It's Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby - New York Times
The New York Times

October 16, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist

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.

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The New York Times Company

Posted by Miriam V.