Why Dick Cheney Cracked Up - New York Times
The New York Times

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February 4, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Why Dick Cheney Cracked Up
By
FRANK RICH

IN the days since Dick Cheney
lost it on CNN
, our nation's armchair shrinks have had a blast. The vice president who
boasted of "enormous successes" in Iraq and barked "hogwash" at the
congenitally
mild Wolf Blitzer has been roundly judged delusional, pathologically
dishonest or just plain nuts. But what else is new? We identified those
diagnoses
long ago. The more intriguing question is what ignited this particularly
violent public flare-up.

The answer can be found in the timing of the CNN interview, which was
conducted the day after the
start of the perjury trial of Mr. Cheney's former top aide
, Scooter Libby. The vice president's on-camera crackup reflected his
understandable fear that a White House cover-up was crumbling. He knew that
sworn
testimony in a Washington courtroom would reveal still more sordid details
about how the administration lied to take the country into war in Iraq. He
knew
that those revelations could cripple the White House's current campaign to
escalate that war and foment apocalyptic scenarios about Iran. Scariest of
all,
he knew that he might yet have to testify under oath himself.

Mr. Cheney, in other words, understands the danger this trial poses to the
White House even as some of Washington remains oblivious. From the start,
the
capital has belittled the Joseph and Valerie Wilson affair as "a tempest in
a teapot,"
as David Broder of The Washington Post reiterated
just five months ago. When "all of the facts come out in this case, it's
going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great,"
Bob Woodward said in 2005
. Or, as Robert Novak suggested in 2003 before he revealed Ms. Wilson's
identity as a C.I.A. officer in his column, "weapons of mass destruction or
uranium
from Niger" are "little elitist issues that don't bother most of the
people." Those issues may not trouble Mr. Novak, but they do loom large to
other people,
especially those who sent their kids off to war over nonexistent weapons of
mass destruction and nonexistent uranium.

In terms of the big issues, the question of who first leaked Ms. Wilson's
identity (whether Mr. Libby, Richard Armitage, Ari Fleischer or Karl Rove)
to
which journalist (whether Mr. Woodward, Mr. Novak, Judith Miller or Matt
Cooper) has always been a red herring. It's entirely possible that the White
House
has always been telling the truth when it says that no one intended to
unmask a secret agent. (No one has been charged with that crime.) The White
House
is also telling the truth when it repeatedly says that Mr. Cheney did not
send Mr. Wilson on his C.I.A.-sponsored African trip to check out a supposed
Iraq-Niger uranium transaction. (Another red herring, since Mr. Wilson didn't
make that accusation in the first place.)

But if the administration is telling the truth on these narrow questions and
had little to hide about the Wilson trip per se, its wild overreaction to
the
episode was an incriminating sign it was hiding something else. According to
testimony in the Libby case, the White House went berserk when Mr. Wilson
published his
Op-Ed article in The Times in July 2003
about what he didn't find in Africa. Top officials gossiped incessantly
about both Wilsons to anyone who would listen, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby
conferred
about them several times a day, and finally Mr. Libby, known as an
exceptionally discreet White House courtier, became so sloppy that his
alleged lying

landed him with five felony counts.

The explanation for the hysteria has long been obvious. The White House was
terrified about being found guilty of a far greater crime than outing a
C.I.A.
officer: lying to the nation to hype its case for war. When Mr. Wilson, an
obscure retired diplomat, touched that raw nerve, all the president's men
panicked
because they knew Mr. Wilson's modest finding in Africa was the tip of a far
larger iceberg. They knew that there was still far more damning evidence of
the administration's W.M.D. lies lurking in the bowels of the bureaucracy.

Thanks to the commotion caused by the leak case, that damning evidence has
slowly dribbled out. By my count we now know of at least a half-dozen
instances
before the start of the Iraq war when various intelligence agencies and
others signaled that evidence of Iraq's purchase of uranium in Africa might
be
dubious or fabricated. (These are detailed in the timelines at
frankrich.com/timeline.htm
.) The culmination of these warnings arrived in January 2003, the same month
as the president's State of the Union address, when the White House received
a memo from the National Intelligence Council, the coordinating body for all
American spy agencies, stating unequivocally that
the claim was baseless
. Nonetheless President Bush brandished that fearful "uranium from Africa"
in his
speech to Congress
as he hustled the country into war in Iraq.

