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Another
bad day
at the office
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - One has to feel sorry for
Republicans. Although they control both houses of the US
Congress and the White House, they must think they're
living through a bad dream. Consider Republicans on
Capitol Hill in particular:
After campaigning
for a constitutional amendment that would require the
federal government to balance its budget, they're forced
to defend the biggest deficits in US history, all
requested by their president.
After electing a
president who promised never to engage in
"nation-building" overseas, he's demanding that they
finance the biggest nation-building exercise since
Vietnam.
They ran on a platform that promised
that US troops would never be used for peacekeeping. Now
they're being asked to defend an occupation where
130,000 troops are engaged mainly in directing traffic,
giving away soccer balls, and mediating tribal disputes
in dusty Iraqi villages, while being shot at by unknown
assailants who almost always get away.
They
elected a president who promised to pursue a "humble"
foreign policy, and now they're expected to pay for a
global empire whose manpower requirements are wreaking
havoc on their beloved army and the reserves.
If
all that makes them feel as if they've passed over into
some parallel universe, now, after years of beating up
on Democrats for criticizing the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), they're being told by their leader to
pretend that the public "outing" of a covert officer by
two "senior White House officials" is no big deal.
And not just any covert officer at that.
A woman, wife and mother of two small children,
whose job, until her cover was blown by those "senior
White House officials", was to track down rogues and
terrorists bent on acquiring nuclear weapons. A secret
heroine in the twilight world of Bush's "war on terror".
Moreover, Valerie Plame, the spy in question, is
precisely the kind of person for whose protection real
Republican men, like Attorney General John Ashcroft,
California gubernatorial hopeful Arnold Schwarzenegger,
and Top Gun Bush, are supposed to lay down their lives
... at least rhetorically.
Clearly the
Republican reflex is to pour forth their outrage against
the dastardly traitors who exposed her identity and call
for their execution, rather than the measly 10 years
prescribed for such crimes by a 1982 law enacted to
protect covert operatives from exposure.
But
they have a serious problem.
Those "most
insidious of traitors", as former President George H W
Bush once called such people, apparently are also tight
with the current president, at least if you can believe
five yet-to-be-identified Washington reporters who
confirmed to The Washington Post this week that they,
like Robert Novak, the right-wing columnist who first
named Plame in print in July, were told by two senior
White House officials about Plame's secret identity. The
traitors appear, in other words, to be Republicans, and
not just any Republicans.
Most of the
speculation is focused on Karl Rove, Bush's top
political adviser, and I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice
President Dick Cheney's powerful chief of staff and
national security adviser.
The stakes are very
high, as indicated by the fact that Republicans on
Capitol Hill have been told not only to stifle their
righteous indignation, but also to enlist in a campaign,
as one anonymous Republican Congressional aide told the
New York Times this week, to "slime and defend" against
Plame and her husband, retired ambassador Joseph Wilson.
Wilson, a career diplomat who was sent by the
CIA to Niger in 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq
had bought huge quantities of uranium yellowcake,
published an article in the New York Times in early July
in which he charged that the White House must have known
that those reports were unfounded and fraudulent when
Bush cited them in his State of the Union Address last
January as evidence that Saddam Hussein was building a
nuclear weapon. It is widely known that Cheney and
Libby, both superhawks on Iraq, displayed a special
interest in those reports.
Within a week of the
publication of that article, the calls to Novak and the
other reporters about Plame's identity and relationship
with Wilson were made.
Last week, word that the
CIA had formally asked the Justice Department to launch
a criminal investigation was leaked to the press.
Already on the defensive over the mounting death
toll and skyrocketing financial costs in Iraq, the
failure to find weapons of mass destruction, and
plummeting poll ratings, the White House and its allies
in the media have spent much of the past few days trying
to smear her and her husband.
Thus, according to
anonymous sources, Plame is really a mere "analyst", not
a covert officer at all.
Plame told lots of
people she worked for the CIA, according to another
story that is being plied to reporters. Both accounts
appear to be untrue.
Louder guns are firing on
Wilson, who had publicly opposed the war before it was
fought and has contributed money to Senator John Kerry's
campaign. He didn't even file a written report on his
findings in Niger, goes one story. "He's not even a
professionally trained intelligence operative, so why
take his account seriously?" goes another line of
attack.
But even attacking Wilson is a tough
target for Republicans, whose performance under fire
when he was the highest-ranking US diplomat in Baghdad
before and during the first Gulf War in 1991 is
virtually legendary. Known for his irreverence and
panache, he became a hero to hundreds of expatriates -
many of them oilmen who are Republicans by instinct -
whom Saddam had threatened to hold as hostages. The
elder Bush praised him at the time a "truly inspiring
diplomat" and extolled his "courageous leadership".
Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson are definitely
not the best targets for attack, especially for
Republicans.
So, while the vast majority of
those Republican lawmakers have gone along, however
grimly, with all the other demands the Bush
administration has made on them - even those that made
it appear that they were betraying their own
conservative ideals - this one may be too much to
swallow. Indeed, one key committee chairman met
privately with Wilson on Thursday.
Meanwhile,
Democrats - whose recent transformation into fiscal
conservatives, skeptics of nation-building, and
defenders of the armed forces and the CIA has been just
as disorienting as the Republican metamorphosis under
Bush - are demanding that an independent prosecutor be
appointed to get to the bottom of the case and punish
those responsible for Plame's betrayal to the maximum
extent of the law.
And cheering them on, albeit
more discreetly, are thousands of professional US
diplomats, intelligence officers, and army officers -
past and present - who see in the White House's
treatment of Plame and Wilson metaphors for the
ideological zeal and ruthlessness of the Bush
administration. Those national-security professionals,
who tend to vote Republican, are angry. For them, in
Valerie Plame, they have found their Joan of Arc, and
she's definitely not for burning.
(Inter Press
Service)
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