Overlooking The Obvious

In this week’s editorial The New Republic discusses the rightwing push back on Rovegate. They complain that the emphasis on Rove obscures the more important story of Iraq lies. I submit that without Rovegate, there would be no coverage of the Iraq lies at all, so we should not knock the hook that gives us the opportunity to talk about the bigger picture.

The editorial brings up something else, however, that I think is quite important. It mentions the single most important weapon in our arsenal when arguing about the bigger picture surrounding Wilson’s trip:

As that investigation has spilled onto the front pages in the last few weeks, supporters of the administration have picked up where they left off two years ago, saying that Wilson was unqualified for the Niger investigation and declaring that his credibility is in tatters. It’s true that Wilson has made himself an easy target for such accusations by posing with his wife for Vanity Fair magazine and taking a very public role advising the Kerry campaign last fall. But the most serious charge that Wilson’s critics level against him is the allegation that he was wrong in his assessment of Iraq’s dealing with Niger. Supporters of Rove have revived this accusation in an effort to claim that, when Rove spoke to reporters about Plame, he wasn’t trying to disparage Wilson so much as warn them off a “bad story.” But what, exactly, was “bad” about Wilson’s story?

Both the national security adviser and the CIA director at the time (Condoleezza Rice and George Tenet, respectively) issued public apologies for the Niger claim, admitting it was unsubstantiated. And the most authoritative report on the matter comes from the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), which spent a year combing the Iraqi countryside for alleged weapons of mass destruction. Its conclusion: “ISG has not found evidence to show that Iraq sought uranium from abroad after 1991 or renewed indigenous production of such material.”

Because of all the deliberate obfuscation coming from the Rove machine, this central piece of evidence has not been discussed nearly enough. Ivo Daalder on TPM cafe brought this up some time ago, but it’s worth repeating: Wilson’s conclusions have been born out by the Iraq Survey Group, who spent a year inside Iraq, looking at all the records and speaking to the parties. There is no point in speculating about meetings in 1999 or the Butler Report or any other reports that testify to evidence that Iraq sought to buy uranium from Niger. The fact is that it didn’t. Period. End of story. The non-believers were right, the true-believers were wrong, whatever their motives.

It’s two years later, we have a definitive report from the ISG, and people are still saying that Wilson was a flake, he was sent by his wife, he was trying to set up the Republicans, whatever. In a normal world, that fact that Wilson’s conclusions (along with others) were correct would have some salience in this argument — particularly since the Reublicans are basing theirs on the the mistaken premise that Wilson’s credibility is in question when quite clearly, he was right.

Rick Perlstein relayed in the comments of one of my other posts a comment from a right wing correspondent of his who said of Plame: “she was part of a CIA attempt to discredit the elected government. She should be swinging from a lamp post.” And yet, there was no uranium deal. There were no WMD. This comment therefore means that naysayers (in and out of the CIA, presumably) were trying to discredit the elected government with the truth.

It’s enormously frustrating to argue with people who have so little intellectual integrity, but that’s the way it is. They continue to dig themselves in on this point — even as the huge elephant holding a sign that says “there were no WMD in Iraq” is sitting in the middle of the room, mocking them.

But over time, through all the bickering and small bore detail and gossip, that elephant comes more and more into focus for average Americans. And it lays the groundwork for a scathing Democratic critique of Republican foreign policy for the first time in many years if we can just find the nerve to claim it. The Republicans are going to have Iraq hung around their necks like a burning rubber tire for a long time to come, as they should.

When you strip all the fulminating away, the Republican argument for the massive failure in both concept and execution of Iraq is that they didn’t do it on purpose — they just screwed up. That’s the same excuse Karl Rove is using, as well, and it’s no surprise. At this point, it’s realistically their best case scenario. Would you want to run on that record?

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