Sharks & Vultures

The Karl Rove/Valerie Plame inquiry that I've discussed in detail previously has taken two new twists over the last 24 hours. First, a news report came out yesterday stating that President Bush knew about the leak two years ago and was angry at Rove for his "sloppy" handling of the leak. This, if accurate, would mark Mr. Bush as a liar since the White House line has always been that he knew nothing about it and would fire anyone who played a role in the leak. The White House is denying the accuracy of that news report yet not commenting as part of their long held policy of "not commenting on ongoing investigations". This report is likely to be accurate as the reporter is a former confidant of the Bush family (co-wrote James Baker's memoirs) who was granted access that most reporters were not granted (was considered for Pentagon spokesman). Thus, the press is now going nuts about this story and the White House is squirming again.

The other big news is that, as expected, the Rove machine sees blood in the water. The public knowledge currently available about the inquest appears to indicate that the true culprit might be I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby (all good scandals involve a guy with a letter as his first name). While I seriously doubt Libby was able to do something like this on his own, as this article makes clear, Rove is launching a desperate bid to save himself. As it appears likely that someone in the administration is going to take a fall for this, Rove has nicely positioned himself as innocent while pinning the blame on Libby. What's interesting, however, isn't that Rove testified to that end in front of the grand jury. No, what's really interesting is that suddenly, this is becoming public. From where I'm sitting, it appears that the political machine is churning and this time, the Dogs of War are focused on one of their own. I'll not gleefully chortle as self-emasculation gets underway because it's my hope that justice is served. If Rove is guilty, then he needs to go down, along with the rest of the secret inner core of dirty politicos.

At any rate, there's another angle to all of this that I find fascinating in a three-car-accident-on-the-highway kind of way. One thing that has been revealed by the inquiry and media attention is that there was/is a tight cabal of administration officials that essentially made the Iraq policy. A lot of discussion has gone into the influence of the neo-conservatives, but little press had been dedicated to exactly how that influence enabled the war. It seems obvious now that the Iraq WMD fable was organized, created, and propagated by the tight relationship between Vice President Cheney and SecDef Rumsfeld. Colin Powell's former chief of staff Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson blows the cover off in this report in which he argues that the Cheney-Rumsfeld alliance hijacked US foreign policy and force fed a specific agenda and viewpoint on Iraq. Wilkerson has now joined Richard Clarke, the former Terrorism Czar, and Paul O'Neill, the former Treasury Secretary, in making this argument. The falling rocks have become an avalanche.

President Bush, by all accounts, is a hands off people manager. He doesn't want to know details, he doesn't like to get dirty. He's not Bill Clinton or the first George Bush, who both notably would stay up late reading memo's and reports and had full engagement in most levels of policy. Instead, Bush employs people he feels he can "trust", they give advice, and he makes the decisions. While I disagree with this management style at many levels, one thing that seems clear is that the hands off approach enabled Bush's minions to carefully tailor their desired agenda in a way that would embolden the President to act in Iraq.

I want to make this clear: I'm not accusing the President of anything. From what I've heard and read, he seems like a genuinely nice guy. But, more to the point, unless you're in the Oval Office, you'll never know what goes on in his head and how decisions are truly made. But, I am fairly convinced at this point that the decision to go into Iraq was made by the Cheney-Rumsfeld group, that the group tailored intelligence data to support their claim, that they sold that information to the President, and that we went to war for extremely curious reasons in a situation that didn't require action.

The big picture, of course, is how the White House operates under President Bush. While this will inevitably be debated for years to come by historians and political scientists, it looks like the President's management style encourages subordinates to compete with each other to gain the ear of the decision maker. Regardless of the actual effect on policy, what that tactic really encourages is divisions in the upper levels of the administration. For example, Defense didn't talk to State because State wanted a softer line on Iraq. Thus, when a State Department office concluded (correctly) that Iraq had not reconstituted it's WMD program, that information never made it to Defense (or was blatantly ignored). The cumulative effect of this type of management is that decisions are made with a less than fair and full review of the facts resulting in catastrophe's like the Iraq invasion.