Okay, no question: the Washington Post has the story about the Wilson/Plame scandal. This story, frankly, blows the whole thing wide open.
The Post got one "senior administration official" to concede that "two top White House officials" disclosed Plame's identity to at least six journalists. (In its totality, the piece gives me a pretty good hunch who the 'senior administration official' is.)
Here are the five bombshell grafs in their entirety ...
A senior administration official said two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and revealed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife. That was shortly after Wilson revealed in July that the CIA had sent him to Niger last year to look into the uranium claim and that he had found no evidence to back up the charge. Wilson's account eventually touched off a controversy over Bush's use of intelligence as he made the case for attacking Iraq.
"Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge," the senior official said of the alleged leak.
Sources familiar with the conversations said the leakers' allegation was that Wilson had benefited from nepotism because the Niger mission had been his wife's idea. Wilson said in an interview yesterday that a reporter had told him that the leaker said, "The real issue is Wilson and his wife."
The official would not name the leakers for the record and would not name the journalists. The official said he had no indication that Bush knew about the calls. Columnist Robert Novak published the agent's name in a July column about Wilson's mission.
It is rare for one Bush administration official to turn on another. Asked about the motive for describing the leaks, the senior official said the leaks were "wrong and a huge miscalculation, because they were irrelevant and did nothing to diminish Wilson's credibility."
How about just wrong, and leave out that they were ineffective?
In any case, this is truly a bombshell and for the first time I suspect someone may actually lose their job over this -- though loyalty being what it is to the prez I still have my doubts. Here's what this means, as nearly as I can see it. Clearly, the White House knows who those two people are. They also know that the wrongdoing did in fact occur. Perhaps most important, the public now knows that they know. Given all that, I don't see how -- in a climate of media feeding frenzy -- it will be possible to keep their identities a secret for long. And once their identities are known ...
--Josh Marshall
And then there were three...
CBS reports the CIA referral to Justice over the Wilson/Plame story.
We'll be hearing about this on the shows tomorrow morning.
And of course the obligatory plug: I think we've got the most extensive and detailed interview on this with Ambassador Joe Wilson from September 16th, download it here in PDF.
--Josh Marshall
And then there were two. Time's Timothy Burger picks up the Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame CIA referral story and takes it a few yards farther down field.
According to Burger, Justice 
has begun a "preliminary inquiry" to determine whether there should be a full-fledged FBI investigation.
My understanding of these things is that this is basically the minimum that they must do in taking cognizance of the CIA's referral and making a formal determination whether or not to act on it. So in a sense it doesn't tell us that much more than the MSNBC story did.
On the other hand, it's another clue that a formal bureaucratic process has been triggered: a step A, followed by step B, followed by step C, and so on.
People at Justice can shut that process down, of course -- either for legit reasons or illegitimate ones. But these are specific decisions in the hands of people who are, at least in theory, politically accountable. Ultimately, the decision is in the hands of John Ashcroft, unless he decides to recuse himself.
So if a FBI investigation isn't initiated, people will know who to ask and they'll be able to ask why he or his deputies decided not to follow up on the CIA's recommendation.
Howard Dean is already banging the drum. And let's just say I know of a few senators who aren't running for president who want to start banging that drum too.
Now, one other point. Both the NBC and the Time story have said that the White House denies the charge. That, I believe, is actually not true. At least not precisely. On September 16th, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan had this to say ...
Q On the Robert Novak-Joseph Wilson situation, Novak reported earlier this year -- quoting -- "anonymous government sources" telling him that Wilson's wife was a CIA operative. Now, this is apparently a federal offense, to burn the cover a CIA operative. Wilson now believes that the person who did this was Karl Rove. He's quoted from a speech last month as saying, "At the end of the day, it's of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs." Did Karl Rove tell that --
MR. McCLELLAN: I haven't heard that. That's just totally ridiculous. But we've already addressed this issue. If I could find out who anonymous people were, I would. I just said, it's totally ridiculous.
Q But did Karl Rove do it?
MR. McCLELLAN: I said, it's totally ridiculous.
That's a classic non-denial denial. Probably because, as Tim Noah noted a few days ago, McClellan just doesn't know -- and if he's smart, he'll probably keep it that way. On the other hand, the fact that Rove didn't authorize McClellan to issue a categorical denial is awfully revealing ...
--Josh Marshall
As I noted last night, NBC reported that the CIA has made a referral to the Justice Department recommending that there be a criminal investigation into whether White House aides broke federal laws by exposing the identity of undercover employee Valerie Plame in order to retaliate against her husband, Amb. Joe Wilson.
Now, normally when such a story breaks the wire services will jump right on it and the other major papers and networks will report it out through their own sources and run the story too.
But according to the Google News Site, not a single other news outfit has reported the story or picked it up some fifteen hours later. In the circa 2003 news cycle that's a good bit of time.
Now, let me be clear: I'm not saying there's a problem with the story. In fact, I have every reason to believe it's accurate. And MSNBC still has it posted prominently.
But news that the CIA has recommended an investigation of White House aides for criminal wrongdoing is a pretty big deal. So the fact that no one else has picked it up strikes me as odd.
