Right Wing Nut House

The Republican sponsored “Sense of the House” resolution that calls for the immediate withdrawal of our troops from Iraq and that will be defeated in a few minutes is a brilliant political maneuver with three major benefits:

1. It gives our troops in the field a boost by showing that the Congress is not going to withdraw them willy-nilly from Iraq.

2. It stops Zarqawi’s victory party in its tracks.

3. It shows the Democrats to be hypocritical fools - an admittedly easy task but one that has been beyond the capabilities of GOP Congressmen.

As John Cole points out, the Dems are screaming bloody murder:

This is what you guys want! You have been telling the public for a year now that we have lost in Iraq, and Armando spends everyday calling for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, and now we are going to have a vote on it, and you tell your folks not to vote? Gimme a damned break. You want the troops out- here is your damned vote.

Watching CNN, poor Lou Dobbs is acting like some illegal immigrant has come in and sat right down next to him on the set. The pudgy anchor is beside himself, grilling the CNN White House correspondent on whether or not the White House is behind the effort.

And as Cole points out, Kos is acting like an old woman who’s discovered there’s a cockroach in the pound cake:

Funny how the Republicans in the debate keep referring to the “Democrat resolution”, even though they introduced it and it bears ZERO resemblance to the actual Murtha resolution.

Why are Republicans afraid to bring Murtha’s actual resolution up to a vote, rather than this nakedly political piece of shit? And why do they insist on calling their own resolution a “Democrat” resolution?

What a bunch of liars.

Oh, really? I guess when Murtha said this he was talking about some other war:

My plan calls for immediate redeployment of U.S. troops consistent with the safety of U.S. forces, to create a quick reaction force in the region, to create an over-the-horizon presence of Marines, and to diplomatically pursue security and stability in Iraq.

And here’s the guts of the resolution:

RESOLUTION

Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the deployment of United States forces in Iraq be terminated immediately.

Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that the deployment of United States forces in Iraq be terminated immediately.

Watching the debate has been fun. The Democrats are twisting, twisting, slowly in the wind as Republicans skewer them by reading emails from soldiers at the front pleading with their Congressman to allow them to finish the job.

Not to many military emails from Democrats. Just a lot of twisted, angry faces as Republicans are going to force them to tell their base of Kossacs, Moorites, and Moveoners that all their tough talk about getting out of Iraq is just that - talk. As Polipundit pointed out in this brilliant post this morning, cutting and running may be popular in the liberal salons of New York and Hollywood cocktail parties, but political poison all over the rest of America:

There is a historical parallel we can use for this conclusion: Vietnam.

Americans aren’t quitters. Throughout the Vietnam War - even as 57,000 Americans sacrificed their lives - support for the war remained strong, and antipathy towards “anti-war” protesters remained high. At the height of the conflict, peacenik Democrat presidential nominee George McGovern went down in an electoral defeat of unprecedented magnitude.

Democrats are repeating history.

Like a trout dangling on the end of a hook, Democrats are desperately trying to get away from this political trap set by Republicans. About the only choice they have is whether they want to be served with lemon or lightly breaded and sauteed in olive oil.

Senate Republicans appear to be about ready to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq. Just as the nascent Iraqi government starts to get up a head of steam in anticipation of next month’s elections, some “nervous Nellies” who worry about what the New York Times says about them appear to be willing to play the surrender card:

In a sign of increasing unease among Congressional Republicans over the war in Iraq, the Senate is to consider on Tuesday a Republican proposal that calls for Iraqi forces to take the lead next year in securing the nation and for the Bush administration to lay out its strategy for ending the war.

The proposal on the Iraq war, from Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, and Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, would require the administration to provide extensive new quarterly reports to Congress on subjects like progress in bringing in other countries to help stabilize Iraq. The other appeals related to Iraq are nonbinding and express the position of the Senate.

It isn’t just that this is the absolute worst time for Senate Republicans to turn into jellyfish on the war. It is their pathetic belief that this will somehow shield them from criticism or lessen their association with the War in Iraq in any way. Surely they don’t believe it will have any affect on the White House. In which case, they are directing their concerns toward the Iraqi people and government. In fact, this is the primary reason they are giving for this surrender:

Mr. Warner said the underlying message was, “we really mean business, Iraqis, get on with it.” The senator, an influential party voice on military issues, said he did not interpret the wording of his plan as critical of the administration, describing it as a “forward-looking” approach.

“It is not a question of satisfaction or dissatisfaction,” he said. “This reflects what has to be done.”

Democrats said the plan represented a shift in Republican sentiment on Iraq and was an acknowledgment of growing public unrest with the course of the war and the administration’s frequent call for patience. “I think it signals the fact that the American people are demanding change, and the Republicans see that that’s something that they have to follow,” said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader.

Well, Frist and Co. walked into that one, didn’t they? When Harry Reid says your on the side of the angels and that “the American people are demanding change” it begs the question: why not just throw in the towel now instead of waiting until next November?

By realizing Democratic talking points on the war, the Republican majority may just have taken an irrevocable step toward becoming the Republican minority.

As for the Iraqi government, here’s my friend AJ at Strata-Sphere:

A democratic and free Iraq does not take orders from doddling old fools in the US Senate. Who is being imperialistic now? And how about playing the Vietnam card.

Only a nitwit believes that the Iraqi government isn’t desperate to get rid of US troops and have their own army take control in fighting the insurgency. I daresay that any Iraqi politician coming out and saying that he likes anything about American troops patrolling his country - not to mention having those troops under American command and living in places where there is no Iraqi sovereignty - will not receive many votes at the polls. The fact is that Iraqi politicians are smarter than most Senators. At least in Iraq, the politicians are bright enough not to hand their opponents an election winning issue. The major political parties are all in support of getting Americans out as fast as possible. Why the “doddering old fools” in the Senate believe otherwise is a mystery.

The Administration will shrug off this nonsense as well it should. But the damage done to Republican Senators will evidence itself next November as I suspect several of their number will not be joining them when the next Congress convenes in January, 2007.

UPDATE

Hugh Hewitt has a similar take:

The proposed Senate resolution is an unmistakable vot-of-no-confidence in the Adminsitration, and the best gift the United States Senate could give Zarqawi and his terrorist ranks. It is almost incomprehensible that Senate Republicans could see this in any other fashion.

After months of absorbing the hammer blows of his political enemies regarding pre-war Iraq intel, the Bush Administration abandoned its “rope-a-dope” strategy and came out swinging:

“It is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began,” Bush said as he used a Veterans Day address here to lash out at critics. “These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America’s will.” Democrats retaliated with a barrage of statements accusing the president of skewing the facts, just as they maintain he did in the run-up to the invasion of March 2003.

