July 17, 2005
Follow the Uranium
By FRANK RICH
"I am saying that if anyone was involved in that type of activity which I
referred to, they would not be working here."
- Ron Ziegler, press secretary to Richard Nixon, defending the
presidential aide Dwight Chapin on Oct. 18, 1972. Chapin was convicted in
April 1974 of perjury in connection with his relationship to the
political saboteur Donald Segretti.
"Any individual who works here at the White House has the confidence of
the president. They wouldn't be working here at the White House if they
didn't have the president's confidence."
- Scott McClellan, press secretary to George W. Bush, defending Karl Rove
on Tuesday.
WELL, of course, Karl Rove did it. He may not have violated the
Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, with its high threshold
of criminality for outing a covert agent, but there's no doubt he trashed
Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame. We know this not only because of Matt
Cooper's e-mail, but also because of Mr. Rove's own history. Trashing is
in his nature, and bad things happen, usually through under-the-radar
whispers, to decent people (and their wives) who get in his way. In the
2000 South Carolina primary, John McCain's wife, Cindy, was rumored to be
a drug addict (and Senator McCain was rumored to be mentally unstable).
In the 1994 Texas governor's race, Ann Richards found herself rumored to
be a lesbian. The implication that Mr. Wilson was a John Kerry-ish girlie
man beholden to his wife for his meal ticket is of a thematic piece with
previous mud splattered on Rove political adversaries. The difference is
that this time Mr. Rove got caught.
Even so, we shouldn't get hung up on him - or on most of the other
supposed leading figures in this scandal thus far. Not Matt Cooper or
Judy Miller or the Wilsons or the bad guy everyone loves to hate, the
former CNN star Robert Novak. This scandal is not about them in the end,
any more than Watergate was about Dwight Chapin and Donald Segretti or
Woodward and Bernstein. It is about the president of the United States.
It is about a plot that was hatched at the top of the administration and
in which everyone else, Mr. Rove included, are at most secondary players.
To see the main plot, you must sweep away the subplots, starting with the
Cooper e-mail. It has been brandished as a smoking gun by Bush bashers
and as exculpatory evidence by Bush backers (Mr. Rove, you see, was just
trying to ensure that Time had its facts straight). But no one knows what
this e-mail means unless it's set against the avalanche of other
evidence, most of it secret, including what Mr. Rove said in three
appearances before the grand jury. Therein lies the rub, or at least
whatever case might be made for perjury.
Another bogus subplot, long popular on the left, has it that Patrick
Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, gave Mr. Novak a free pass out of
ideological comradeship. But Mr. Fitzgerald, both young (44) and
ambitious, has no record of Starr- or Ashcroft-style partisanship (his
contempt for the press notwithstanding) or known proclivity for
committing career suicide. What's most likely is that Mr. Novak, more of
a common coward than the prince of darkness he fashions himself to be,
found a way to spill some beans and avoid Judy Miller's fate. That the
investigation has dragged on so long anyway is another indication of the
expanded reach of the prosecutorial web.
Apparently this is finally beginning to dawn on Mr. Bush's fiercest
defenders and on Mr. Bush himself. Hence, last week's erection of the
stonewall manned by the almost poignantly clownish Mr. McClellan, who
abruptly rendered inoperative his previous statements that any suspicions
about Mr. Rove are "totally ridiculous." The morning after Mr. McClellan
went mano a mano with his tormentors in the White House press room -
"We've secretly replaced the White House press corps with actual
reporters," observed Jon Stewart - the ardently pro-Bush New York Post
ran only five paragraphs of a wire-service story on Page 12. That
conspicuous burial of what was front-page news beyond Murdochland speaks
loudly about the rising anxiety on the right. Since then, White House
surrogates have been desperately babbling talking points attacking Joseph
Wilson as a partisan and a liar.
These attacks, too, are red herrings. Let me reiterate: This case is not
about Joseph Wilson. He is, in Alfred Hitchcock's parlance, a MacGuffin,
which, to quote the Oxford English Dictionary, is "a particular event,
object, factor, etc., initially presented as being of great significance
to the story, but often having little actual importance for the plot as
it develops." Mr. Wilson, his mission to Niger to check out Saddam's
supposed attempts to secure uranium that might be used in nuclear weapons
and even his wife's outing have as much to do with the real story here as
Janet Leigh's theft of office cash has to do with the mayhem that ensues
at the Bates Motel in "Psycho."
This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American
people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit - the big enchilada, to borrow
a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes - is not Mr. Rove but
the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up
grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise,
from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That's why the
stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-
conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for
Vanity Fair.
So put aside Mr. Wilson's February 2002 trip to Africa. The plot that
matters starts a month later, in March, and its omniscient author is *****
Cheney. It was Mr. Cheney (on CNN) who planted the idea that Saddam was
"actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time." The vice president went
on to repeat this charge in May on "Meet the Press," in three speeches in
August and on "Meet the Press" yet again in September. Along the way the
frightening word "uranium" was thrown into the mix.
By September the president was bandying about the u-word too at the
United Nations and elsewhere, speaking of how Saddam needed only a
softball-size helping of uranium to wreak Armageddon on America. But
hardly had Mr. Bush done so than, offstage, out of view of us civilian
spectators, the whole premise of this propaganda campaign was being
challenged by forces with more official weight than Joseph Wilson. In
October, the National Intelligence Estimate, distributed to Congress as
it deliberated authorizing war, included the State Department's caveat
that "claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa," made public
in a British dossier, were "highly dubious." A C.I.A. assessment, sent to
the White House that month, determined that "the evidence is weak" and
"the Africa story is overblown."
AS if this weren't enough, a State Department intelligence analyst
questioned the legitimacy of some mysterious documents that had surfaced
in Italy that fall and were supposed proof of the Iraq-Niger uranium
transaction. In fact, they were blatant forgeries. When Mohamed
ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy
Agency, said as much publicly in the days just before "shock and awe,"
his announcement made none of the three evening newscasts. The
administration's apocalyptic uranium rhetoric, sprinkled with mushroom
clouds, had been hammered incessantly for more than five months by then -
not merely in the State of the Union address - and could not be
dislodged. As scenarios go, this one was about as subtle as "Independence
Day" and just as unstoppable a crowd-pleaser.
Once we were locked into the war, and no W.M.D.'s could be found, the
original plot line was dropped with an alacrity that recalled the "Never
mind!" with which Gilda Radner's Emily Litella used to end her
misinformed Weekend Update commentaries on "Saturday Night Live." The
administration began its dog-ate-my-homework cover-up, asserting that the
various warning signs about the uranium claims were lost "in the bowels"
of the bureaucracy or that it was all the C.I.A.'s fault or that it
didn't matter anyway, because there were new, retroactive rationales to
justify the war. But the administration knows how guilty it is. That's
why it has so quickly trashed any insider who contradicts its story line
about how we got to Iraq, starting with the former Treasury secretary
Paul O'Neill and the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke.
Next to White House courtiers of their rank, Mr. Wilson is at most a
Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. The brief against the administration's
drumbeat for war would be just as damning if he'd never gone to Africa.
But by overreacting in panic to his single Op-Ed piece of two years ago,
the White House has opened a Pandora's box it can't slam shut. Seasoned
audiences of presidential scandal know that there's only one certainty
ahead: the timing of a Karl Rove resignation. As always in this genre,
the knight takes the fall at exactly that moment when it's essential to
protect the king.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/opinion/17rich.html?ex=1279252800&en=
87fee7dc424bef7e&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
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