--Josh Marshall
You've gotta be kidding!
Here I am trying to get some Saturday R&R with a good book, when I hear this ...
(Like Michael Corleone: "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!")
If you're a regular you've been 
reading TPM's recent posts about New Bridge Strategies, the new outfit set up by President Bush's right-hand-man Joe Allbaugh and a couple of GOP uber-insider Haley Barbour's lobbying partners to land sweet Iraqi reconstruction contracts.
Well, I'm wondering whether the attention may have been unwelcome because now the New Bridge website seems to be down the memory hole.
As of early Saturday the New Bridge website --- http://www.newbridgestrategies.com --- was nowhere to be found. Then a short time later it was replaced by the Barbour Griffith & Rogers website.
(That's not completely surprising since, as we noted yesterday, New Bridge and Barbour Griffith & Rogers share the same office space near the White House.)
Perhaps it's just a glitch or they're just working on it because it seems to be going back and forth, but I'm a tad suspicious.
They seem to be reconfiguring the site as we speak (so to speak) so if readers can let me know if it changes back again, I'd be much obliged.
LATE UPDATE: As of 3:57 PM New Bridge Strategies triumphantly returns! New Bridge 2.0! The comeback!
--Josh Marshall
When last we spoke, I was telling you about Joe Allbaugh's new company New Bridge Strategies, currently shaking the Iraqi contracts money tree and building a bridge to the Gilded Age.
But cronyism, like charity, starts at home. So let's get to it.
A little more than a year ago, I told you about Edison schools, the brain child of entrepreneur Chris Whittle. The company's mission was to get contracts to run public schools on a for-profit basis and to do it better and more cheaply. The company was the toast of the Republican establishment and got tens of millions of dollars of start-up capital back in the go-go 90s.
The only hitch was that it ended up producing poor performance and for more money. Other than that it worked great.
When we last noted Edison in June 2002, Whittle was hollowing out the company to cover personal debts by having the company loan him about $9 million to buy stock in itself. That's not all that uncommon. The only problem was that Whittle had collateralized the loan with the stocks themselves. And by then Edison's stock, which had traded as high as $23 a share in the glory days of 2001, was chugging along at 85 cents a pop.
In other words, the $9 million was gone and so was the collateral. And this supposedly public company was making no effort to get its money back --- because it was controlled by Whittle. For more details on these innovative shenanigans, see TPM's June 27th, 2002 post on the matter.
In any case, in the last year Edison has bumbled along from failure to failure and the stock has spent most of the year trading a bit over a buck a share.
Things looked awfully bad until last week when Florida's state employee pension fund announced it was buying up all of Edison's stock and taking the company private --- for a cool $174 million. That's got to be the shrewdest investment the fund has made since it bought millions of shares of Enron just as the company entered its death spiral --- including 1.3 million shares just two weeks before the company declared bankruptcy.
As the St. Pete Times aptly noted yesterday, this gives "Florida the distinction of being essentially the sole owner of the nation's largest and perhaps most financially imperiled school management business."
The three member board of trustees of the fund is chaired by Florida Governor Jeb Bush, a big supporter of privatized schools and a big supporter of Edison.
So, you start a company to privatize education and take on the teachers unions. Your company fails miserably both in terms of the market and academic success. Then after you've hollowed the company out to cover your other bad debts friendly pols come along to bail you out with a couple hundred million from the teachers' (and other public employees') pension fund. I love symmetry.
--Josh Marshall
Whammo! NBC has a late report that the CIA has asked the Justice Department to investigate whether the White House broke federal law by exposing the identity of one of its undercover employees, Valerie Plame, to retaliate against her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson.
Wilson of course is the former foreign service officer who made the trip to Niger to investigate those claims of uranium sales to Iraq.
The way this works is that the CIA does its own investigation to determine whether there is reason to believe laws were broken. But the CIA has no law enforcement powers itself. So it makes a referral to the Justice Department, which obviously does have law enforcement powers. If the folks at Justice concur in the Agency's determination that there is reason to believe that laws were broken, they then task the FBI with mounting a formal criminal investigation.
(Joe Wilson discussed some of these particulars and the issue of possible White House leaks about his wife in his September 16th interview with TPM, which is now available in .pdf format.)
On its face, this news tonight almost certainly means that the CIA's internal investigation concluded that laws were broken or that there was sufficient evidence of wrong-doing for a criminal investigation to be undertaken.
The decision on whether to task the FBI with investigating the White House is now in hands of John Ashcroft. Once that happens -- if that happens -- it's not a matter of blogs and chat shows, but subpoenas and depositions.
--Josh Marshall
Crony-palooza!
I
Barbour of course is former chair of the RNC, former chair of President Bush's campaign advisory committee in DC in 2000, and former just about everything else in the DC Republican party, as well being 
one of the priciest and most wired Republican lobbyists in town.
At the moment, in his spare time, Barbour's running for governor of Mississippi. But his real digs are at his DC lobbying shop Barbour Griffith & Rogers, Inc.