Although the two sides have long skirmished over the war, the sharp tenor Friday resembled an election-year campaign more than a policy disagreement. In a rare move, Bush in his speech took a direct swipe at last year’s opponent, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), while the White House issued an unusual campaign-style memo attacking Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman followed with a speech blistering 10 Democrats for “political doublespeak.”

The problem with the “rope-a-dope” strategy - where the boxer hangs on the ropes allowing his opponent to exhaust himself by throwing too many punches - is that it doesn’t work in politics in the media age. The sad fact for the President and, by extension, the United States of America, is that the Big Lie about pre-war Iraq intel has had a huge head start to get established in the public mind. This makes Democratic counterattacks seem reasonable in that by continuing to repeat the lies, they appear to be still on the offensive . As usual, Goldstein opens the wrapper and reveals the nougat center of the candy bar:

Let’s hope this augurs the beginning of a strong and concerted administration pushback against the scurrilous charges being leveled by many of his political opponents. Pointedly, Bush used the term “some Democrats” to label those opponents—a designation that I believe is important, because it signals that the partisan gloves are about to come off, and that Democratic leaders who have been making strong public accusations questioning the honesty and good faith of the administration (I’m looking at you Harry and Howard and Nancy) are about to be forcefully challenged on those claims.

This also gets to the question of credibility. Because the Administration has allowed itself to be used as a punching bag on so many issues - Iraq, Katrina response, Plamegate to name a couple - Bush’s approval ratings have dropped like a stone along with the question of whether or not people both trust and believe him. Right now, it appears that outside of his base Republican support of around 40-45% of the electorate, Bush has overwhelmingly lost the confidence of the 20-25% of centrists. And unless the Administration puts on a full court press over the next 12 months, they may find themselves in real danger of losing control of the Senate in 2006, although the House of Representatives is probably secure.

Losing the Senate would be a disaster for the Republicans. With Harry Reid as Majority Leader, very little of the people’s business would get done. Instead, Democratic committee chairmen would be hauling Administration witnesses before their committees as fake “investigations” would proliferate like moonbats at a Cindy Sheehan campout. Before you could say “No blood for oil,” Haliburton execs would be in the Senatorial dock listening as Democrats asked questions like “How many times a day do you beat your wife?”

Mark Noonan:

It was more than past time that the President called the critics out on their lies - sick and cruel lies; lies which merely encourage the enemy to kill more people, including more American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. There is not the slightest truth in the anti-war criticism - each and every assertion they have made about pre-war intelligence and the course of the war in Iraq has been false from the start. I am sick and tired of it - and I’m glad that the President is sick and tired of it.

While Mark is correct in his assertion that there is not truth in the left’s criticism of how pre-war Iraq intel was handled, I must part company with Mr. Noonan when he talks about criticism of “the course of the war” in the same breath. Clearly, there is much to criticize and critique regarding the Administration’s plans and actions following the fall of Saddam. If there was a modicum of good faith from the left, their criticisms in this regard may have even been seen as helpful. As it stands, railing against the President for not having enough troops on the ground or for our detention policies, or for how we underestimated the strength of the insurgency rings hollow when coming from people whose intent is not to the improve the situation but to bring down the President.

Along those lines, Tigerhawk has a fascinating post about the proper role of criticism in a time of what he terms a “limited” war:

Assuming, arguendo, that anti-war dissent does give aid and comfort to the enemy (I discuss why this must be so later in the post), are there types of dissent that more efficiently balance the benefit (robust public debate about a topic as momentous as the war) with the costs (the sending of signals that embolden the enemy and demoralize our own soldiers) than other types? If so, are these more efficient methods or arguments of dissent more moral or legitimate than methods or arguments that do little to advance the debate but do relatively more damage to the American war effort? These are the questions that interest me.

I’m not sure the concept of “limited” war is applicable in this case. The war is engaging most of the men and material in our military. It is perhaps “limited” as opposed to “total” war, but nevertheless it is defined this way because the President and the Administration have chosen to define it thusly.

I have on more than one occasion take the President to task for his abject failure in not only defending his policies but also repeating the rationale for going to war in the first place. To get bogged down at this point in defending how the decision to take the United States to war was made is indicative of the problems the Administration has with credibility. Of course, this would have been unnecessary if the Bush team had beaten down these scurrilous charges when they first started to gain traction in the aftermath of the election.

In effect, Bush has tried to fight this war by trying to keep it off the front pages and in the back of the American people’s minds. By not constantly defending his policies and shooting down conspiracy theories, he has allowed the Democrats to maintain the single most important advantage in any political campaign; they have been able to set the agenda for discussion based on their talking points. The question in most people’s minds isn’t did Bush lie but rather how much he lied.

I’m afraid this will make it virtually impossible for the President to make much of a dent in people’s attitude toward how we came to be involved in Iraq. This problem will fester until the last American combat troops leave.

This article originally appears in The American Thinker.

Suppose you were president of a country that had been hit by a massive terrorist attack that had killed 3,000 of your fellow citizens. Suppose you had come to the inescapable conclusion that not only were the terrorists to be destroyed for the threat they posed to the nation you led, but that other nations who supported the terrorists must also be dealt with. And suppose one of those nations in particular, already shooting at your fighters and bombers, was also known to give financial support to terrorists as well as allowing their territory to be used as a training ground for the murderous religious fanatics who threatened the very existence of the nation you have sworn to preserve and protect.

Now suppose that there were large swaths of the national security community unalterably opposed to your policy. Suppose that many of these unelected bureaucrats believed that their judgment was not only superior to yours, the elected leader, but better than those whom you appointed to oversee the agencies in which they worked. Also suppose that many of them were partisans who wished to undermine your decisions in order to swing an election to your opponent.

This scenario might make a good outline for a political potboiler of a novel. Unfortunately, this is the situation the President found himself in during the lead up to the Iraq war, and even more so afterward, as the 2004 election loomed on the horizon and the large stockpiles WMD that most of the world believed were present in Saddam’s Iraq never materialized.

Aided and abetted by friendly and ideologically sympathetic reporters who eagerly published the cherry-picked analyses given them by current and former intelligence analysts, this faction at the CIA tried their best to discredit their political opponent in the White House by undermining the war effort and embarrassing the elected leader of the United States.

If you were the President, how would you fight back? Do you simply acquiesce and bend a knee to these arrogant apostates in the intelligence community who treat you with contempt and disrespect?

Every president has had to deal at one time or another with this amorphous mass of conceited and corrupt intelligence bureaucrats, who spend almost as much time worrying about the bureaucratic pecking order as they do the security of the nation. If you spend any time at all in Washington studying and writing about national security issues, you know exactly what they are all about. Their self-importance is evidenced by the way they bully subordinates and fawn over superiors. They mask their insecurities with an arrogant bravado more appropriate to a bullfighter than a servant of the people.

