The spy story engulfing the White House is the catalyst for the Bush meltdown. But we wouldn’t be obsessing over who sanctioned and spread political dirt if the Bush team had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The ballooning scandal is a symptom and not the cause of Bush’s problems.
Bush staged the most elaborate and expensive coup d’etat in history. All he did was remove Saddam Hussein from power. With no WMD uncovered and American soldiers dying daily in Iraq, the president’s policies–along with his credibility–are in tatters.
Retired ambassador Joe Wilson is at the center of the storm. It’s his wife whose cover was blown in retribution for Wilson criticizing the administration for including dubious intelligence about Iraq attempting to purchase uranium from Niger in Bush’s January State of the Union speech. Wilson, who was in Iraq during the first gulf war and who had also worked in Africa, traveled to Niger at the behest of the CIA to investigate the claim.
Reached in his office a block from the White House, Wilson says the controversy over who leaked what is part of a much larger debate on how we as a government decide something as solemn as committing our young people to war. In the lead-up to Iraq, he asks, “Was there a commonly accepted set of facts, or did the administration willfully and knowingly distort and manipulate information to bolster policies that were already decided upon?”
Wilson opposed the war, but he supports the reconstruction. He was scheduled to speak to the House Democratic Caucus on his ideas, but when news of the Justice Department investigation broke, the session was canceled. “It was put off because I’m a political hot potato,” Wilson told NEWSWEEK. Democrats don’t want their calls for a special counsel to investigate the leak involving Wilson’s wife to get tangled up in partisan politics.
Wilson worries that the mounting costs and continuing deaths in Iraq will prompt calls to pull out the troops. “I would argue vociferously against that,” he says. “That would bolster the ‘Whack-a-Moles’,” a reference to the arcade game where you whap plastic moles with a mallet. “Rumsfeld is the chief Whack-a-Mole,” says Wilson.
Republicans portray Wilson as a limelight-seeking partisan because he has been consulting with John Kerry’s campaign. But Wilson gave money to Bush in 2000, and his diplomatic skills win praise from Republicans and Democrats alike. A Senate GOP backer of the Iraq war says the Justice Department probe is eroding voter confidence in the president. “Bush promised to restore honor and integrity to the Oval Office. This is diminishing him. He looks smaller, less commanding.” The GOP source says he is disgusted by White House efforts to tar Wilson as an antiwar partisan. “The administration moves from honor and integrity to slime and defend,” says this Republican.
When the historical tally is done on the consequences of the battle of Baghdad, Wilson believes the terrorists will emerge as winners–along with the neoconservative thinkers and strategists who were the primary architects of the war. “The terrorists because we have created a larger pool to do us harm,” he explains. But the neocons? “The reason I say they’re winners is that for another generation we will still be singing off the sheet of music they laid down during this war,” says Wilson.
The spy story may not be the catastrophic moment for Bush. Finding the source of a leak is hard, and there was an 11-hour gap before White House aides were ordered to preserve e-mails and phone records. But the 2004 presidential race is forming around a series of discrete events that paint a picture of an administration in disarray. This past week alone, there were reports about the poverty rate rising, millions more Americans without health insurance and Levi Strauss, the signature maker of jeans, joining the list of businesses taking jobs overseas.
The Iraq war clearly will cost more than the $87 billion that has caused such angst on Capitol Hill. Bush never prepared the American people for this. As soon as Baghdad fell, Bush was pushing for the elimination of double taxation on stock dividends. Instead of landing on the USS Lincoln, he should have landed in the well of Congress and said this was only the beginning of a long, hard struggle. In addition to worrying about civil war in Iraq between the Sunnis and the Shiites, the dam has broken here at home. The career intelligence professionals at the CIA, closing ranks around one of their own, are openly warring against the administration ideologues. Caught in the cross-fire, Bush’s free ride is over.