If the war had been a cakewalk, few would have cared to investigate the
administration's deceit at its inception. But by the time Mr. Wilson's Op-Ed
article
appeared - some five months after the State of the Union and two months
after "Mission Accomplished" - there was something terribly wrong with the
White
House's triumphal picture. More than
60 American troops had been killed
since Mr. Bush celebrated the end of "major combat operations" by prancing
about an aircraft carrier. No W.M.D. had been found, and we weren't even
able
to turn on the lights in Baghdad. For the first time, more than half of
Americans told a
Washington Post-ABC News poll
that the level of casualties was "unacceptable."

It was urgent, therefore, that the awkward questions raised by Mr. Wilson's
revelation of his Africa trip be squelched as quickly as possible. He had to
be smeared as an inconsequential has-been whose mission was merely a trivial
boondoggle arranged by his wife. The C.I.A., which had actually resisted the
uranium fictions, had to be strong-armed into taking the blame for the 16
errant words in the State of the Union speech.

What we are learning from Mr. Libby's trial is just what a herculean effort
it took to execute this two-pronged cover-up after Mr. Wilson's article
appeared.
Mr. Cheney was the hands-on manager of the 24/7 campaign of press
manipulation and high-stakes character assassination, with Mr. Libby as his
chief hatchet
man. Though Mr. Libby's lawyers are now arguing that their client was a
sacrificial lamb thrown to the feds to shield Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby actually
was
- and still is - a stooge for the vice president.

Whether he will go to jail for his misplaced loyalty is the human drama of
his trial. But for the country there are bigger issues at stake, and they
are
not, as the White House would have us believe, ancient history. The
administration propaganda flimflams that sold us the war are now being
retrofitted
to expand and extend it.

In a replay of the run-up to the original invasion, a
new National Intelligence Estimate
, requested by Congress in August to summarize all intelligence assessments
on Iraq, was mysteriously delayed until last week, well after the president
had set his surge. Even the declassified passages
released on Friday
- the grim takes on the weak Iraqi security forces and the spiraling
sectarian violence - foretell that the latest plan for victory is doomed. (
As a White House communications aide testified at the Libby trial
, this administration habitually releases bad news on Fridays because "fewer
people pay attention when it's reported on Saturday.")

A Pentagon inspector general's report,
uncovered by Business Week last week
, was also kept on the q.t.: it shows that even as more American troops are
being thrown into the grinder in Iraq, existing troops lack the guns and
ammunition
to "effectively complete their missions." Army and Marine Corps commanders
told The Washington Post that both armor and trucks were in such short
supply
that their best hope is that "
five brigades of up-armored Humvees fall out of the sky
."

Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of
Colin Powell's notorious W.M.D. pantomime
before the United Nations Security Council, a fair amount of it a
Cheney-Libby production. To mark this milestone, the White House is reviving
the same
script to rev up the war's escalation, this time hyping Iran-Iraq
connections instead of Al Qaeda-Iraq connections.
In his Jan. 10 prime-time speech on Iraq
, Mr. Bush said that Iran was supplying "advanced weaponry and training to
our enemies," even though the evidence suggests that Iran is actually in bed
with our "friends" in Iraq, the Maliki government. The administration
promised a dossier to back up its claims, but that too has been delayed
twice amid
reports of what
The Times calls
"a continuing debate about how well the information proved the Bush
administration's case."

Call it a coincidence - though there are no coincidences - but it's only
fitting that the Libby trial began as news arrived of
the death of E. Howard Hunt
, the former C.I.A. agent whose bungling of the Watergate break-in sent him
to jail and led to the unraveling of the Nixon presidency two years later.
Still,
we can't push the parallels too far. No one died in Watergate. This time
around our country can't wait two more years for the White House to be
stopped
from playing its games with American blood.

Copyright 2007
The New York Times Company

Posted by Miriam V.