Plame Game

I have not been planning on blogging the Plame affair for a while.  It’s just a load of hogwash in my eyes and a big national distraction.  I noted, though, that today there was an indictment of Scooter Libby for some things that look pretty serious. 

Lacking in that indictment was anything about Rove or anyone else in the administration.  And if Rove doesn’t get indicted or even become a major part of this investigation, then the administration is probably not going to get burned by this.

Also lacking was any mention of leaking the name of a covert agent.
The reason that I think this is all nonsense is that for all the hoopla, the press continues to ignore the main question:  was Plame’s name in fact protected by the Intelligence Identities Protection Act? 

Because if she wasn’t covered, and there some pretty good argument that she wasn’t, then this whole shootin’ match is for nothing.  Like taking a swing at fog. 

Really this is about Bush, and it’s about the war in Iraq. 

It's obvious too that the Plame Affair is not at all about some minor not-so-covert CIA official, but about Iraq. It is a replaying of the war on other turf.

Roger Simon sums all this up nicely on why there is such a hoopla over this affair, it’s because of course that WMD played a major role in the administrations argument to invade Iraq.  Not that it was the only reason.

As the for the run-up to the war, in looking back I think it was a big game of charades that everybody understood. Despite what was said, the obvious US motivation was geo-political. We wanted the despot Saddam out of the Middle East and replaced by a democracy. The French and the Russians - never particularly interested in democracy in the first place - desperately wanted to keep their cash cow in office. Everybody knew this, so the dreaded WMDs had to be emphasized in front of the UN. Never mind that whether Saddam had nuclear and other such weapons now or later was essentially irrelevant as long as he was in power and able to use them, never mind the supposedly missing weapons could be hidden at this moment in Syria, Lebanon or Iran (or even Iraq of course), never mind that there actually is a fledgling democracy in Iraq seemingly applauded by a vast majority of Iraqis, the weapons have been pronounced non-existent and the war a mistake.

And Wilson is the pivot of one of the left’s arguments that Bush misled the public by claiming that Iraq was going for Yellowcake in Africa and Wilson, who was assigned to find that out, is saying that that wasn’t the case.

Never mind that his report to the CIA said that Niger believed that Iraq was indeed out to buy yellowcake from them.

But you aren’t seeing that in the press either.