So the President and his people discovered early on that there was implacable resistance in the CIA to their plans to invade Iraq to affect regime change. They started to mistrust the intelligence analysis coming from that quarter. In what can only be described as a desperation move, the White House set up an entire operation devoted to disseminating Iraq intel to policy makers independent of the CIA. In effect, they made an end run around a bureaucracy using the office of Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith and his Counterterrorism Evaluation Group (CTEG).

What CTEG found is exactly what the 9/11 Commission found; that there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda – something the CIA refused to acknowledge, having so much invested in their conclusion that the supposedly secular Sunnis in Iraq wouldn’t sully their hands by dealing with the radical Shi’ites Sunnis in al Qaeda. This analysis was demonstrated to be even more wrongheaded after the fall of Baghdad, when files from the Iraqi intelligence service revealed even more contacts with al Qaeda than had previously been revealed.

Other prewar analysis coming from the CIA seemed to confirm that Saddam in fact had large stockpiles of WMD. George Tenet famously referred to the case for WMD as “a slam dunk.” So is the Administration guilty of hearing what it wanted to hear and seeing what it wanted to see with regard to pre-war Iraqi intelligence, especially as it related to ties to al Qaeda and WMD?

What critics universally fail to point out is that in the wake of 9/11, the United States could not afford to take the chance that Saddam had WMD. This is such a fundamental tenet of American policy in the post 9/11 world that the argument for or against it reveals the great chasm in American politics and policy. The divide is not between Republicans and Democrats, so much as it is between those who live in a 9/10 world and those who live in a 9/12 world.

For those who live in the comfortable pre-9/11 America, Saddam was in a “box” and was no threat to the US. To those who woke up on 9/12 and saw a different world, Saddam was eventually going to outlast the world community and sanctions would be lifted, at which point he would be free to continue to threaten his neighbors in the region, as well as forge closer ties with the terrorist groups who ached to attack America and murder thousands of citizens.

Suppose you were President and faced with that possibility. Your political opponents would have the luxury of second guessing every move you made. But it is you who have the responsibility for the safety and security of the republic. If you had done nothing, you would have been taken to task for weakness, as was your father when he failed to effect regime change during the first Gulf War. But you, the president, not a sidelines critic, could not afford to do nothing. The downside risk of being wrong was too enormous.

Was the President hearing what he wanted to hear with regard to pre-war intelligence? Or, was he hearing the screams of dying Americans in his sleep, killed in a terrorist attack if he did nothing ? It really is too bad that our politics are so polarized today, because that is a debate that, on its merits, the President wins every time. It will be good to keep in mind that balance of risk during the coming confrontation with Iran over their enrichment of uranium in order to build atomic bombs. No one is going to argue that Iran doesn’t have ties to terrorists, or that they aren’t a threat to both our allies in the region and to us, the Great Satan,. If it comes to it, I wonder if the opposition will talk about “twisting” intelligence in the lead up to any military action we take against the radical mullahs who wish to wipe Israel off the map as appetizer and destroy the United States as the main course.

The momentous decision to take the United States to war was made even more difficult by the recalcitrance and disloyalty of a faction at the CIA, who opposed the Administration on ideological, political and/or policy grounds. They were the ones who “twisted” intelligence to try to affect policy by leaking classified information to reporters.

The announcement that leaks surrounding the classified CIA prisons where the worst of the worst terrorists were being interrogated will now be investigated is good news indeed. Perhaps, some of the unelected bureaucrats who have tried to bring down the President and undermine the war effort will themselves be revealed as the petty, arrogant small minded people that they are.

UPDATE

This is what I get for writing at 2:30 in the morning.

Al Qaeda is of course, an organization of Sunni radicals as both Morgan Collins and Gumshoe point out in the comments. No excuse because I knew that Osama is a Saudi and as Gumshoe points out, a devoted Wahhabi.

I regret the error and am grateful that it was pointed out.

Italian TV station RAI News 24 will broadcast an “expose” tonight of the use of phosphorus shells as a weapon when US forces attacked and took the rebel stronghold of Fallujah in Iraq. From A Kos diarist who didn’t bother to link to any original story in English. Here’s a link to an English language news video via Americablog. And this is a story in The Independent giving the one side of the story that is currently out there:

Powerful new evidence emerged yesterday that the United States dropped massive quantities of white phosphorus on the Iraqi city of Fallujah during the attack on the city in November 2004, killing insurgents and civilians with the appalling burns that are the signature of this weapon.

Ever since the assault, which went unreported by any Western journalists, rumours have swirled that the Americans used chemical weapons on the city.

On 10 November last year, the Islam Online website wrote: “US troops are reportedly using chemical weapons and poisonous gas in its large-scale offensive on the Iraqi resistance bastion of Fallujah, a grim reminder of Saddam Hussein’s alleged gassing of the Kurds in 1988.”

The website quoted insurgent sources as saying: “The US occupation troops are gassing resistance fighters and confronting them with internationally banned chemical weapons.”

“Ever since the assault, which went unreported by any Western journalists,…”

You know what? He’s right. There wasn’t a single reporter covering this story. Not one.

Uh huh.

Be that as it may, the government acknowledged using white phosphorus shells for illumination only:

“Some news accounts have claimed that US forces have used ‘outlawed’ phosphorus shells in Fallujah,” the USinfo website said. “Phosphorus shells are not outlawed. US forces have used them very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes.

“They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters.”

A “former American soldier” is quoted as saying:

“I heard the order to pay attention because they were going to use white phosphorus on Fallujah. In military jargon it’s known as Willy Pete.

That particular quote doesn’t confirm anything except what the military was saying; that they were going to use white phosphorus on Fallujah. Any more proof? The soldier is identified as ex-Marine Jeff Eglehart. Eglehart identifies himself in the video on the RAI 24 website as “former US military.” While he may in fact be everything he says he is, I can’t recall an ex-Marine identifying himself as anything but a Marine - “ex” or otherwise. The pride those people take in belonging to the Corps lasts a lifetime.

That said, the 2 1/2 minute snippet on RAI’s site shows Mr. Eglehart as the only American military eyewitness. There may be others quoted in the full program.

Also in the video are some shocking scenes of dead bodies so be forewarned: VIDEO CONTAINS GRAPHIC DEPICTIONS OF DEAD BODIES.

Provided by the Studies Centre of Human Rights in Fallujah, dozens of high-quality, colour close-ups show bodies of Fallujah residents, some still in their beds, whose clothes remain largely intact but whose skin has been dissolved or caramelised or turned the consistency of leather by the shells.