Now, yesterday I told you how President Bush's right-hand-man Joe Allbaugh has just set up a new outfit -- New Bridge Strategies -- to help companies get the sweetest contracts in Iraq. New Bridge, as their site says, is "your bridge to success in Iraq."
But when you look more closely at New Bridge, of which Allbaugh is Chairman and Director, you start to see that New Bridge looks an awful lot like an outgrowth of Barbour Griffith and Rogers.
For one thing, the Vice President and Director of New Bridge is Ed Rogers --- the same Ed Rogers who is Barbour's partner in Barbour Griffith and Rogers.
Then there's the third partner, Lanny Griffith. He's Director at New Bridge and Chief Operating Officer at Barbour Griffith & Rogers.
Then there's former Ambassador Richard Burt. He's 'Director' at New Bridge and 'International Director' at Barbour Griffith & Rogers.
Needless to say, Allbaugh's wife Diane is 'of counsel' at Barbour Griffith & Rogers.
Isn't it weird how that happens when you apply for a second job and all the dudes from your first job work at the new place too? Anyway ...
Actually, you can see why it's so convenient to work at both of these two places since they both happen to be located on the 10th floor of 1275 Pennsylvania Avenue.
--Josh Marshall
The memory always goes first.
A slew of readers have just written in to tell me that Chris Matthews just made a big production on Hardball tonight about who Wes Clark voted for in 2000, and then promised to get to the bottom of it by asking Clark the question straight-out if he came on his show again. (I'm at one of my cafe haunts so I didn't see it myself.)
Well, it shouldn't be too hard to get to the bottom of this one.
From Hardball, September 17th ...
MATTHEWS: Let me ask you, who you did you vote for in 2000 for president?CLARK: I voted for Al Gore.
Oh well.
--Josh Marshall
Imagine that. Last night we told you about Joe Allbaugh, President Bush's longtime right-hand-man who just opened a company to get into the Iraq contract business. And last week we told you about how Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith's old law firm, Feith & Zell, has now opened a new division specializing in hooking up clients with the sweetest deals in Iraq. Feith & Zell is now Zell, Goldberg & Co, though they haven't yet gotten around to changing their website address, which is still www.fandz.com.
Well, there's more.
Let me introduce you to the Iraqi International Law Group, a new outfit ready to help you secure contracts for rebuilding Iraq. And let me also introduce you to the head of IILG, Salem Chalabi.
Name sound familiar? Related to Ahmed Chalabi? You bet: Salem's Ahmed's nephew.
Now, Salem just got his website up online. And he seems to have gotten some help because up until a couple days ago the site address was registered under the name of Marc Zell. Right, that Marc Zell, Feith's former law partner. And the help continues. According to Chalabi, Zell is working as the firm's "marketing consultant." In fact, at the bottom of the IILG website in the 'contact' section it lists the "Partner for International Marketing" as someone with the email address "mzell@iraqlawfirm.com". And I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that that's an email address for Marc Zell. Call me crazy.
In any case, I'd love to tell you that this latest twist is the product of my own sleuthing. But most of it comes from a very good article in Wednesday's Guardian, passed on to me by a helpful TPM reader (DW).
(Well, actually I noticed the email address on the site, so I'll give myself a small pat on the back.)
The contracts are becoming a key lever of power in Washington and in Baghdad. There's much more of this to come.
--Josh Marshall
Okay. I normally make something of a policy of not responding to jabs and cracks from other websites, because there's no end to it. But this one I simply can't resist. Wednesday evening I wrote that "the president's numbers seem to be in something close to free-fall. His approval ratings have fallen roughly 20 percentage points in four months ... the president's rapid descent is undeniable. And it's not clear he's hit bottom."
Au Contraire! says the Wall Street Journal online, referring to my quote above. The WSJ argues that my post represents "a triumph of hope over arithmetic."
Why?
The president's current rate of decline, they note, is "unsustainable" since it would lead to a mere 9% approval rating by May 2004. (They actually provide a chart.)
Continues the WSJ ...
Mathematically, then, Bush's "free fall" has to end at some point, with his ratings at least leveling off. And it seems likely that his "bottom" is a lot closer to the current 49% than to zero, for the simple reason that his own party remains united behind them.
Now, it's true that the finite number of people in the country able to offer support does represent something of a brake on one's ability to keep falling in the polls indefinitely. But somehow, if I were a Republican, I'm not sure I'd find the Journal's analysis that reassuring. My analysis may be a triumph of hope over mathematics. But I'd call theirs an unwitting triumph of mathematics over hope.
A lot closer to 49% than zero!
Is that the new motto? How the mighty have fallen.
--Josh Marshall
File this one under Un-#$%@#*&-believable.
Let me introduce you to New Bridge Strategies, LLC. New Bridge is 'Helping to Rebuild a New Iraq' as their liner note says.
Here's the company's new blurb from their website ...
New Bridge Strategies, LLC is a unique company that was created specifically with the aim of assisting clients to evaluate and take advantage of business opportunities in the Middle East following the conclusion of the U.S.-led war in Iraq. Its activities will seek to expedite the creation of free and fair markets and new economic growth in Iraq, consistent with the policies of the Bush Administration. The opportunities evolving in Iraq today are of such an unprecedented nature and scope that no other existing firm has the necessary skills and experience to be effective both in Washington, D.C. and on the ground in Iraq.
