Why the Valerie Wilson/Karl Rove story matters...aka...Why is there a pink elephant in my living room?

More details are emerging about the leak of Valerie Wilson's covert role in the CIA, most notably in this article in today's Washington Post. It is now clear, at the least, regardless of criminal charges, that the Bush administration, seeking to cover its losses on the Niger WMD claims, targeted both Valerie Wilson (to discredit the highly vocal Joe Wilson who went public with his role after the State of the Union speech mentioned the now clearly absurd claim the Iraq was pursuing "yellow cake" uranium from Niger) and the CIA, whom the White House claimed had provided the false Niger information.

At this point, we don't know if any charges will ever be fired. And, as much as I would love to see Karl Rove summarily tossed out of the administration (or perhaps jailed or fined), his sins of yesterday have no bearing on his potential sins of today. In other words, he may not be guilty of committing any crime, even if his flexible ethics are personally revolting. But really, the question of filing charges is probably not even the point anymore. The point is:

WHY IS THERE A PINK ELEPHANT IN MY LIVING ROOM THAT NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT?

Of course, I'm referring to the fabled WMDs that Iraq obviously never had. The whole premise of doing a war with Iraq was that they represented a "clear" and "present" danger to US national security due to their quest for nuclear weapons. The Wilson affair just shows the truly cutthroat and insidious nature of the Bush administration. Not only would they out a CIA operative merely because her husband happens to be a vocal critic of the WMD claim (adding the clearly untrue allegation that he only went to Niger because she authorized it), but the Bush crew also forced the CIA to apologize (take the blame) on the Niger issue after the CIA specifically told the political leadership that there was no substance to the Niger claim.

That's right. As in previous conflicts and previous administrations, the political leadership made a decision about what it wanted to do and told the military and intelligence units to make it happen. They never cared if Iraq had WMDs or not. They never approached the issue with a discerning eye. The decision was made to invade Iraq - the only thing that remained was to loosely justify it so that they could sell it to an uninformed, trusting public. We know this is true from the Guardian article that documented how the US and British governments fixed the intel to justify the war. We also know that the US used a variety of dirty tricks to garner the votes on the Security Council in passing Resolution 1441. And we know, most importantly, that Iraq didn't have any WMDs.

What truly bothers me, however, is that Kerry didn't ask at any point during the Presidential debates, "Mr. President, where are Iraq's WMDs?" For some reason, the left has allowed the right to get away with the "shifting goalposts" justifications for Iraq. It is no longer WMDs. It's now that Saddam Hussein was a genocidal dictator who would have gone after WMDs inevitably and needed to be taken out so that the West could build a democracy in the Middle East that would serve as a shining example for the rest of the regions despotic regimes (you know, allies like Saudi Arabia). By tightly controlling the message, the Bush admin has gotten away with shifty justifications and the public has bought into it. I blame the Democrats for not skewering him on it in the first place, as well as voting for the war. In fact, I'm particularly disappointed that Josh Marshall has not made a bigger stink about this, even going as far to almost repeat the Bush line that this is "old news".

What will be the long term effects of this war? It's hard to say. But let me mention two examples. One of the side effects of the war in Vietnam was that the US ended up extensively bombing Cambodia as some VC insurgency was operating there. (We also sent troops in.) The bombing was blanket and indiscriminate. Innocent civilians were killed and the country was left with tons of unexploded ordinances that ended up maiming or killing thousands of Cambodians (mostly children) in the years after the war. As if that human impact wasn't enough, the US bombing campaign gave fuel to a Marxist insurgency movement called the Khmer Rouge. A struggling insurgency became a successful insurgency mostly because of its ability to portray the US as an imperial power that cared not for the Cambodian people. The non-democratic Cambodian government, which just happened to be a US ally, ultimately took a hit and lost the civil war because of its relationship with the "imperial" US. The result? Only about 1,000,000 Cambodians killed in less than four years in something that was a clear genocide and clearly ignored.

The US did nothing.

Another case is equally telling. The US surprise at the Iranian Revolution sent policymakers scurrying. We had been allies with Iran, but immediately switched and allied ourselves with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. While there were clear geostrategic interests in play, the 1980's saw one of the bloodiest conflicts between nations as Iran and Iraq fought to a standstill. Iraq, led by the maniac Saddam Hussein, deployed and used chemical weapons against Iran - both on the battlefield and against innocent civilians.

The US did nothing.

Later, Hussein launched a campaign against the Kurdish minority in northern Iraq. This campaign included forcibly moving the Kurds as well as mass executions. Up to 180,000 Kurds were executed in 1988 alone, with estimates reaching as high as 800,000 in a three year span. (One Iraqi official famously retorted, "There's no way 180,000 were killed. It couldn't have been more than 100,000.) The nickname 'Chemical Ali' was born during this period as the man sent to the region to "do the job" used chemical weapons against the civilian population again and again and again.

The US did nothing.

The point of these two short narratives is that foreign policy mistakes often have grave, unintended consequences that don't become clear until years later. The Reagan and first Bush administrations clearly had ideological blinders on when it came to Iraq. All they saw was a perceived threat from Iran and that perspective colored any other view they had. Even today, the key players are reluctant to accept that the offensive against the Kurds constituted genocide, probably because they are ignorant as to what genocide is (former Sec State James Baker never even read the Genocide Convention) and because it's a tough pill to swallow to admit that your actions directly contributed to the death of hundreds of thousands of innocents.

In the end, once again, the people in power that make decisions that lead America down a tough road aren't going to be the ones that sort out the mess they've made. This means, much to Tony Blair's consternation, that US and British presence in Iraq will continue to make us vulnerable to terrorism both at home and abroad. The new rallying cry for Al queda an their ilk is to point to Iraq as an example of how the West wants to dominate the Middle East and Islam in general. Make no mistake, more innocents are going to die because a cadre of politicians decided to launch into an unnecessary and dangerous war.