A biologist in Fallujah, Mohamad Tareq, interviewed for the film, says: “A rain of fire fell on the city, the people struck by this multi-coloured substance started to burn, we found people dead with strange wounds, the bodies burned but the clothes intact.”

Would a biologist be an expert or even know anything about wounds made by white phosphorus shells? I don’t know about you but that struck me as odd. I mean, couldn’t RAI 24 find a military expert who could have confirmed from the pictures whether or not the wounds were caused by battlefield weapons?

There is also night video of the phosphorus shells exploding a couple of hundred feet off the ground and what appears to be some kind of anti-personnel effect as shards of the shell fall by the dozens, burning even after they hit the ground. I can see where some would conclude that these shards were in fact designed to kill people on the ground. But I can also see where low level explosions of these shells would be desirable in an urban setting. The closer to the ground the illumination, the shorter the shadows caused by buildings on the street. This would make sense for night fighting. What doesn’t make sense is the fact that our troops fighting at night should be equipped with night vision goggles. Any illumination from a white phosphorus shell would temporarily blind them.

Many questions and I’m afraid my expertise is very limited when trying to write about the tactical use of 40mm white phosphorus shells.

There is also a charge that the Marines used a napalm-type shell:

The documentary, entitled Fallujah: the Hidden Massacre, also provides what it claims is clinching evidence that incendiary bombs known as Mark 77, a new, improved form of napalm, was used in the attack on Fallujah, in breach of the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons of 1980, which only allows its use against military targets.

Could a house full of people shooting at you be described as a “military target?”

So far, only lefty bloggers are writing about this with predictable glee. I would hope that some military fellows will post on this today. Watch for updates as the day goes on and I will link to whatever I find.

UPDATE

James Joyner gives some details about the use of WP, linking to the SF Chronicle article:

Some artillery guns fired white phosphorous rounds that create a screen of fire that cannot be extinguished with water. Insurgents reported being attacked with a substance that melted their skin, a reaction consistent with white phosphorous burns. Kamal Hadeethi, a physician at a regional hospital, said, “The corpses of the mujahedeen which we received were burned, and some corpses were melted.”

Joyner also has links to information on the legality of WP. It is, in fact, legal but not against civilians. The fact that civilians were hit was a tragedy. But who was the target? Only those predisposed to believe the worst about the military could believe they would “target” civilians. That would be a waste of munitions to begin with not to mention morally wrong.

One thing is clear; the WP was used for more than “illumination.”

John Cole agrees with me I about the anti-personnel nature of the rounds. He also disabuses those so inclined of the notion that the weapon is “chemical” in nature. It is considered a conventional round.

UPDATE II

Here’s an email I got from chris@lenape.com:

I’m a Marine with combat service from the 1st Persian Gulf War. I was an 1833 AAV (Amtrack) operator in 1st Marine Div. batallion 3/9 who has some direct knowledge of the weapons and tactics described above.

1st White phosphorous or Willy Peet (WP) is a marker used to direct artilery, mortar or tank fire. Trust me you don’t want to be in the area when stuff is employed.

2nd If you are unlucky enough to be in the way of WP it will burn your close and anything else for that matter. It doesn’t carmelize anything it burns the crap out of whatever it touches.

3rd Consider the above. We don’t use WP when our troops are any where near its intended impact zone. Unless we’ve adopted some new tactics, killing our own people, since I got out in 1992.

4th The USMC does not use poison gas. Not only is it a violation of international law but it is a major pain in the ass. Once you’ve dooshed an area with gas you can’t send in troops because even Marines protected by NBC gear would need to decontaminated. Any Marine or Soldier who has any experience with decon knows what a major tedious slow down that is.

5th Marines rely on fire power and close air support to overwhelm the enemy. These two tools best fit the strategy of closing with and destroying the enemy. As stated earlier gas slows you down. Marines move quick they have no time for gas or similar bull s**t.

The RAI piece sounds like a load of bull. Perhaps they should learn a little bit about USMC tactics before they run their cake holes on something they obviously know nothing about.

Semper Fi!

I have watched during the last week as bloggers and the MSM have finally started to focus on the real story in the case involving the leaking of Valerie Plame’s name; the fact that there is a rogue faction at the CIA who opposed the policies of the President of the United States and tried to defeat those policies by selectively leaking classified information to friendly reporters.

Last summer as I began a series of posts on this subject, there was literally no one focusing on this aspect of the Plame controversy outside of Tom McGuire at Just One Minute. On July 13, I wrote:

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.

On July 21st:

If Joe Wilson could sit by a pool sipping mint tea and talk with a few officials, why couldn’t such an inquiry be handled by agency personnel already in country? Why a “special mission?”

The answer is that the CIA wanted to make sure they got the right answers from the “investigation.” So they send glory boy Wilson on a made up errand to insure that the intelligence is “fixed” to absolve the Niger government of colluding with the Iraqis in what two separate inquiries have concluded was a real attempt to circumvent sanctions to purchase uranium. And to obscure that fact, Wilson has to make it appear that his talent and contacts alone were the reason he was sent to Niger not that his wife was part of a faction out to discredit the Administration’s WMD claims prior to going to war with Iraq.

This may in fact be the real cover-up. What started as a policy dispute between WMD experts at CIA and the “Neocons” in the Bush Administration may have escalated to include the CIA selective leaking of classified information in order to swing an election. And right in the middle of this cover up may be the Wilson-Plame connection regarding the Niger mission.

On August 2nd, I covered more selective leaking from the CIA for The American Thinker. This time it was a National Intelligence Estimate with regards to Iran’s nuclear ambitions:

The point is that regardless of recent steps to reform our intelligence capability, it appears that we’re still working with a dysfunctional system where agency personnel feel perfectly comfortable with leaking classified information in a bid to influence both Administration policy and the political process. No one expects everybody to agree on everything. But the American people have a right to expect that the unelected bureaucrats who work at the CIA allow policy making to reside with those we have entrusted for the task – the elected representatives of the people.

Now we have a host of bloggers and mainstream media columnists calling for an investigation of the CIA. Victoria Toensing:

“The CIA conduct in this matter is either a brilliant covert action against the White House or inept intelligence tradecraft. It is up to Congress to decide which.”

Deborah Orin:

Having Wilson go public was very useful to the CIA, especially the division where his wife worked — because it served to shift blame for failed “slam dunk” intelligence claims away from the agency. To say that Bush “twisted” intelligence was to presume — falsely — that the CIA had gotten it right.

