From..The New Republic...
TRB FROM WASHINGTON
Theater of the Absurd
by Peter Beinart
It's fun to read the conservative press in the days immediately following a damning revelation about the Bush administration. The assumptions--the White House did nothing wrong, its critics are disreputable partisans--are there from the outset. But the arguments themselves--why the White House is blameless and its critics lack all credibility--are still in flux. The result is a flurry of justifications: some plausible, some contradictory, some laughable.
So it has been since last Sunday, when The Washington Post reported that the CIA had requested a Justice Department investigation into charges that administration officials exposed Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA operative to columnist Robert Novak--a potential crime. (Wilson, of course, is the former ambassador sent by the CIA to investigate claims that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger. He reported that the charges were baseless and later, when President Bush repeated them in his State of the Union speech, wrote a scathing New York Times op-ed.)
The first conservative response is that the leaks couldn't have been part of an orchestrated White House smear campaign because they served no political purpose. To Wilson, however, the purpose was clear. As he told the blogger Joshua Micah Marshall, "[T]hey thought that by coming after me they would discourage others from coming forward." James Taranto of OpinionJournal.Com, The Wall Street Journal editorial page's website, claims, "This doesn't make sense. An ordinary reader of Novak's column had no way of grasping the purported significance of the revelation." But Wilson isn't referring to "ordinary readers." He is referring to the intelligence analysts whose work the White House distorted or ignored. Such people--who refer to CIA operatives by their aliases even in internal documents--would instantly grasp the significance of blowing an agent's cover. And seeing it happen to Plame might make them think twice before challenging White House statements on Iraq.
The second response is that revealing Plame's name was no big deal because she wasn't actually a spy. As Novak himself put it on CNN's "Crossfire" this week, "According to a confidential source at the CIA, Mrs. Wilson was an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operative, and not in charge of undercover operatives." Novak's "Crossfire" guest, Republican Representative Jack Kingston, suggested she may be no more than "a glorified secretary." The problem with this argument is that, in his initial July 14 column--written before he had reason to downplay Plame's status--Novak called her an "operative." That's consistent with an NBC report stating that CIA lawyers told the Justice Department in July that Plame's name was classified. And with Larry Johnson, a former State Department counterterrorism official (and registered Republican), who told PBS that Plame "has been undercover for three decades."
Clifford May of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies has peddled a related argument in National Review Online. May, former spokesman for the Republican National Committee, spends much of his article calling Wilson (Poppy Bush's ambassador to Gabon and a W. campaign contributor) a left-wing partisan. But, like Novak and Kingston, he also downplays the importance of revealing Plame's profession. May says he was informed of Plame's job by "someone who formerly worked in the government, and he mentioned it in an offhand manner." And, on that basis, his piece is subtitled, "Was it really a secret that Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA?" The fact that the CIA kept Plame's identity classified would seem answer enough. But not for May, who evidently thinks that, because classified information was disclosed to him, Novak might as well publish it in The Washington Post.
But give National Review Online credit. On its website, Mark R. Levin breaks from the emerging conservative line and acknowledges that revealing Plame's name was indeed a serious offense. Levin's argument, however, contains a twist. The people responsible for this predicament are not the White House officials who leaked the information to Novak. They are the CIA, for sending Wilson to Niger, and Wilson himself, for accepting the assignment. "Shouldn't it have occurred to someone in CIA management that sending the husband of an agency operative on a highly sensitive, high-profile mission could jeopardize that operative's activities?" Levin wonders. Wilson, he charges, "drew [attention] to himself by taking the Niger fact-finding assignment in the first place. Like it or not, Wilson bears some responsibility for his wife's predicament." Of course he does. How reckless of him to travel halfway around the world for his country when he should have known that top Bushies would ignore his findings and then expose, and potentially endanger, his wife.
The right's absurd responses to the Plame affair point to a larger absurdity, a kind of elephant in the room of conservative commentary about the Bush administration and Iraq. It is increasingly possible that the United States will never find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq. Saddam Hussein's scientists say they were destroyed. The top Democrat and Republican on the House Intelligence Committee claim the Bush administration had no new evidence on Iraqi WMD post-1998 and that "the absence of proof that chemical and biological weapons and their related development programs had been destroyed was considered proof that they continued to exist." The White House, which once said chief WMD-hunter David Kay would vindicate its prewar claims, is now playing down his findings. George F. Will has written that, if there were no WMD, the war was a mistake--a mistake that implicates virtually every prominent conservative in Washington.
You'd think this prospect would spark introspection and recrimination on the right, as it has among pro-war Democrats. Instead, with a few exceptions, it has hardly been publicly contemplated. The Plame scandal is one crack in a much larger edifice that may come crashing down around the conservative intellectual elite. Until then, the debating points continue.
Peter Beinart is the editor of TNR. |