A 'unique company'? You could say that. Who's the Chairman and Director of New Bridge? That would be Joe M. Allbaugh, President Bush's longtime right-hand-man and until about six months ago his head of FEMA. Before that of course he was the president's chief of staff when he was governor of Texas and campaign manager for Bush-Cheney 2000.
Allbaugh was part of the president's so-called 'Iron Triangle' -- the other two being Karl Rove and Karen Hughes. And now Allbaugh's running an outfit that helps your company get the sweetest contracts in Iraq? That sound right to you? Think he'll have any special pull?
Visit the site to see their "interactive map of Iraq [which] will show areas of opportunity in the post-war rebuilding effort for specific industries."
It's James Fisk and Jay Gould of Arabia. Unbelievable ...
--Josh Marshall
Okay, a few random thoughts on the debate, just finishing up now in the 9 PM replay. My main reaction is that there are just too many candidates to follow any of them through the debate, any real themes, how they're doing, anything like that. The candidates who stood out to me were Clark, Dean and Kerry (and the order there is intentionally alphabetical). 
I thought each had a good debate.
Clark had some good moments, his opening statement was very good. Mainly he just didn't make any mistakes and, to my mind, showed a lot of energy. As with the rest, there just wasn't enough time hearing him talk.
The same for Dean. I can see why his supporters like him. He was strong, with those moments of sparkle-in-the-eye candor and wit. At the same time, he was on the receiving end of a lot of attacks, which is the sign of a front runner, but also took some of the edge off his game.
Kerry was sharp, strong and smart.
Many of the other candidates gave good answers and came off well -- Lieberman, Graham, etc. (Lieberman had one extremely funny moment.) But on balance the others just felt irrelevant to the race. That may be unfair to Gephardt who was definitely all over the debate. But on balance that was my impression.
--Josh Marshall
I can't tell you yet what I thought of the Democratic presidential debate because I haven't seen it yet. I'm watching the taped version on MSNBC in a few minutes. But let me say a few things about this issue of Clark and the Republican party.
I went back and looked in the Nexis database to get a sense of what people were saying in 2001 --- that is to say, before people had any interest in spinning one way or another. Also mixed in is my sense of the situation from watching Clark since the Kosovo War in 1999 and more closely since Clark wrote Waging Modern War in the summer of 2001.
So here's my sense of this.
Clark moved back to Arkansas after leaving the Army to get into business and make some money and in all likelihood to get into politics. He got politically involved and basically kept people guessing. Republican scuttlebutt had him running for office as a Republican; Democratic scuttlebutt had him running as a Democrat. He gave this speech to a Pulaski County Republican Committee dinner. But a little context from a May 20th, 2001 article in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette …
Pulaski County Committee Chairman Greg Racicot invited Wesley Clark as keynote speaker. Former supreme allied commander in Europe and leader of NATO during the recent Kosovo campaign, Clark now lives in Little Rock and works in high-technology venture capital at Stephens Inc. A hot-ticket guest speaker, Clark plans a similar appearance before the Democrats, his wife, Gert, confided.
Then when everyone was sure he was going to run for something, he signed on as a CNN military analyst in late August 2001. Here's a blurb from the time in US News' Washington Whispers …
Just when Arkansas political bigs figured that local-boy-done-good Wesley Clark was set to make a bid for public office, he's surprised them all by signing on as a military and current affairs analyst with CNN, Whispers learns. Clark, a retired Army general who was one of the U.S. military bosses in Bosnia, is expected to be a regular on the cable network as it scrambles to recover viewers who've switched to Fox News Channel and MSNBC. Since retiring, Clark has been a fixture on the Arkansas political trail, speaking at key events normally reserved for campaigning pols. That's led most state politicians to assume he's planning to run for Senate or governor. Clark, however, keeps them guessing. And not just about his future: folks don't even know if he's a Republican or Democrat.
(Signing on as a military policy analyst for CNN a couple weeks before 9/11 does seem to signal an uncanny sense of timing, but I'll leave that for another time.)
Now my sense of Clark's political direction goes like this. I take Clark at his word that he was simply not a partisan when he was in the military. (Spencer Ackerman -- he of busting the WMD intel story wide open fame -- has a really good article in the new New Republic discrediting the idea that Clark was somehow Clinton's crony or one of the 'Clinton generals.' I strongly recommend Spencer's piece.) And as late as May 2001 he was not above saying kind words about the president's foreign policy team. But at the same time, during the first half of 2001, he was writing a book that was very much at odds with the president's foreign policy, in some cases explicitly so. And I think if you read the things Clark was saying as a commentator you can see him getting increasingly disenchanted with the radical direction President Bush was taking the nation's foreign policy in. You can see some signs of this at the very beginning of the administration, as in this exchange from February 2001 on MSNBC, and then progressively more so over time …
HOLT: General, I know this is a political question. But if we knew he had weapons of mass destruction and knew where they were, would you advise an air strike against those sites?CLARK: Well, I think we're watching this at all times. And I think that the administration will look for that.