When the White House ineptly tried to counter Wilson’s tall tales by revealing that he wasn’t an expert and his wife set up the trip, the CIA demanded a criminal probe — and then itself broke the law by leaking that news

Investors.Com:

We believe that someone needs to answer the questions raised recently by Joseph F. DiGenova, a former federal prosecutor and independent counsel:

These aren’t the musings of the tinfoil-hat brigade. A sober-minded case can be made that at least some people in the CIA may have acted inappropriately to discredit the administration as a way of salvaging their own reputations after the intelligence debacles of 9-11 and Iraqi WMD.

Newsmax:

But the Agency’s double-dealing on evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction begs another question: Was the CIA an honest broker of information that seemed, early on, to link Iraq to the 9/11 attacks?

Then there are bloggers like Michael Barone, Mark Noonan, and Scott Johnson who are calling for an investigation of the CIA. While I wholeheartedly endorse such a probe, the question is how focused could such an investigation get?

The wide range of malfeasance on the part of the CIA has been breathtaking. Their leaking of classified information has encompassed so many aspects of American policy all over the world that it must be the work of some very senior intelligence officials. Only top level officials would be in a position to gather and collate such wide ranging intel to be put in regular briefings for policy makers or be the ones giving the briefings themselves. The latter is less likely but not out of the realm of possibility. In short, we aren’t just looking at the kind of leaking done by low-level analysts who may be disgruntled with the way the Administration used a specific bit of intelligence. We are talking about people at the highest levels of the Agency who are in a position to decide what intelligence is passed on to policy makers and what intelligence is withheld.

And no investigation would be complete without hauling before the Committee members of VIPS - the so-called “Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity” whose membership includes some of the most radical left wing Democratic party partisans working today. Did members of this group act as conduits between their friends still working at the Agency and national security columnists like Walter Pincus and Nick Kristoff? Inquiring minds want to know, indeed.

The last major Congressional investigation of CIA activities was the Church Committee. Most inside observers at the Agency claim that the revelations and subsequent fall out from the Committee’s hearings nearly destroyed the CIA. Morale hit rock bottom when Admiral Stansfield Turner became the DCIA under President Carter. Turner dismantled our human intelligence capability (HUMINT) and stressed the gathering of intel by so-called “National Technical Means.” We found out to our detriment on 9/11 how vitally important HUMINT is to the overall picture intelligence analysts try to draw for policy makers.

The satellites and other technical means we have at our disposal to gather and analyze intelligence are the most closely guarded secrets in America. By leaking some of the classified intelligence about Saddam’s capabilities and intentions prior to the war, the leakers have given our enemies hints as to what we can see, what we can hear, and what we can read from nations and individuals that try and hide these things from prying eyes. In short, leaking by Agency partisans did far more damage to national security than the “outing” of an Agency staffer whose husband apparently bragged about her CIA employment to anyone and everyone who he met.

So any investigation of the CIA must be done with considerable care. It cannot be a scattershot fishing expedition. Too much is at stake to cripple the work done by the CIA in this time of war. But an investigation must be done in order to rid the Agency once and for all of people who place partisan or career considerations above the good of the nation.

I don’t pretend to really understand quantum mechanics, the counter-intuitive theory that much of modern physics and chemistry is based. Having read a dozen or so explanations of it, about all I can say is that I can grasp a crude outline of the theory’s basic tenets; a noted example being that the properties of light can be measured as either a wave function or a particle function but not both. This relates to the famous “Schroedinger’s Cat” experiment where the observer has a privileged frame of reference and all depends on what the observer sees.

A vial of acid is placed in a box along with a cat and radioactive material. If an atom decays in the box, the acid will be released and the cat will die. The point of the thought experiment is that 1) physicists don’t like cats very much and 2) in the quantum world, the cat exists as both alive and dead at the same time - only when we open the box do we “collapse” reality and discover whether we have killed the cat.

One interpretation of this is the “Many Worlds Theory” that stipulates once the observer chooses, an infinite number of other universes are created where every other possibility regarding the collapse occurs and reality evolves from that point in a different way than the universe you and I inhabit.One example would be that in the Schroedinger’s Cat experiment, the observer gets what he deserves and is poisoned by the radioactive material and dies a horrible death Another more prosaic scenario would be the example of the British plot to kill Hitler in June of 1944. In our universe, the plot failed. But the “Many Worlds” interpretation takes the attempted assassination and a million other universes are split off so that in some universes Hitler is indeed killed and all reality evolves from that point to today with a dead Hitler.

The “Many Worlds” theory cleans up some of the more troubling inconsistencies in quantum mechanics at the atomic level. It is also a useful model of reality when trying to explain the Democratic party. How else can you describe a party that so stubbornly ignores the facts of this universe we inhabit only to take facts from other universes where black is white, up is down, and pre-war Iraq intelligence regarding the link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda is either “twisted” or deliberately falsified, thus taking this country into war based on lies?

Over the weekend, the Senator from Michigan Carl Levin released a declassified report from the Defense Intelligence agency that discredits one of the key human intelligence assets used to connect Saddam with al Qaeda:

A top member of Al Qaeda in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document.

The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, “was intentionally misleading the debriefers’’ in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda’s work with illicit weapons.

The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi’s credibility. Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi’s information as “credible’’ evidence that Iraq was training Al Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons

The problem, as Stephen Hayes points out in this Weekly Standard article, is that the Administration ignored the DIA brief because the CIA was enthusiastically vouching for his authenticity:

Why would Bush make such a claim when a DIA report had raised the possibility that al Libi was lying? One possibility: The CIA was saying that al Libi was credible.

On February 11, 2003–a year after the DIA report–CIA Director George Tenet testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. He said: “Iraq has in the past provided training in document forgery and bomb-making to al Qaeda. It has also provided training in poisons and gases to two al Qaeda associates. One of these associates characterized the relationship he forged with Iraqi officials as successful.”

Of course, if the only evidence the Administration had of the Iraq-al Qaeda connection was Mr. Libi and his tall tales, the Bush people would in fact be guilty of at the very least, ignoring evidence presented by an important part of the intelligence analysis community. But as we’ve discovered from numerous investigations and commissions, there is a considerable body of incontrovertible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda did have a working relationship prior to 9/11. This is from another Stephen Hayes piece in the Weekly Standard from November, 2003:

Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda–perhaps even for Mohamed Atta–according to a top secret U.S. government memorandum obtained by The Weekly Standard.

The memo, dated October 27, 2003, was sent from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. It was written in response to a request from the committee as part of its investigation into prewar intelligence claims made by the administration. Intelligence reporting included in the 16-page memo comes from a variety of domestic and foreign agencies, including the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. Much of the evidence is detailed, conclusive, and corroborated by multiple sources. Some of it is new information obtained in custodial interviews with high-level al Qaeda terrorists and Iraqi officials, and some of it is more than a decade old. The picture that emerges is one of a history of collaboration between two of America’s most determined and dangerous enemies.

