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The bomb and Karl
Rove
By Jonathan Schell
Like every important government crisis, the
outing of undercover Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) officer Valerie Plame by the President
George W Bush's chief political adviser, deputy
chief of staff Karl Rove, perhaps among others,
must be seen in many contexts at once. (As all the
world knows, Rove's aim was to discredit Plame's
husband, Joseph Wilson, who had publicly disproved
the administration's claim that Iraq was buying
uranium yellow-cake from Niger - a key element in
the administration's justifications for the Iraq
War.)
Howard Fineman of Newsweek and
Sidney Blumenthal of the Salon website point to
the broader story of Rove's habitual practice of
defending his political clients by smearing their
competitors and detractors. Blumenthal titles his
piece "Rove's War" and Fineman speaks of "The
World According to Rove". Frank Rich of the New
York Times, on the other hand, suggests that the
most important war to look at is the one in Iraq.
He says that the injustice to the Wilsons and even
to the CIA is secondary: "The real crime here
remains the sending of American men and women to
Iraq on fictitious grounds." In other words,
what's important is not the "war" but the war.
Surely, they are all right. It's true that
the harm to the Wilsons cannot be compared to the
deaths of thousands in the misbegotten conflict,
but it's also true that the resolution of the
scandal is likely to have a lasting impact on
American politics, and even on the American system
of government. Perhaps the most important
political question is whether the Bush
administration is to be held accountable for any
of its actions, or whether it now enjoys complete
impunity and a free field of action to do whatever
it likes - from waging war to designing and
presiding over systems of torture to breaking
domestic law. There are also other contexts to
consider.
If Rich is right that the
scandal is really about the Iraq War, then we have
to ask what the war was about. The
administration's chief answer is weapons of mass
destruction and, more particularly, nuclear
weapons. The atomic signature is scrawled all over
the scandal. It is present, of course, in the
uranium the president falsely said Iraq was
seeking from Niger. And Plame, as it turns out,
worked for the CIA on proliferation of weapons of
mass destruction. To defend its nuclear lies, the
administration destroyed a (possible) source of
nuclear truth.
The smear campaign thus did
double damage in the nuclear-weapon field: it
propped up, however briefly, the erroneous
justification for the war, while shutting down
authentic information on the broader problem. The
nuclear issue popped up again in a State
Department memo former secretary of state Colin
Powell brought with him on Air Force One shortly
after Wilson's op-ed piece appeared. It is now
famous because the memo disclosed Plame's identity
as Wilson's wife. Less noticed is that the bulk of
the memo was devoted to rebutting the Niger
uranium allegation.
This must be one of
the most rebutted claims in history. Before Wilson
ever spoke up, it had been disproved by several
government agencies; the director of the UN's
Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammed ElBaradei; and, of
course, the State Department. (As for Powell, in
February 2003 he had told the UN Security Council,
"My colleagues, every statement I make today is
backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not
assertions. What we're giving you are facts and
conclusions based on solid intelligence.")
Whatever else the scandal is, it is also
an episode in the six-decade history of the
nuclear age. In the wake of the Cold War, many
people imagined that nuclear danger had
disappeared. A decade of utter neglect followed.
Then, in 1998, the Indian and Pakistani nuclear
tests launched the two countries on a nuclear arms
race. Soon other countries, including North Korea
and Iran, were knocking at the door of the nuclear
club. But it wasn't until September 11 that the
neglected peril reared up again in the public mind
- and returned to the center of policy. The
fictional danger of an Iraqi bomb bursting in an
American city was, of course, the chief
justification for the war, but it was more than
that. It was the linchpin of the broader policy of
preventive military strikes - necessary, the
president said, to forestall the hostile states
from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. In his
words, "As a matter of common sense and
self-defense, America will act against such
emerging threats before they are fully formed."
At the root of the policy was a radical
reconception of the way to stop proliferation.
Hitherto, the policy had been to address it by
negotiation and disarmament treaties. Now it was
to be addressed by military force. The decade of
neglect had led to the most severe collision of
nuclear policy with nuclear reality since the
Cuban missile crisis of 1962. The Iraq war was the
result, though not the only one. While the US
military was looking for weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq, where there were none, it was
in effect ignoring them in North Korea, which
reportedly was either acquiring or expanding a
nuclear arsenal, and in Iran, which was pressing
forward down the nuclear path. It's worth
recalling that the Vietnam War, too, was in part
the product of misguided nuclear strategy.
Policymakers, well aware that they could not win a
nuclear "general war" with the Soviet Union in the
Central European theater, hoped instead to win a
"limited war" with conventional arms on the
"periphery". When it went wrong, the consequence
was the Watergate crisis, born directly of Richard
Nixon's fury at antiwar protesters.
That
chain of reasoning died with the Cold War, but
nuclear danger lived on to produce new and
possibly more dangerous illusions. The worst is
that the spread of weapons of mass destruction and
their associated technology and know-how can be
stopped, or prevented in advance, by arms. Once
that conclusion was accepted, mere hints of
danger, wisps of fact and speculations became
actionable, bomb-able. But if there is one thing
in this world that cannot be bombed out of
existence, it is an illusion. And illusions, when
rigidly defended, breed encounters with the law.
Thus did a mistaken revolution in nuclear policy,
proceeding under the guise of the "war on terror",
produce the lies that produced the war that
produced the whistleblowing that produced the
smears that produced the blown cover that produced
the cover-up that produced the legal investigation
that produced the political and legal crisis that
now swirls around Karl Rove.
Jonathan Schell, author of
The Unconquerable World, is the Nation
Institute's Harold Willens Peace Fellow. The
Jonathan Schell Reader was recently published
by Nation Books. This article will appear in the
forthcoming August 15 issue of The Nation
Magazine.
(Copyright 2005 Jonathan
Schell)
(Used by permission of Tomdispatch) |
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