Frank Rich, New York Times Opinion Page
It's the classic example of six degrees of separation - or the game that all film celebrities can be tied to Kevin Bacon.
Unable to get the shit to stick definitively to the fan on the Plame Blame Game, NYT's Mr. Rich now confesses it's not really about the Wilsons, protecting CIA sources, or confidentiality. It's all about Bush and how he's wounded the "victims", we the American citizens.
This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit - the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes - is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair.
Well revelation, revelation... It may surprise Mr. Rich, but most of us who stay abreast of the antics of politicians and press already knew that that it was all about some way to punish Bush for Iraq. And we're sorry it's taken him all this time to get to that himself... but welcome to the informed citizen status. Now tell us something we don't know.
The MSM game of Bash Bush is nothing new. Since the middle of 2002, the ultimate target has always been Bush. And when the bullseye is on the Cowboy Prez, the Iraq word is never far behind.
Granted, Iraq is not doing as well as any of us would like. But then, I've never been one to believe you can create a democracy out of a country that has known nothing but tyranny and violence for all of their lives in just a span of years. Hang... as a country, we're *still* trying to get it right, and we've been around over 229 years.
But hey.. it's a big job. Composing, editing and voting for a constitution. Look at the bright side. Iraq is way ahead of the EU. They're a group of democratic countries and they still can't agree on a constitution after years. Pretty nervy to accuse Iraq of being slow to develop, don't you think?
Add to the task, formulating the Iraqi body of branches, election procedures, starting and creating an army, police, restarting an economy and returning property rights to citizens. All while scumbag jihadists are blowing up the citizenry, their mosques, their police stations, hospitals, schools, and their sources of power.
Actually, when you think of it, the progress in Iraq is extraordinary considering the world of Bush haters and jihadists alike pine for it's failure, and remain proactive in seeing that it has every opportunity to do so.
But this is also true... Iraq has not turned out to be the immediate failure or disaster ominously portented by the anti's. Nor has it been the coming of apocolypse. And because of this, the anti's are working overtime to find some... any reason at all... to prove once and for all that Iraq's liberation was utterly and morally wrong, and should never have happened. They can not bear for finally free Iraq to be a feather in Bush's cap.
Like it or not, we're in Iraq, and regime change will be an improvement... just as Clinton and Reno believed in their terms of power. Tough choice, eh? Saddam and sons vs a democratically elected gov't in Iraq. Which would be a better neighbor in the world community? A more productive economy?
The answer is obvious - and most especially to the majority of Iraqis.
Thus the only obvious reason to be spending so much time and energy regurgitating the "why did we go there" leftovers is to facilitate a change of power in the American Congress and WH.
Or, simply put, it's all about politics, elections, and a desperate party accustomed to holding the reins of power.
While I can't agree with Mr. Rich's passion for proving Iraq was an ill-conceived move, I at least applaud him for finally getting down to the nitty-gritty, and copping to what all this bru-ha-hah is truly about.
The MSM would spend their time more productively pursuing the more important issues that face us, instead of crying over spilt milk. Or, as Joe Steyn says in his latest admonishment of a press that can't multitask or triage worth a hoot...This week finds me thousands of miles from the Beltway in what I believe the ABC World News Tonight map designates as the Rest Of The Planet, an obscure beat the media can't seem to spare a correspondent for.
But even if I was with the rest of the navel-gazers inside the Beltway I wouldn't be interested in who ''leaked'' the name of CIA employee Valerie Plame to the press. As her weirdly self-obsesssed husband Joseph C. Wilson IV conceded on CNN the other day, she wasn't a ''clandestine officer'' and, indeed, hadn't been one for six years. So one can only ''leak'' her name in the sense that one can ''leak'' the name of the checkout clerk at Home Depot.
I'm with you, Joe...
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