In an ideal world, the decision to go to war would be taken only with the agreement of the entire national security community. The CIA, the Department of Defense, the FBI, the National Security Agency, and all the bureaucracies that make up the complex world of national defense in a country that spends nearly one half a trillion dollars to protect itself – all would recognize a threat and agree that military action was necessary.

We don’t live in a perfect world. The fact is, as the military and national security state have grown over the last 50 years, the probability that a consensus can be achieved for action except in the most extraordinary circumstances has disappeared. You can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times the United States miliary has gone into action since the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis with the entire national security apparatus on the same page.

I use the Cuban Missile Crisis as a benchmark because of the herculean effort it took for the so-called “Ex-Com” or executive committee of the National Security Council to reach agreement on the blockade that eventually resolved the crisis. We know from declassified documents as well as the memoirs of particpants that there were heated disagreements on both the nature of the threat and what our response should be. Eventually, there was a recognition that the chances of a nuclear exchange with Russia were so great that something short of air strikes and invasion should at least be tried before the military options were used. The resulting blockade along with a secret deal for the US to remove medium range Jupiter missiles from Turkey defused the crisis.

The debates that raged during in the Viet Nam war in the defense establishment hindered the war effort and placed agencies at odds with both each other and at times the White House. To bomb or not to bomb? How many troops? What will China do? There were disagreements on all of these items and many more. And the way to have your position prevail was to try and discredit competing positions by leaking damaging information that undercuts the rationale for taking a particular action. The leaking wars got so bad in 1971 that Nixon sowed the seeds of his own destruction by organizing an anti-leaking squad known as the Plumbers. Their notorious activities with respect to not only leakers of classified information but also the President’s enemies have been well documented.

In the years following Viet Nam, military actions were taken in response to provocations like the hostage crisis or the disco bombing in Germany. And even here, consensus was difficult to achieve. For example, there was opposition from the CIA to the bombing of Libya in April of 1986 fearing it would make a hero of Gadhafi in the arab world and increase his influence. The reason we know this is because the information was leaked within 48 hours of the bombing. In this case, the objective was not to affect policy but rather give ammunition to the political opposition.

This factionalism at the CIA may be at the bottom of the entire Rove-Wilson-Plame affair. Flashback to 2003 and this interesting article by Howard Fineman of Newsweek. Fineman explains the historical context of the debate over Iraq going back to Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. On the one hand, you had the realpolitik group who believed that we could use Saddam as a counterweight against Islamic radicalism. On the other hand you had then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and the “Neocons” agitating for regime change to start a democratic revolution in the middle east:

The “we-can-use Saddam” faction held the upper hand right up to the moment he invaded Kuwait a decade ago. Until then, the administration of Bush One (with its close CIA ties) had been hoping to talk sense with Saddam. Indeed, the last American to speak to Saddam before the war was none other than Joe Wilson, who was the State Department charge’ d’affaires in Baghdad. Fluent in French, with years of experience in Africa, he remained behind in Iraq after the United States withdrew its ambassador, and won high marks for bravery and steadfastness, supervising the protection of Americans there at the start of the first Gulf War. But, as a diplomat, he didn’t want the Americans to “march all the way to Baghdad.” Cheney, always a careful bureaucrat, publicly supported the decision. Wilson was for repelling a tyrant who grabbed land, but not for regime change by force.

That history is one reason why, in the eyes of the anti-Saddam crowd, Wilson was a bad choice to investigate the question of whether Iraq had been trying to buy uranium in Africa.

It appears then, that Cheney and Wilson had a “history” long before the Iraq war even started.

Flash forward to February, 2002 when Ambassador Joe Wilson arrives in Niger seeking answers to the questions about Saddam’s efforts to purchase yellow cake uranium. In his New York Times Op-Ed of July 6, 2003 Wilson claims that he made the trip at the behest of…who? Here are his words:

In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney’s office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake — a form of lightly processed ore — by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990’s. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president’s office.

“Agency officials” asked him to make the trip so they could provide a response to Cheney’s office on the question of a “report” regarding yellow cake sales to Iraq. Wilson says that he never saw the “16” word” document that some say is a forgery and some say otherwise, but that he believed it to be a forgery based on the names of government officials who were not even in the government at the time.

Fair enough. But here’s where things get very strange, indeed. In an interview with LA Weekly, Wilson admitted he had been talking to reporters for months about this story:

I was determined that the story was going to have to get out. I did not particularly want the story to have my name on it. I wanted the U.S. government to say what they said on July 7, that the 16 words should never have been in the State of the Union address. So I began responding to reporters’ inquiries, but always on background. I didn’t want the publicity, but more to the point, there is a nasty habit in Washington of attempting to destroy or discredit the message by discrediting the messenger, and it was important to me that the message have legs before those who would want to discredit the messenger found out who the messenger was. So I spoke to a number of reporters over the ensuing months. Each time they asked the White House or the State Department about it, they would feign ignorance. I became even more convinced that I was going to have to tell the story myself.

Did you anticipate retaliation?

