It's Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby

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Sat, 15 Oct 2005 19:33:52 -0700 (PDT)

It's Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby

 

 

 

 

 

It's Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby

October 16, 2005

By FRANK RICH, Op-Ed Columnist

 

 

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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