It’s Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby

By FRANK RICH

There hasn’t been anything like it since Martha Stewart
fended off questions about her stock-trading scandal by
manically chopping cabbage on "The Early Show" on CBS.
Last week the setting was "Today" on NBC, where the
image of President Bush manically hammering nails at a
Habitat for Humanity construction site on the Gulf
Coast was juggled with the sight of him trying to duck
Matt Lauer’s questions about Karl Rove.

As with Ms. Stewart, Mr. Bush’s paroxysm of panic was
must-see TV. "The president was a blur of blinks, taps,
jiggles, pivots and shifts," Dana Milbank wrote in The
Washington Post. Asked repeatedly about Mr. Rove’s
serial appearances before a Washington grand jury, the
jittery Mr. Bush, for once bereft of a script,
improvised a passable impersonation of Norman Bates
being quizzed by the detective in "Psycho." Like Norman
and Ms. Stewart, he stonewalled.

That stonewall may start to crumble in a Washington
courtroom this week or next. In a sense it already has.
Now, as always, what matters most in this case is not
whether Mr. Rove and Lewis Libby engaged in a petty
conspiracy to seek revenge on a whistle-blower, Joseph
Wilson, by unmasking his wife, Valerie, a covert C.I.A.
officer. What makes Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation
compelling, whatever its outcome, is its illumination
of a conspiracy that was not at all petty: the one that
took us on false premises into a reckless and wasteful
war in Iraq. That conspiracy was instigated by Mr.
Rove’s boss, George W. Bush, and Mr. Libby’s boss, Dick
Cheney.

Mr. Wilson and his wife were trashed to protect that
larger plot. Because the personnel in both stories
overlap, the bits and pieces we’ve learned about the
leak inquiry over the past two years have gradually
helped fill in the über-narrative about the war. Last
week was no exception. Deep in a Wall Street Journal
account of Judy Miller’s grand jury appearance was this
crucial sentence: "Lawyers familiar with the
investigation believe that at least part of the outcome
likely hangs on the inner workings of what has been
dubbed the White House Iraq Group."

Very little has been written about the White House Iraq
Group, or WHIG. Its inception in August 2002, seven
months before the invasion of Iraq, was never
announced. Only much later would a newspaper article or
two mention it in passing, reporting that it had been
set up by Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff.
Its eight members included Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby,
Condoleezza Rice and the spinmeisters Karen Hughes and
Mary Matalin. Its mission: to market a war in Iraq.

Of course, the official Bush history would have us
believe that in August 2002 no decision had yet been
made on that war. Dates bracketing the formation of
WHIG tell us otherwise. On July 23, 2002 - a week or
two before WHIG first convened in earnest - a British
official told his peers, as recorded in the now famous
Downing Street memo, that the Bush administration was
ensuring that "the intelligence and facts" about Iraq’s
W.M.D.’s "were being fixed around the policy" of going
to war. And on Sept. 6, 2002 - just a few weeks after
WHIG first convened - Mr. Card alluded to his group’s
existence by telling Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York
Times that there was a plan afoot to sell a war against
Saddam Hussein: "From a marketing point of view, you
don’t introduce new products in August."

The official introduction of that product began just
two days later. On the Sunday talk shows of Sept. 8,
Ms. Rice warned that "we don’t want the smoking gun to
be a mushroom cloud," and Mr. Cheney, who had already
started the nuclear doomsday drumbeat in three August
speeches, described Saddam as "actively and
aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons." The
vice president cited as evidence a front-page article,
later debunked, about supposedly nefarious aluminum
tubes co-written by Judy Miller in that morning’s
Times. The national security journalist James Bamford,
in "A Pretext for War," writes that the article was all
too perfectly timed to facilitate "exactly the sort of
propaganda coup that the White House Iraq Group had
been set up to stage-manage."