You know, we did the Desert Fox strikes two years ago because we thought that he had not agreed to the inspection visit. We knew where some of these weapons of mass destruction facilities were, and we took them out.
And if I were Saddam Hussein, I'd be quite concerned. If he's trying to do this again, he should expect that America and its allies will take the appropriate actions.
HOLT: Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, two names we associate with the Gulf War, now in big leadership positions. Do you think that will change, create more tension, perhaps bring the coalition as we knew it back together?
CLARK: Well, I think that we've got a very effective foreign policy team in this administration. I think they're going to do the right things.
But I think they're going to have to go into the Middle East, work with the allies there, go through the Persian Gulf and talk to people and get their feet on the ground first before they start making major moves.
A good piece I've found on Clark during this period is a column that Jim Pinkerton wrote in Newsday in July 2001. It's about Clark's book, but also about his views of the early stages of President's Bush's foreign policy.
Now, one final point. There's this idea afoot that Clark got into the Democratic party out of some sort of opportunism, and that this happened after 9/11. Frankly, this makes no sense. Is there really any time over the last two years that getting into the Democratic party would have seemed like a good way to get into office or advance politically? Particularly in a state like Arkansas which has been trending Republican? I mean, sad to say, but I don't see it. At the moment, President Bush is looking weaker and weaker. But that's pretty recent. Clark is clearly new to the Democratic party on many levels. But as explanations go, this strikes me as an awfully weak one.
--Josh Marshall
Check out this article by UPI's Eli Lake on the growing split between the US and the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), particularly as that rift came out into the open in New York this week.
This question has so many moving parts -- who should have authority over the ministries, who doles out the contracts, whether the IGC really has that much more legitimacy than Bremer -- that it's awfully hard to make heads or tails of. But I'm quite skeptical that a quick move to devolve control to this IGC would be a good idea.
On this issue, if on few others, I think the administration is right.
--Josh Marshall
Presidents can do a lot worse than 49% approval a year before they face reelection -- as NBC is reporting for President Bush tonight.
In fact, I'm pretty sure the last two presidents who won second terms (Reagan in 1983 and Clinton in 1995) were doing worse a year out. But the key here is that the president's numbers seem to be in something close to free-fall. His approval ratings have fallen roughly 20 percentage points in four months. And both Reagan and Clinton were on the rebound at the time.
Even with all the context which may be fairly provided (like the fact that the 70+ numbers were part of a post-war spike), the president's rapid descent is undeniable. And it's not clear he's hit bottom.
I'm hearing many conservatives say now that the White House political office is off their game. But I see no real evidence of this. The problem is more fundamental. For quite some time this White House has functioned like a heavily leveraged business, an overextended investor that suddenly gets a margin call. To extend the business metaphor, the White House has been surviving not on profits but expectations of future profits or, in other words, credibility. The White House has been able to get the public to sit tight with a lot of objectively poor news (a poor economy, big deficits, bad news from abroad) on the basis of trust.
But a combination of the manifest incompetence of the planning for post-war Iraq and the dishonesty of the build-up for the war have become increasingly difficult to defend or deny. And that's struck a grave blow against the president's credibility.
Credibility of course is unitary. And the erosion has ricocheted from foreign policy to domestic policy and back again in escalating fashion. Suddenly the White House's explanations for why the country has fallen back into half trillion dollar deficits are ringing hollow.
As we've seen recently, a hollowed-out company can push along for some time so long as no one takes a good look at the books or calls in their loans. But when it happens the fall can be dramatic.
--Josh Marshall
More talk, more diversion.
In President Bush's speech at the UN yesterday many took note of his call for a "new anti-proliferation resolution" to counter the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
Now it's becoming clear that that was just a throwaway line meant for domestic consumption, one fashioned by speechwriters rather than policy-makers and intended to give Americans the impression that the president was pushing some sort of new UN-friendly, multilateral intitiative.
Not true. Apparently the policy-makers and diplomats knew nothing about it until the words came off the president's lips.
As the AP noted with gentle understatement: "U.S. and British diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they were surprised by Bush's call for a weapons resolution and that Tuesday was the first time they had heard about the idea."
(We'll be linking to another story soon with further reporting on this.)
What's more, the actual counter-proliferation experts say such a resolution would be close to meaningless since the key controls and restrictions are already covered by existing treaties.
Needless to say, the folks in the hall knew this. This was for domestic consumption, some padding spun up by speechwriters to balance out the speech.
More talk, more diversion, more denial.
--Josh Marshall
Don't miss this post at Juan Cole's site about the new plan to privatize Iraq's economy.
--Josh Marshall
More on the UN speech and a White House in denial -- my new column in The Hill.
--Josh Marshall
Or maybe not ...
David Kay is in charge of our effort now, with some 1,500 inspectors and analysts and experts. He will provide an interim report later this month, and I am confident when people see what David Kay puts forward they will see that there was no question that such weapons exist, existed, and so did the programs to develop one.
Colin Powell
Meet The Press
September 7th, 2003
David Kay is not going to be done with this for quite some time. And I would not count on reports. I suppose there may be interim reports. I don't know when those will be, and I don't know what the public nature of them will be.
