Getting Back on Track
The proverbial man from Mars, landing today, might wonder if we are all off our rockers. He will ask to be taken to our leader, but it will be hard to break through the White House bubble, and when we do find him, we encounter the leader of the free world preoccupied with domestic turmoil--beleagured by the rebellion of the right over the unfortunate Harriet Miers--and bothered even more now by the exposure of the grimy political machinery of a secretive administration in the Valerie Plame/CIA affair.
This latter issue reminds me of nothing so much as the chaos theory story: A butterfly flapping its wings in China produces a hurricane on the other side of the world. A retired diplomat writing an opinion article about a trip to Africa produces a hurricane inside the White House. The five counts against Vice President Dick Cheney's now former chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, are not for alleged violations of the arcane Intelligence Identities Act but for crimes allegedly committed during--and triggered by--the investigation. As with presidents Nixon and Clinton, the banana skin will be the coverup (if the prosecutor makes his case). It cannot be dismissed, as some Republicans have been saying, as a "perjury technicality."
That's not what they said when the name in the prosecutor's sights was Clinton. An indictment by a prosecutor as esteemed as Patrick Fitzgerald--praised in advance by President Bush--is a serious blow to the moral authority of the administration, even if the charges are eventually dismissed or lawyered down. In a concerted effort to discredit the retired ambassador Joseph Wilson for debunking the president's statement that Iraq had tried to buy processed uranium in Nigeria for a nuclear weapons program, Libby will look like the fall guy. An unanswered question is the role of the vice president. He was perfectly entitled to tell Libby that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, but was he aware that she was undercover and, if so, did he warn his chief of staff that her identity must not be disclosed? Or what?
Panic. Our man from Mars is bewildered by all this political infighting. Coming from outer space, he is troubled by the apparent insularity of our obsessions. The unraveling of the CIA leak is serious because it suggests a degree of panic in the administration about the original rationale for the invasion of Iraq and a deepening concern by Bush aides that the CIA was trying to pass the buck to the White House for the flawed pre-war intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction.
All roads lead back to Baghdad, for the two most serious demands on all our attention are the revelations in Paul Volcker's final report on Saddam Hussein's bribery in the United Nations oil-for-food program and the threats from Iran, a constant saboteur of Iraq's progress. Iran's malevolent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, now says the only functioning democracy in the Middle East--Israel--must be wiped off the map." Iran, recall, is the very same country that asks to be taken on trust about its nuclear intentions. It is a cancer in the body politic that cannot be left to fester much longer, as the European negotiators have now realized. It finances terrorism in Iraq, Israel, and Lebanon. It works against the better interests of the Palestinians, who at least formally disavowed the oft-stated aim of eradicating the state of Israel.
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