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Karl Rove no longer has any place in public service. Mr. Bush will simply have to tell his friend and trusted aid that he must find employment elsewhere. It will not be easy for Mr. Bush to tell Rove that he must leave.
We could have more sympathy for Bush and his aides in this case if the argument presented for war against Iraq -- or just the greater part of it -- had turned out to have been right. Suppose our troops went up to Baghdad and found the country swimming in weapons grade biochemical toxins, nuclear weapons under construction and archives full of documentation concerning cash, weapons and training provided to al Qaida by Saddam's regime. Would anybody care about an erroneous assertion in the 2003 SOTU about a yellowcake deal that never actually happened, had no basis in fact and the information about which was based on forged documents? One incorrect fact being disseminated to the public would be written off as human error. If that had been the case, Wilson would probably never have written his piece for The New York Times or, if he had, most people would have forgotten about it in less time than it took to read it.
However, as it is, we are hard pressed to find one correct fact that was disseminated to the public prior to the war. That is pretty hard to do; it is probably even more incredible than getting everything right. The Downing Street document tells us that the regime first decided to go to war, found it had a thin case for war and then proceeded to fix facts and intelligence around the policy. Perhaps if the regime instead of making a decision and then looking for talking points had looked for facts and then made a decision based thereon, they would not have so much egg on their face or blood on their hands today.
The fact that everything was wrong in the case for war, that policymakers were making an unprecedented number of trips to CIA headquarters, that bureaus like the OSP were set up to cull through intelligence, and that there is documentary proof that the decision to go to war was made independent of facts to support an assertion of any threat from the state to be attacked all strongly suggests that Bush and his aides deliberately and willfully misled the country to war based on falsehoods.
It is clear that whatever reasons the Bush regime had for going to war, they were not the ones stated. What they really were has been the subject of other discussions. What they may have been is not the subject of this one. It suffices for our purposes to conclude that Bush sent US troops to a war which he justified with lies.
The regime could only maintain support for its policies in Iraq by continuing its deception. Anybody who could come forward and tell a story of how his work in a fact finding mission was either ignored or dissembled would have to be discredited. Joseph Wilson told the truth and the truth is a threat to Bush regime. Once he told the truth, the regime responded with a campaign of lies, half truths and red herrings against him that did not take into account any real matters of national security. A CIA operative working with NOC on important national security matters was unmasked, either carelessly or deliberately, as a result of this smear campaign. That smear campaign has been renewed in order to discredit Wilson, something which it has failed to do with all but the regime's most hard core supporters.
Whether Mr. Rove will face criminal charges, and if so what charges, will depend on application of facts to the law. I will trust the judgment of Mr. Fitzgerald and the grand jury to make that determination. However, if the facts that have been leaked to the public are true, the most benign interpretation of Mr. Rove's behavior that can be made is that was careless with classified information for partisan political ends. Whether a crime was committed or not is immaterial. Rove and the White House should part ways.
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