Can we call this a credibility issue yet?
--Josh Marshall
It's come to this. A US Congressman, Jim Marshall, Democrat from Georgia's 3rd District, says 
media bias is responsible for US troop deaths in Iraq.
From a column he penned the Atlanta Journal Consitution earlier this month, some of the highlights: "I found myself wondering whether the news media were somehow complicit in [Sgt. Trevor A. Blumberg's] death ... We may need a few credible Baghdad Bobs to undo the harm done by our media. I'm afraid it is killing our troops."
It really doesn't get much lower than that.
--Josh Marshall
The backdrop to the Clark-bashing from the White House and its helpers. This from Charlie Cook's weekly newsletter "Off To The Races" ...
For the White House, it is particularly important that Clark's credibility be impeached as soon as possible. President Bush now has a 40 percent disapproval rating on "handling foreign policy and terrorism." That is without a Democrat with any credibility in national security having thrown a punch. A credible Clark could inflict some very serious damage on this president, particularly after Bush's admission last week that there was no direct connection between the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and Saddam Hussein. That was news to 69 percent of Americans, who told Washington Post pollsters in August they thought a connection was likely. The Bush campaign cannot afford to have a credible Clark throwing fastballs at them for the next 15 months, whether he is the nominee, running mate or sitting on the sidelines.
This isn't rocket science, people. This is how they operate. Don't think it's random. If you go over to the Fox News website, you can see their featured video clip (page down on the left) with Brit Hume repeating the ridiculous Standard-peddled phone log canard : "White House phone logs suggest Wesley Clark is telling tales once again." You've seen this before. As I say, it's how they operate.
The only question is whether the legit press gets dragged into it, as they have in the past. It's a test for them.
--Josh Marshall
As promised, Vice President Dick Cheney's Public Financial Disclosure Report for calendar year 2001. (Before downloading the pdf file, note that it's a big file -- almost 5 megs. But a high resolution is necessary to read certain parts accurately.)
--Josh Marshall
Wanna see the journalistic equivalent of friendly fire? It ain't pretty. But here goes.
This week Howard Fineman leads his column on Wes Clark with an anecdote about how Clark allegedly tried to get into the Bush administration, got shot down by Karl Rove, and then in spite became a Democrat.
Fineman's evidence is the say-so of Colorado's Republican Governor Bill Owens and one of his appointees, Marc Holtzman.
"I would have been a Republican if Karl Rove had returned my phone calls," they say Clark told him.
Clark told Fineman he had just been kidding around. But Owens and Holtzman assured Fineman that Clark was dead serious.
Now, Owens is a Republican and he's close to Karl Rove and President Bush. So I don't think you've got to use your imagination too creatively to see what agenda Owens might be advancing -- especially since the story doesn't really add up on several other counts as well.
However that may be, this afternoon The Weekly Standard's Matthew Continetti chimes in with a quick bit of investigative reporting.
Says Continetti ...
Unfortunately for Clark, the White House has logged every incoming phone call since the beginning of the Bush administration in January 2001. At the request of THE DAILY STANDARD, White House staffers went through the logs to check whether Clark had ever called White House political adviser Karl Rove. The general hadn't. What's more, Rove says he doesn't remember ever talking to Clark, either.
Continetti goes on to say that "this isn't the general's first whopper [and that] Clark's latest tale bears little resemblance to reality," trying, to true to form, to nail down the Clark as fabulist meme -- a la Al Gore and every other Democratic presidential candidate.
But wait a second. Do you see the problem here? Right. Clark isn't the one who's saying he put in calls to Karl Rove. Owens and Hotzman are saying it.
So to the extent this means anything -- and that's highly debatable -- it discredits them, not him.
In other words, the canard floated by one group of Rove's pals on day one gets shot down by another group of his friends on day two. Like I said, journalistic friendly fire on the right.
To my friends at the Standard I can only say that the next time you put something like this together on the fly you might want to hash it out with a Venn Diagram or a flow chart or something before you go to press.
Meanwhile, Kevin Drum asks an awfully good question about how the White House suddenly became so forthcoming about phone record searches.
And look how they fall in line. Andrew Sullivan's response to the phone call idiocy ...
HOW LOOPY IS CLARK? The answer, I fear, is that he's Ross Perot without the emotional stability. So now his previous remark that he'd be a Republican if Karl Rove had returned his calls is just a metaphor, or a fabrication, or a dream, or something. Or maybe he called Rove on a cell-phone or an email. Will he respond to these discrepancies?
Ahhh the discrepancies. Someone else needs a flow chart.
--Josh Marshall
Last week, in part one of TPM's interview with Ambassador Joe Wilson, we left off in our discussion of the investigation he conducted in Niger during his trip there in the spring of 2002. Here, we rejoin that discussion in part two of the interview ...
(TPM sat down with Wilson on Tuesday, September 16th ...)
