Juan Cole gets all hot and bothered over Stephie's Sunday revelation.
The implication is that Bush and Cheney took part in discussions with
Karl Rove, Lewis Libby and other administration spinmeisters about what
to do about that pesky Joseph Wilson IV, former acting ambassador to
Iraq who had stood up to Saddam in fall of 1990. So the Bush team
ordered an investigation into Wilson after his editorial in the NY
Times.
The whole point of Bushism is to punish dissidence within the ranks
immediately and ruthlessly. Wilson, a former State Department official,
had to be destroyed for having stepped out of line. It didn't matter to them that Wilson had been proved right. In their
world, you only lose if the public sees the truth. The mere discovery
of the truth in some obscure quarter is irrelevant. They had to prevent
the public from seeing Wilson's truth.
Rove and Libby were chosen as the hatchet men who would actually talk
to the reporters and put the information around. But of course Bush and
Cheney were part of the deliberations that set the plan in motion. It
involved outing a career CIA operative (and likely getting her contacts
in the third world killed). It was very serious business. Bush would
have had to have signed off on it, at least orally.
[snip]
I have long been frustrated by the US press's tendency to talk about
Bush's cabinet officers as though they were independent agents, and to
put Bush on a pedestal. Let me just follow through on some further
assertions in the spirit of Stephanopoulos's remark.
It is fruitless to speculate about who dissolved the Iraqi army
in May of 2003, and why. (This move contributed to the rise of the
Sunni Arab guerrilla movement). Bush did it!
Who ordered the Marines, against their better judgement, to launch a
reprisal attack on Fallujah after four Western private security guards
were killed and their bodies desecrated there? Bush did it!
Who authorized torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib? Bush did it!
Who appointed Michael Brown, a man with no experience in emergency management, head of FEMA? Bush did it!
Who let Bin Laden escape from Tora Bora? Bush did it!
Who completely destroyed the fiscal health of the US government and
forced us into massive debt, squandering Clinton's surplus and
endangering social security? Bush did it!
Bush is the president. He makes the decisions. If there has been a major bad decision, it has been his.
Who outed Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA operative? Bush did it!
As long as the Republicans control both houses of congress, Bush is
probably safe. I'm not sure a special counsel like Fitzpatrick could by
himself bring down a president. But if the Democrats can take the
Senate in 2006, this scandal could turn into an impeachment trial.