According to the memo–which lays out the intelligence in 50 numbered points–Iraq-al Qaeda contacts began in 1990 and continued through mid-March 2003, days before the Iraq War began. Most of the numbered passages contain straight, fact-based intelligence reporting, which some cases includes an evaluation of the credibility of the source. This reporting is often followed by commentary and analysis.

Despite this overwhelming evidence, when the 9/11 Commission released a statement saying there was no evidence of a “collaborative relationship” between Iraq and al Qaeda, the press and the Democrats eagerly deleted the word “collaborative” and accused the Administration of lying about any relationship between Saddam and Bin Laden.

This is not what the Commission said as the report clearly shows. High level contacts between the Iraqi government and al Qaeda were frequent during the lead up to 9/11. The Iraqis even offered Bin Laden a safe haven after he was booted out of Sudan.

But listening to Carl Levin and the Democrats, one would be convinced that they had entered an alternate universe where the 9/11 Commission report never existed. It’s as if the Democrats could not only determine whether or not Schroedinger’s cat was dead or alive, but that they could actually choose which of the “Many Worlds” they wish the rest of us to live in.

The same unhinged reasoning can be found in the now infamous “16 words” of the President’s State of the Union speech where the President said “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” As it turns out, the Brits based that intel on documents we now know were forged by an Italian businessman who claims he did it at bidding of French intelligence. But, as Joe Wilson discovered independently, a high level Iraqi trade delegation did in fact meet with a former Niger Prime Minister in order to “expand trade.” Given that Niger’s meager export economy is overwhelmingly based on the sale of yellow cake uranium, it turns out that the guts of the statement were true. The information did indeed come from the British and Saddam was seeking to reconstitute his nuclear program the minute that the world was looking the other way once sanctions were lifted (something that liberals had been screaming for the United States to do for years).

But in the Many Worlds of the Democrats, not only did the President “twist” this intelligence to fool the American people into going to war with Saddam Hussein, but that Joe Wilson is a saintly, truth telling whistleblower instead of the leaker of classified material and a liar of monumental proportions that he really is.

This particular universe occupied by the Democrats must be a fascinating place to live. Imagine existing where the ordinary laws of gravity are turned on its head and humans can fly. Or a place where you can’t go anywhere without tripping over faeries and leprechauns. This would be a place where bedtime stories are true, where Mother Goose has a loft in Greenwich Village and the Grinch actually does try and steal Christmas. Such a universe might also have the Cubs winning as many World Championships as the Yankees.

This is the only explanation for why Democrats like Carl Levin continue to insist that what is patently false is actually the truth of the matter. By creating their own universe to explain pre-war Iraqi intelligence as a place where the Administration deceitfully “twisted” information to suit their own nefarious designs, they take themselves out of our reality altogether and and try to drag the rest of us with them as they descend into the darkness of conspiracy theory and fantasy.

How about a universe where Democrats are actually heroic supporters of America and American values rather than a collection of deranged, Bush-hating, America trashing lickspittles who are so desperate for electoral victory that they will risk the future of this country by working for the defeat of the armed forces of the United States on the field of battle in Iraq?

That might be one of the “Many Worlds” that just doesn’t exist.

This really is a horrible time to be a Democrat. Flummoxed at every turn by both the dumb good luck of George Bush and the powerful forces of history at work in the Middle East, the Democrats have been reduced to sitting around trying to think up ways to get attention:

A Senate Minority Leadership staffer says this plan to shut down the Senate was hatched last night, as staff and Democratic Senators looked over the wreckage of what they believed was going to be their finest few days in a long time: an indictment of a White House official, a struggling President, a conservative judicial nominee, a splintering conservative base.

“Alito’s nomination and the press that followed just devastated them,” says the leadership source. “They couldn’t get their message out. They felt that things had pivoted on them, and that with the President presenting his plan for avian flu, with the Alito nomination going apparently well, with the tax panel recommendations, they were going to get ploughed under. This was a stunt. But it worked.”

(HT: Betsy Newmark)

The stink of desperation on the Democratic side of the aisle is almost palpable. Instead of the avalanche of indictments emanating from the Special Prosecutors 2 year investigation of L’Affaire d’Plame which could have included The Evil One Karl Rove and perhaps (in their wettest of wet dreams) Vice President Cheney, all they got for Fitzmas was Scooter Libby and two front teeth, knocked out by the Special Prosecutor who chastised them thusly for trying to make the entire prosecution about their flights of fancy regarding intelligence before the war:

“This indictment is not about the war. This indictment’s not about the propriety of the war. And people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel…”

Since no one on the pro-war side could possibly see any vindication regarding their position on the lead up to the conflict even if no one had been indicted, Fitzgerald’s caustic comments could only be directed toward the Democrats and their steadfast adherence to conspiracy theories about how and why we went to war.

Imagine the effort by the Democrats that went into planning the media campaign which would have followed the Special Prosecutors parade of wrongdoers being frog-marched in handcuffs to the hoosegow. Speeches, talking points, photo-ops, surrogates being booked on all the cable shows, not to mention the activation of the rabid, frothing-at-the-mouth base that would have been in the streets demanding the resignation of Bush, Cheney, and Rove et. al. It must have taken hundreds of man hours to plan and coordinate such an operation.

Alas, it was not to be. And to top it off, George Bush goes and names a conservative judge whose credentials are so impeccable that even some liberal lawyers are praising the choice. The right is sated and united once again and Bush, although considerably weakened by the Miers fiasco, gives a wink and a nod in the direction of the Special Prosecutor and goes about planning his trip to Latin America next week.

So what was supposed to be the story of the year, one that should have dominated the headlines and cable shows for weeks, instead ends up being a two day wonder that no amount of flogging by partisans can resurrect. But never let it be said that Majority Leader Harry Reid didn’t try. I can just see the lot of them, the Democratic leadership, sitting around glumly when all of a sudden, Harry Reid jumps to his feet and suggests that maybe they should go ahead with the media campaign as if Fitzgerald did in fact indict Rove, Cheney, the President’s dog and the White House chef. They could pretend that all their dreams had come true. Call on Rove to resign! Ask the President to “apologize to the American people!” And best of all, pretend for the umpteenth time that we are unaware of the fact that pre-war intel on Saddam’s WMD was not “twisted.”

And item number one on the to do list was to invoke Rule 21 and place the Senate in closed session. Whenever Democrats pull stunts like this, they remind me of 12 year old drama queens. In fact, there is much in the Democratic party that could be compared to a clique of little girls; they’re always jabbering about nothing, they value form over substance, and they don’t realize they should grow up and start acting like adults.