TPM: Now, as you've described your report--and a number of administration figures latched onto this one comment--and my recollection is that in speaking to one of the former government ministers, this person discussed that there was an earlier time when there seemed to be a feeler from the Iraqis about restarting trade relations. And since this country doesn't have a lot of prized goods for international trade, that this may have been a feeler about a potential uranium sale. Now, I believe that Condi Rice and perhaps even Paul Wolfowitz mentioned this, and they took this to mean, "Look, even Joe Wilson says the Iraqis tried to get back in with Niger, and even possibly about uranium."
WILSON: I think it's important--and hopefully we'll get a chance to talk about the debate in the run-up to the war, the position I took on that--but I think that it's important to understand that having been in Iraq and having worked through the Gulf War with these guys--and I date the Gulf War from the invasion of Kuwait--I think that it's important not to lose sight that the first battle was the battle for Kuwait. Desert Storm was essentially the counterattack. Saddam would have loved for us to have all believed that the Gulf War was essentially the American attack to drive him from Kuwait, but the Gulf War was essentially when he invaded Kuwait--that's what precipitated the counterattack. Anyway, I've spent enough time there not to be so naive as to believe that the Iraqis were interested in Niger for its millet, sorghum production. The Iraqis had sent an emissary there, a guy by the name of Wisam al Zahawi, a fellow that I actually knew pretty well. American-educated, he was ambassador to the Vatican, he had been one of the under secretaries at the ministry of Foreign Affairs when I was in Baghdad, he had a long and distinguished career as a diplomat. He was also a world-class opera singer. He was at the end of his career. I'm quite sure that one of the reasons they sent him to Rome was so that he could avail himself of Italian opera as his last assignment. He was sent down there to Niger--
TPM: When was this? Roughly?
WILSON: It was either '98 or '99. Our former ambassador who was in place at that time told me that the embassy had fully reported that visit. That report was reported by the government in the press. There was nothing clandestine about his visit, nothing untoward. The people that I talked to in the government at that time, said that uranium had not yet come up in discussions, although they acknowledged that perhaps uranium would have been one of the things that would have interested Iraq in a future relationship--all of which is reasonable, none of which constitutes the explicit attempt by Iraq to purchase uranium at that time. There was one other report. One of my interlocutors said that on the fringes of an international conference he was attending, he was approached by a Niger businessman who asked him to meet with an Iraqi delegation. He said that because of alarm bells going off in his mind about UN sanctions and everything else, he declined to take the meeting, and then, rather pensively, he looked up--and sort of plumbing the depths of his mind--
TPM: This when he's talking to you?
WILSON: This is when he was talking to me. He said, "Gee, maybe he would have wanted to talk about uranium." Now, I reported all of that because it seemed to me that I'd been asked to report on everything I'd found out, and that this was just sort of one of these other little tidbits. It never constituted in my mind--it was even thinner gruel than what I had found out about how the process could work. The fact that there was a meeting or a visit in which uranium was not discussed does not translate into purchased a significant quantities of uranium. The fact that there was a meeting that was not taken, that was not held, but had it been held, one of the participants opines that perhaps uranium might have been one of the things that this guy might have wanted to discuss, does not suggest uranium sales or significant quantities of uranium from Niger to Iraq. So, those were both--I thought those were both really red herrings. Again, it comes down to, the question was, Could Iraq purchase significant quantities--a quantity, 500 tons--of uranium from Niger without anybody knowing about it? Was it feasible? I came back and said, the business side of it says no and the government side of it says, because people told me--not because people told me but because this is the way that the procedure is--the government side suggests that, if there was going to be a memorandum of sale, that document would have to have the Minister of Mines, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the Prime Minister's signature on it. If that document did not have those signatures, then that document could not be authentic.
TPM: So this is--that's the report you bring back, you report to the CIA.
WILSON: Yeah, I report it. Look, before I left, when I went out there, I saw the ambassador before I did anything. First of all, I went over to see the State Department to make sure it was OK with them. Make sure that the ambassador was informed, the ambassador agreed. I went out there, I talked to the ambassador, and he said, "Look. I've heard this report, I thought that I had debunked it already, I've already talked to the President and with the government." And I said, "That's fine, my value added is I can talk to people who I know better than you know because they were in government, they were out of government before you got here. I can talk to the old government." I did it, I came back, I reported to her, she said--I said, "Well, this essentially confirms what you knew," and I also reported to somebody else on the mission staff, and then submitted--should have submitted--a separate report, or at least would have been aware of it.
TPM: That would have gone through the State Department channels, as opposed to--
WILSON: Everything that--everything in Niger goes through the State Department channels. Nonetheless, it gets bifurcated when it gets back, it goes to the--whoever the agency is who asked for the information. I returned. Within an hour of my setting down at Dulles, I was having Chinese food with the reports officer of the CIA, and I was giving him an oral briefing. I did not--I brought back notes, I did not bring back a complete report, because at the end of the day, reports officers are paid to turn briefings such as the one I'm giving you into something that's comprehensible for their particular consumer. That is the way it is done. That is the way it's always done. It also was done within an hour of my arriving back in Washington, DC, because I was leaving, actually, on a business trip the next day, and I did not have all my life to devote to this pro-bono activity.