Nobody that I knew thought this was going to be any more than a two-day story. The day after, when the White House said the 16 words do not rise to the level of inclusion in the State of the Union address, I personally stopped accepting invitations to talk about this issue. I did those interviews I had previously agreed to do before the White House spoke, and then I didn’t speak again until the week after Mr. Novak’s article came out in which he leaked the name of my wife as a CIA operative.

In other words, between the President’s State of the Union speech on January 20th, 2003 and July 6th when he wrote the Op-Ed piece in the Times, Wilson was talking to reporters all over town, telling them that the President was using false information as a justification for war.

Now why would he do that? Is it possible he was doing at the behest of his wife? Tom Maguire asks that question and links to the Walter Pincus Washington Post article that quotes a “senior CIA analyst” about WMD intelligence and how it was handled by the Administration:

So, a CIA analyst is criticizing the President anonymously in June for mishandling intelligence. In July, a former ambassador comes forward, also criticizing the Administration’s handling of intelligence. Is the Ambassador simply a professional, detached, objective careerist from the State Department offering his own point of view?

Or is it at all relevant in assessing his credibility to know that he is in bed with a CIA professional? Does knowing that give a hint as to what side he might be on in this discussion?

What Maguire and others are speculating about is that Plame was using her husband to augment the CIA’s own leaking on the Administration’s handling of intelligence. And that given Wilson’s chattiness with the press, is it possible that Plame’s relationship with Wislon was not only “common knowledge” as Andrea Mitchell of NBC said, but got to be known as a result of Wilson’s own efforts to discredit the President?

Did Wilson “out” his own wife?

The fact that Wilson suspected Rove as the leaker as far back as July of 2003 opens up another interesting line of questions. Since Wilson had been talking to the press for months, could Wilson have gotten that information from a journalist who actually talked to Rove?

I think it’s fair to say that the CIA is an executive-branch agency that reports to the president of the United States. The act of outing the name of a national-security asset was a political act. There is a political office attached to the office of the president of the United States, and that political office is headed by Karl Rove. It seems to me a good place to start.

I would have thought a good place to start would have been the Vice President’s office, given the history between the two. We’ll probably have to wait until all the principals – Rove, Judith Miller, Cooper, Scooter Libby, and Novak – lay it all out for us. At that point, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Wilson-Plame-press connection was the axis of a faction in the CIA that for both political and policy reasons, opposed the war in Iraq.

This is the dirty business of government being exposed to the light of day. On the one hand, you have the White House with a President duly elected that has made the tough decision to go to war. On the other side, you have a political faction at the CIA who can justify their opposition to the Administration by chalking it up as differences in policy. The amazing number of selective leaks prior to the election that constantly put the administration on the defensive with regards to what they knew about WMD before the war was another manifestation of the partisanship of this faction. Given the mountains of intelligence analyses prior to the Iraq war on WMD, to cherry pick opposing views and then leak them to the press was an outrageously partisan attempt to discredit the President.

In an article for the Daily Telegraph that describes this “old guard” faction being in opposition to the President’s re-election, a retired CIA veteran explains the rift:

Bill Harlow, the former CIA spokesman who left with the former director George Tenet in July, acknowledged that there had been leaks from within the agency. “The intelligence community has been made the scapegoat for all the failings over Iraq,” he said. “It deserves some of the blame, but not all of it. People are chafing at that, and that’s the background to these leaks.”

Fighting to defend their patch ahead of the future review, anti-Bush CIA operatives have ensured that Iraq remains high on the election campaign agenda long after Republican strategists such as Karl Rove, the President’s closest adviser, had hoped that it would fade from the front pages.

Other recent leaks have included the contents of classified reports drawn up by CIA analysts before the invasion of Iraq, warning the White House about the dangers of post-war instability. Specifically, the reports said that rogue Ba’athist elements might team up with terrorist groups to wage a guerrilla war.

And this quote from another retired veteran illustrates the spin this faction was directing toward the press:

These have been an extraordinary four years for the CIA and the political pressure to come up with the right results has been enormous, particularly from Vice-President Cheney.

“I’m afraid that the agency is guilty of bending over backwards to please the administration. George Tenet was desperate to give them what they wanted and that was a complete disaster.”

With the simmering rows breaking out in public, the Wall Street Journal declared in an editorial that the administration was now fighting two insurgencies: one in Iraq and one at the CIA.

Having lived there for many years, I know that Washington is an insanely political town. Politics colors everything, from where you eat to what parties you attend. It’s a twenty-four hour a day, seven day a week obsession. It should come as no surprise that even war takes a back seat to the jostling for power.

It’s doubtful that Rove will survive. If the President digs in his heels about letting him go, it will only make matters worse. The Special Prosecutor’s investigation will have it’s own leak factory going and every little tidbit that refects badly on Rove will be trumpeted to the skies by both lefty blogs and the MSM. The only thing that could possibly save Rove’s job is a revelation so shocking that it blows both the MSM and lefty blogs out of the water and proves them wrong. If Judith Miller is in jail because she’s protecting herself or some other source (Joe Wilson?) from prosecution, then Rove may be able to weather the storm.

If not, expect Rove’s resignation by the end of the month.