Government of lies: The political meaning of the Rove affair

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=MAR20050729&articleId=760

The more thoughtful media commentators have begun to acknowledge that the real issue in the Rove affair is not whether Rove, Cheney’s chief of staff Lewis Libby, former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer or some other White House aide leaked Plame’s name or lied about it to Fitzgerald’s investigators or the grand jury. Such lies are only symptomatic of the much greater lies which constitute the Bush administration’s entire case for war in Iraq: claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein was an ally of Al Qaeda, and suggestions that the Iraqi president was somehow linked to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

In one perceptive commentary, New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote July 17 that the public should not “get hung up” on Rove “or on most of the other supposed leading figures in this scandal thus far.” He continued: “Not Matt Cooper or Judy Miller or the Wilsons or the bad guy everyone loves to hate, the former CNN star Robert Novak. This scandal is not about them in the end, any more than Watergate was about Dwight Chapin and Donald Segretti or Woodward and Bernstein. It is about the president of the United States. It is about a plot that was hatched at the top of the administration and in which everyone else, Mr. Rove included, are at most secondary players. That the investigation has dragged on so long anyway is another indication of the expanded reach of the prosecutorial web.”

Rich’s column was entitled, “Follow the Uranium,” and the comparison to Watergate is more than apt, as is his political conclusion: “This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit—the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes—is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds... this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a CIA operative...”

Like Watergate, and unlike the bogus right-wing-inspired investigations into the Clinton White House, the Rove affair is about government policy, in which the actions of the bit players can be traced back directly to the decision-makers at the top: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld & Co. And like Watergate, the information has begun to surface because of a bitter conflict within the state apparatus, in which murky and even reactionary motives play a role. (Let us not forget the lesson of Watergate’s Deep Throat, now revealed as FBI deputy director W. Mark Felt, who leaked critical details of the Nixon White House conspiracy largely out of institutional loyalty to the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover.) The driving force of the conflict now raging in official Washington is the increasingly evident failure of the Bush administration’s military intervention in Iraq. There are bitter recriminations over the consequences of Bush’s refusal to heed the cautions from the intelligence agencies and military about the likely outcome of the invasion of Iraq, which has left American imperialism bogged down in an open-ended counter-insurgency campaign.

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Here's the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/opinion/17rich.html?pagewanted=print