It appears that this tactic did in fact, not “work” quite as well as the Democratic staffer so wishfully uttered above. In fact, as the Powerline boys point out, if they want a debate about pre-war intel on the Iraq war, bring it on:

There is a great deal to be said on this subject, and most of it is already in the public domain. The fact is that the intelligence agencies’ official consensus estimate expressed a high level of confidence that Saddam possessed both chemical and biological weapons. The U.N. didn’t disagree, contrary to popular assumptions and Hans Blix’s revisionist history. As we have noted here before, the U.N.’s UNMOVIC reports emphasized the large quantities of banned materials for which Iraq had failed to account.

This is a big topic, as is the subject of Iraq’s many connections with al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. In my opinion, we should take up the Democrats’ challenge: most Americans know all too little about the threats posed by Saddam’s Iraq. Let’s talk about those threats from now until November 2006.

And as Max Boot pointed out in his LA Times piece yesterday, such a debate would unmask the real liar in the Plamegate matter - Joseph Wilson:

Making the best of a weak hand, Democrats argued that the case was not about petty-ante perjury but, as Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid put it, “about how the Bush White House manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to bolster its case for the war in Iraq and to discredit anyone who dared to challenge the president.” The problem here is that the one undisputed liar in this whole sordid affair doesn’t work for the administration. In his attempts to turn his wife into an antiwar martyr, Joseph C. Wilson IV has retailed more whoppers than Burger King.

Even Administration critics like former aide to Secretary of State Powell Lawrence Wilkerson acknowledge that the pre-war intel was wrong but not “twisted”:

…I can’t tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits and us thought that most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the U.N. on 5 February 2003 was the truth. I can’t. I’ve wrestled with it. I don’t know – and people say, well, INR dissented. That’s a bunch of bull. INR (the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research) dissented that the nuclear program was up and running. That’s all INR dissented on. They were right there with the chems and the bios….

A losing strategy on the indictments. A losing strategy on scapegoating the Bush Administration on pre war intel. An apparent losing strategy on the Alito nomination as some of the more moderate Democrats like Ben Nelson are jumping ship and are refusing to back a Moveon-mandated filibuster.

Harry Reid is responsible for all of this. He has proven himself even dumber than his counterpart in the House Nancy Pelosi who also suffers from hoof in mouth disease but at least has the good fortune to have been born with breasts which immunizes her from most criticism in the party.

No such luck for Harry. The problem the Democrats have is that when you scan the list of potential replacements for Reid, you get the depressing feeling that you may be better off opening to any page in the DC Metro phone book, closing your eyes, and stabbing the page with your finger in order to choose the next Minority Leader. With the Democrats luck, they’d probably hit on one of the 2 dozen or so Republicans listed.

So the Democrats are stuck with Harry Reid for the foreseeablee future. I suspect after another electoral disaster in 2006, that the party will give Harry a gold watch, a pat on the back for a job well done, and send him off into the sunset. Who they’ll get to replace him is anyone’s guess. There’s always that phone book…

As political stunts go, the Senate Democrats’ invocation of Rule 21 that placed the Senate in closed session ostensibly to talk about “pre war intelligence leading up to the Iraq war” was pretty lame. Consider some of the truly imaginative political shows put on by the Democrats recently:

* Max Cleland going out to President Bush’s ranch to beg the President to denounce the Swiftvets for smearing John Kerry. A couple of weeks later, Cleland fields a call from Bill Burkett who has some memos that show Bush is a lying shirker and directs him to the appropriate people at the DNC. Cleland is a great actor.

* The reverence and near canonization of Cindy Sheehan as an anti-war icon. The Sheehan Show was going great until the Rosa Parks of the anti war movement turned out to be the Eva Braun of the loony left. The scramble to disassociate themselves from Moonbat Mama was so side splittingly funny that the vignettes should be up for an Academy Award for “Best Comedy Shorts.”

* The “Pat Fizgerald Show” which was unceremoniously canceled after only one episode due to its failure to meet expectations. Here they were, all dressed up in costume and ready to declare the Bush Presidency over, their nemesis Rove in handcuffs, perhaps even the Vice President resigning in disgrace, and all they got was a guy named Scooter who made false statements to the grand jury.

That last bit of theater led directly to today’s production. It appears the Democrats had planned to put on this show for weeks. They must have felt - for the umpteenth time - that they finally had Bush dead to rights and could bring him down by putting on a righteous morality play about “twisting” pre-war intelligence on the Iraq War. The fact that Fitzgerald said this at his press conference must have gone in one ear and out the other:

This indictment is not about the war. This indictment’s not about the propriety of the war. And people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel….The indictment will not seek to prove that the war was justified or unjustified. This is stripped of that debate, and this is focused on a narrow transaction. And I think anyone who’s concerned about the war and has feelings for or against shouldn’t look to this criminal process for any answers or resolution of that.

When a political party loses its way like the Democrats have, they tend to rely on stunts like this for the same reason that two year olds throw tantrums; they are starved for attention. With a united Republican party ready to nuke any filibuster attempt against Judge Alito as well as an ethnic smear campaign being unmasked as a truly amateur attempt by the DNC to play hardball, this Theater of the Absurd was all the Democrats had left to dominate the news day.

What I wouldn’t have given to be a fly on the wall during that closed session…

UPDATE

As usual, Giacomo hits the nail on the head:

As I’ve noted previously, Senator Reid, one of only 100 such men and women in the country, has access to all the pre-war intelligence he wants. He doesn’t want to “investigate.” He wants a show trial with the Bush administration playing the role of defendant. He and his fellow Democrats couldn’t get that with the Plame investigation, so he’s stomping his feet and holding his breath in a political temper tantrum hoping he gets what he wants. He thinks the Libby indictment entitles the left to extrapolate and argue that every utterance of the Bush administration is suspect.

Read the whole thing…

In a series of articles I began last July entitled “The CIA Vs. The White House,” I have tried to give context and meaning to the CIA’s war against the Administration and how that war has its roots in both partisan politics and bureaucratic infighting. But at bottom, what the Plame Affair reveals about the CIA is a culture of incompetence whose principals will do anything to avoid responsibility for their mistakes.

This is more than just simple bureacratic CYA. It is one thing for officials to hide some boondoggle or another in the Department of Health and Human Services. It is quite something else to miss 9/11 or be wrong about Saddam’s WMD’s.

One would think that by this time, the CIA would be used to owning up to its spectacular incompetence. Blessed with technical intelligence gathering capabilities that boggle the mind as well as some of the best minds in the country, one would believe that the CIA has its finger on the pulse of events around the world and with penetrating analysis, give our elected leaders a heads-up about what is coming down the pike that might be a threat to the United States and our vital interests.

