.”

It is inconceivable to me that Rumsfeld should still be defense secretary after one of the most botched wars in recent memory. But I do not live, as Cohen proudly does, with the knowledge of his own son being sent to war. If you need more reason to be angry at the Bush team, read this post. Money quote:

One story that really got me was the tale of former ambassador to Yemen Barbara Bodine suggesting to Rumsfeld in March of 2003 that it would behoove the Bush administration to develop a plan to pay Iraqi civil servants. Rumsfeld replied that American taxpayers would never go for it and that he was not concerned if they were paid for several weeks or even months; if they rioted in the streets in protest, he said, the US could use such an eventuality as leverage to get the Europeans to pick up the tab. Stunning, no?

Stunning, but at this point unsurprising.

A useful flash video presentation of al Qaeda’s attacks in the last decade. Here’s more context for those who still believe we would not be targeted if we never retaliated:

What does all this tell us? First, that if they aren’t blowing us up, then they’ll be blowing up someone else. And you don’t get to choose who. Secondly, who or what they blow up is largely a matter of what’s available. Jews anywhere, Americans after that, Shia next and Brits probably a distant fourth. Africans for fun.

And Australians, Indians, Hindus, Balinese, Saudis, Iraqis, and on and on. We will be bombed and murdered, whatever we do. So why not do all we can to stay on the offensive?

YES, YES, I KNOW: Many reasonable people argue that the Iraq invasion made matters worse, not better in the short term. Let’s concede that, for the sake of argument. But deep down, how do we drain the swamp of Islamo-fascism? For all my criticisms of the conduct of the Iraq war, the reason I’m still glad we did it and still want us to get it right is that I see no fundamental solution to this unless we give the Muslim Arab world an alternative apart from Jihadism or the autocracy that fosters it. Democracy is the only cure; the only way for the silent majority of Muslims to regain power from the fanatics, to undermine this pathology and evil from within. I wrote the following before the London attacks for the Stranger in Seattle and I stand by every word:

The way ahead is undoubtedly brutal and unsure. But let’s not delude ourselves that the alternative was that much better: an Iraq pulverized by still more sanctions, poverty and tyranny or one in which Saddam lived to see another day and gave aid and comfort to al Qaeda. We chose the better of two options. Both were and are still hellish. But this war is young and was always going to last a generation. We owe our government sturdy, even fierce, criticism but we also owe our civilization support. That civilization – one in which people live free from tyranny and suffocating theocracy – is being fought over in Iraq today; and I have not the slightest hesitation in knowing whose side I am on. Our enemy is targeting innocents daily; while we are doing our best to advance their freedom. The Iraqi people told us what they want last January – peace with democracy. We cannot afford to betray either them or our principles now.

So we must fight on. Especially in Iraq, where innocent civilians are experiencing the London bombings on an almost daily basis.

An emailer prods my pop-cultural hypothalamus:

“Double super secret background” … actually is a joking wink reference to the movie “Animal House”. The fraternity had been placed on ‘double super secret probation’ by the evil Dean. Cooper probably just used that as joking slang (or Turd Blossom did :-).

Since Matt is one of the funniest and kindest men in D.C., I’ll bet it was his joke. But my point stands. This leak wasn’t a minor one, according to Rove. So why did he think it was major and didn’t want his fingerprints anywhere near it? Another emailer asks who told Rove:

How did Karl Rove know that Ms. Plame was a CIA operative? I cannot imagine that the WH keeps a list of CIA personnel. If in fact Ms. Plame was an undercover CIA operative, her employment with the CIA should have been known by a relatively small number of people within the agency. Everyone else should have know her as her cover profession. I’m assuming undercover CIA operatives do not use a CIA desk job as their cover. Somewhere along this information trail someone knowingly released the identity of Ms. Plame as a covert employee. Was this at the request of Karl Rove or others within the WH? Did he have clearance? Should he have had clearance?

I don’t know. But Fitzgerald may.

A new phase in the war on the West might just have been launched.

An emailer puts it as well as I could:

Two points, briefly:
1. People need to stop hiding behind Clintonian semantics here and understand that even if no actual technical violation of the law is found in the Rove/Plame case it will still be true, based on what we know now from the Time emails, that White House actions compromised a CIA asset during a time of war. What would Hannity, Limbaugh, Scarborough and all the cable loudmouths be saying if it had been Sidney Blumenthal?

2. Scott McClellan once told the American people that Karl Rove was not involved in any way, and that the President would remove anyone found to be involved. During the Lewinsky scandal many people insisted that it was not the sex that bothered them, but it was the lying, spinning, parsing, and direct misleading of the American people that offended them, and that came to define the Clinton White House. What would the cable loudmouths be saying if instead of McClellan it had been McCurry?

This isn’t about technical violations or a game of gotcha. It’s about character, and George Bush needs to show some.

I’m leery of saying anything yet about a case that is still so murky. But it does seem to me that doing what Rove seems to have done would, in peace-time, be sleazy. In wartime, it shows a contempt for our national security – or a willingness to put petty partisan sniping ahead of national security. No, I’m not shocked. But I’m also struck by one detail in Matt Cooper’s email to his editors:

“Spoke to Rove on double super secret background for about two mins before he went on vacation …”

“Double super secret background” for just some guidance about a developing story? That sounds a little excessive to me. Why would Rove have insisted on such a super-tight confidentiality standard if he was not aware that he was divulging something he truly shouldn’t divulge? Again, I don’t know enough to say anything that definitive right now. But it seems clear to me that Rove leaked the CIA role of Wilson’s wife (whether he named her or knew that she was under-cover is another matter). The president has said he would fire anyone who did such a thing. Ergo: the president must fire Rove or break his word. It’s going to be an interesting few weeks.

Ready to hear it? Here’s the murderer of Theo van Gogh:

[T]ranscripts of recorded statements allegedly made by Mr. Bouyeri and introduced in the trial offered a window into his way of thinking. “I knew what I was doing,” Mr. Bouyeri told his brother in a phone conversation shortly after the killing, according to the transcript. “I slaughtered him.” Then Mr. Bouyeri laughed, said Judge Udo Willem Bentinck, who was reading the transcript aloud.

Then there’s this, Bouyeri’s address to van Gogh’s mother in court:

He argued that he did not kill her son, “but I have chopped off his head according to the law that orders me to do so to everyone who offends Allah. I do not not feel your pain as I do not know what it is to suffer the loss of a child.”

Can anyone seriously believe that not invading Iraq would have changed the mindset of this fanatic? Or leaving Afghanistan alone? What we’re learning, especially from the home-grown bombings in London, is that our fundamental enemy is a medievalist theological fascism, buried in the recesses of a legitimate religious faith. It would be nice if we could talk these people out of it, or hand them concessions to buy them off, or hug them till they saw the joys of the New Age. Until then, we have to bring them to justice – on the battlefield or court-room. And the people who are most able to bring them to justice are Western Muslims; and the democratically-inclined Muslims in Iraq.