The administration’s doomsday imagery was ratcheted up
from that day on. As Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus
of The Washington Post would determine in the first
account of WHIG a full year later, the administration’s
"escalation of nuclear rhetoric" could be traced to the
group’s formation. Along with mushroom clouds, uranium
was another favored image, the Post report noted,
"because anyone could see its connection to an atomic
bomb." It appeared in a Bush radio address the weekend
after the Rice-Cheney Sunday show blitz and would reach
its apotheosis with the infamously fictional 16 words
about "uranium from Africa" in Mr. Bush’s January 2003
State of the Union address on the eve of war.

Throughout those crucial seven months between the
creation of WHIG and the start of the American invasion
of Iraq, there were indications that evidence of a
Saddam nuclear program was fraudulent or nonexistent.
Joseph Wilson’s C.I.A. mission to Niger, in which he
failed to find any evidence to back up uranium claims,
took place nearly a year before the president’s 16
words. But the truth never mattered. The Bush-Cheney
product rolled out by Card, Rove, Libby & Company had
been bought by Congress, the press and the public. The
intelligence and facts had been successfully fixed to
sell the war, and any memory of Mr. Bush’s errant 16
words melted away in Shock and Awe. When, months later,
a national security official, Stephen Hadley, took
"responsibility" for allowing the president to address
the nation about mythical uranium, no one knew that Mr.
Hadley, too, had been a member of WHIG.

It was not until the war was supposedly over - with
"Mission Accomplished," in May 2003 - that Mr. Wilson
started to add his voice to those who were disputing
the administration’s uranium hype. Members of WHIG had
a compelling motive to shut him down. In contrast to
other skeptics, like Mohamed ElBaradei of the
International Atomic Energy Agency (this year’s Nobel
Peace Prize winner), Mr. Wilson was an American
diplomat; he had reported his findings in Niger to our
own government. He was a dagger aimed at the heart of
WHIG and its disinformation campaign. Exactly who tried
to silence him and how is what Mr. Fitzgerald
presumably will tell us.

It’s long been my hunch that the WHIG-ites were at
their most brazen (and, in legal terms, reckless)
during the many months that preceded the appointment of
Mr. Fitzgerald as special counsel. When Mr. Rove was
asked on camera by ABC News in September 2003 if he had
any knowledge of the Valerie Wilson leak and said no,
it was only hours before the Justice Department would
open its first leak investigation. When Scott McClellan
later declared that he had been personally assured by
Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby that they were "not involved"
with the leak, the case was still in the safe hands of
the attorney general then, John Ashcroft, himself a
three-time Rove client in past political campaigns.
Though Mr. Rove may be known as "Bush’s brain," he
wasn’t smart enough to anticipate that Justice
Department career employees would eventually pressure
Mr. Ashcroft to recuse himself because of this conflict
of interest, clearing the way for an outside prosecutor
as independent as Mr. Fitzgerald.

"Bush’s Brain" is the title of James Moore and Wayne
Slater’s definitive account of Mr. Rove’s political
career. But Mr. Rove is less his boss’s brain than
another alliterative organ (or organs), that which
provides testosterone. As we learn in "Bush’s Brain,"
bad things (usually character assassination) often
happen to Bush foes, whether Ann Richards or John
McCain. On such occasions, Mr. Bush stays
compassionately above the fray while the ruthless Mr.
Rove operates below the radar, always separated by "a
layer of operatives" from any ill behavior that might
implicate him. "There is no crime, just a victim," Mr.
Moore and Mr. Slater write of this repeated pattern.

THIS modus operandi was foolproof, shielding the
president as well as Mr. Rove from culpability, as long
as it was about winning an election. The attack on Mr.
Wilson, by contrast, has left them and the Cheney-Libby
tag team vulnerable because it’s about something far
bigger: protecting the lies that took the country into
what the Reagan administration National Security Agency
director, Lt. Gen. William Odom, recently called "the
greatest strategic disaster in United States history."

Whether or not Mr. Fitzgerald uncovers an indictable
crime, there is once again a victim, but that victim is
not Mr. or Mrs. Wilson; it’s the nation. It is surely a
joke of history that even as the White House sells this
weekend’s constitutional referendum as yet another
"victory" for democracy in Iraq, we still don’t know
the whole story of how our own democracy was hijacked
on the way to war.

http://select.nytimes.com/2005/10/1...