Think again. While it is undoubtedly true that the CIA has assisted in heading off many threats to the US and its interests, it has also had several conspicuous and, in hindsight, puzzling failures. What these failures reveal is a system that does not punish incompetence - even when mistakes lead to the kind of tragedy we experienced on 9/11. Rather, a huge amount of effort is expended in either trying to explain away the errors or worse, attack those who attempt to find an explanation for the incompetence.

We have seen both tactics on display in the Plame Affair. The CIA’s failures in Iraq go all the way back to the first Gulf War when the Administration of George Bush #41 was taken completely by surprise when Saddam invaded Kuwait. This despite a huge build-up of Iraqi forces on Kuwait’s border prior to the invasion as well as many overt threats by Saddam against the Kuwaiti’s for pumping too much oil thus keeping the price depressed.

Following tactics that they repeated when it was discovered that Saddam’s huge stockpiles of WMD were a chimera, the CIA began to leak cherry-picked analysis which revealed that the the Agency did indeed believe that Saddam was going to invade, that it was the policymakers who missed the clear signals emanating from Langely. The problem, of course, is that those analyses were ignored in the run-up to the invasion as both the State Department and the CIA were telling the White House that Saddam was simply doing some saber rattling in order to get the Kuwaitis to cut back oil production.

The consequences of the CIA’s mistaken analysis about Saddam’s intentions were huge. It has since been revealed by former Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz that Saddam never anticipated the angry reaction from the United States that led to war. Just imagine what a strong statement from President Bush warning Saddam about the consequences of an invasion could have accomplished.

What the CIA analysis of Saddam’s intentions at that time revealed was a clear bias toward what has become known as the realpolitik faction in government who believed that Saddam was a vital ally and bulwark against radical Islam. There may have been a case to be made for such thinking prior to 9/11 as several high level Bush #41 Administration officials such as National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and Secretary of State James Baker believed. But as Howard Fineman points out in this article from October, 2003 in Newsweek, opposition to that policy came from the Department of Defense which, at that time, was headed up by current Vice President of the United States Dick Cheney:

Behind the scenes or openly, at war or at peace, the United States has been debating what to do in, with and about Iraq for more than 20 years. We always have been of two minds. One faction, led by the CIA and State Department, favored using secular forces in Iraq—Saddam Hussein and his Baathists—as a counterweight to even more radical elements, from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to the Shiite ayatollahs in Iran to the Palestinian terrorists in the Levant. The other faction, including Dick Cheney and the “neo-cons,” has long held a different view: that, with their huge oil reserves and lust for power (and dreams of recreating Baghdad’s ancient role in the Arab world), the Baathists had to be permanently weakened and isolated, if not destroyed. This group cheered when, more than 20 years ago in a secret airstrike, the Israelis destroyed a nuclear reactor Saddam had been trying to build, a reactor that could have given him the ultimate WMD.

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.

Choosing Wilson then to go to Niger to check out the yellowcake story does not seem such a stretch when placed in the context of a faction at the CIA who thought that their judgment about what kind of threat Saddam presented was superior to that of individuals who the American people elected to make those kinds of decisions. By sending Wilson, the CIA knew full well what the result of his “investigation” would be. So why weren’t Wilson’s conclusions widely disseminated by the CIA? Speculation in this regard has run the gamut from a CIA “set-up” of the Administration to simple bureaucratic incompetence. Given a choice, I would settle on the latter. While it may be true that the CIA was trying to undercut the Administration’s case for war, it would be a stretch to believe that they knew there were no large stockpiles of WMD and thus, any use of Wilson’s “report” would be to demonstrate the “twisting” of intelligence charged by many on the left.

What may be true is that by not having Wilson sign a confidentiality agreement, they wished his “findings” to receive the widest possible distribution. Wilson’s contacts in the press included both Walter Pincus of the Washington Post and Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times, two reporters who eventually did publish very selective information about his trip Wilson himself admits to shopping his story to reporters for months prior to his OpEd in the New York Times in early July, 2003. This would seem to indicate that the selective leaking of classified information carried out by a partisan cabal at the CIA for more than a year prior to the election last November was done not just to discredit the Administration’s Iraq War case but also to politically damage the President so as to cause his defeat for re-election.

For those who were puzzled by why the Bush Administration was trying to push back against Wilson more than a month prior to his public acknowledgment of the Niger trip as both Cheney and Libby were discussing Wislon-Plame in early June, one need look no further than the Administration’s recognition that they were in the midst of a partisan political attack by a known Democratic party sympathizer who was running around Washington trying to discredit the Bush Administration by giving a skewed account of his CIA “mission” to national security reporters. If they could connect Wilson to both the nepotistic actions of his wife and the partisan cabal in the CIA who, along with those seeking to cover up the Agency’s incompetence with regard to WMD’s wanted to show the Administration “twisted” intelligence on Iraq, Cheney-Libby would be able to blunt the impact of the attack.

What is the connection between lack of WMD and the Administration countering of Wilson? The answer is Valerie Plame whose associates in the Counterproliferation Department at the agency were responsible both for sending Wilson to Niger and giving the Administration uncredible reports with regard to WMD in Iraq in the first place. Any attempt to understand the prosecution of Libby must begin with Valerie Plame herself and her part in the leaking and bureaucratic backbiting that led the Administration to its current dilemma.

Will this part of the story ever fully be revealed? If Scooter Libby goes to trial rather than take a plea deal, it is very possible that the full role of the CIA and their war against the Administration will be revealed. Otherwise, the entire matter will simply remain an interesting footnote in the history of the Iraq War.

UPDATE

Powerline “gets it”…

“…[Is] there a serious journalist among the mainstream media who thinks the story in the Libby case might be the CIA’s efforts to defeat the president. Isn’t that the big story?”

Does Glenn Reyonolds “get it?”

“This leaves two possibilities. One is that the mission was intended to result in the New York Times oped all along, meaning that the CIA didn’t care much about Plame’s status, and was trying to meddle in domestic politics. This reflects very badly on the CIA.”

Once again, Mr. Reynolds proves that his gift for understating the obvious with devastating effect is the best around.

How about Tom McGuire?

Come on, we see through this - if the CIA prepared a formal report, it would be subpoenaed as evidence, and the jury would laugh out loud at the “no damage” assessment. So the CIA filed a criminal referral in 2003, got the White House tied up in a two year investigation, and now they are laughing out loud. Well played, especially if you like a spy service that shrugs off executive oversight by inventing crimes and playing dirty tricks.

Perfectly said.