TPM: From that point on, your firsthand knowledge of sort of where this channeled up through the ranks ends, if I understand right--
WILSON: That's true--
TPM: And you're going on your understanding of basically how the U.S. government and the nexus of the intelligence community and the executive branch works, and that tells you that since Cheney was the one who asked for the report, the report would have come back to him in some fashion or another.
WILSON: That's correct.
TPM: He may well not have known that you--
WILSON: He wouldn't have known. He would not have known that it was me. There's where there would be--
TPM: So, it's probably accurate, that assuming that this report made its way back to the vice president, that he wouldn't have know that it was you.
WILSON: No. In fact, on the contrary. The way that these things are done, particularly when it comes to U.S. citizens, is you're not identified by name. These reports essentially will give you a grade as to whether or not you're a credible reporter, and by extension, will give the report a grade. And, you know, I have some reason to believe that the grade that was given both to my credibility as well as to the report was something other than a "junk bond" grade. And, you know, it's important to remember that in addition to my report, you also had the ambassador's own report, and then you had--
TPM: The U.S. ambassador to Niger?
WILSON: The U.S. ambassador to Niger, and then you had a four-star Marine Corps general. Now, those two reports may have been in the same report because they may have been when she was taking him around on meetings, but nonetheless, these two very senior officials in our system of government of representation both were comfortable that this report of sales just simply could not have taken place. Those reports were also in files. So mine was not the only report. So when they say it was inconclusive because, you know, there was this meeting that did or did not take place at which uranium was not discussed but maybe they might have wanted to discuss uranium sometime in the future--they used that as an argument that my report was not conclusive. Well, in actual fact, there were at least two, and quite possibly three, separate reports, all of which said that this could not have taken place, this was not on. Despite that, in U.S. government files, the one report that they kept harping back to, the one that sort of allowed them to then cite, insist upon citing, the British white paper, was a report that didn't even pass muster with an Italian weekly tabloid, that never showed any hesitation about putting even bare breasts between its covers.
TPM: But on this narrow question of--and this comes up in the vice president's interview with Tim Russert--the narrow question, he's probably telling the truth when he says that he had no reason to know of your involvement with--
WILSON: Absolutely.
TPM: At the time. Before--obviously now he knows, but at the time.
WILSON: Absolutely, sure.
TPM: OK. Now, go forward a few weeks from when this all broke out, and another incident comes up. And, I'll sort of work from published accounts since I know that your ability to talk about this other controversy is circumscribed by--well, I'll just get into it. According to--Robert Novak published a column, where he said that two senior administration officials had told him that your wife works for the CIA, works under non-official cover--which basically, in sort of colloquial terms, means that she's an undercover agent--and that her relationship with you was, in some sense, what got you the job to go to Niger.
Now, there's a couple issues here. One is whether that had anything to do with why you went to Niger. The other question--to many, the more significant one--is that it is illegal for government officials to out, as it were, people working undercover for the CIA. And according to just the black-letter words of what Novak published, two senior administration officials did just that. Now, for people who work in Washington, that phrase "senior Administration official" isn't a vague term. That's a pretty small population of people. Now, this got a lot of attention. It sort of swirled around in the press. Now, I know that precisely because who works undercover for the CIA and who doesn't can't be talked about by people who know who people are, you can't--you have to sort of couch these things in hypotheticals. But, you have discussed publicly contacts that you have had with, I guess, the CIA and FBI about their potentially looking into how Novak came to have this information. What can you--do you know, is there an investigation ongoing? What do you know about that?
WilSON: First of all, the Novak allegation is very interesting. If I recall the article correctly, he flatly asserts my wife is a CIA operative. And then he quotes senior administration officials as saying that she was somehow responsible for sending me out there. Now, I think I mentioned to you earlier the context in which my trip was initially discussed, and I will tell you that at the meetings it was discussed, and at the meeting where it was proposed that I go out there, there was nobody at that meeting that I knew. There were a couple of people who came up and introduced themselves and said to me that they had been at other briefings I had given in the past on other issues, but I could not name any of them. I couldn't tell you who they are today--would pass them on the streets without recognizing them. So that's really--the decision-making process involved nobody that I knew.
The idea that--first of all, irrespective of whether my wife is or is not what Novak alleged, therefore, there was no personal involvement. I think it's important to understand about this allegation, a couple of things. One: when they're talking about "senior administration officials", they're talking about the White House. The CIA does not "out" its own. It just doesn't do that. Secondly, I think that it's important to understand that if, in fact, she is what was alleged, then it is a violation of the Intelligence Agents Identification Act of 1982, which is a felony, and the process of investigating it goes through, I believe, the CIA and then to Justice and to the FBI, and that's if she is, in fact, what they said.
If she's not, it's a real inconvenience for her to have to answer all these questions. For the purposes of the trip out there--irrespective of whether she is or she isn't--the decisions on the trip were made by people I didn't know, as I told you earlier. For those who would assert that somehow she was involved in this, it just defies logic. At the time, she was the mother of two-year-old twins. Therefore, sort of sending her husband off on an eight-day trip leaves her with full responsibility for taking care of two screaming two-year-olds without help, and anybody who is a parent would understand what that means. Anybody who is a mother would understand it even far better. Secondly, I mean, the notion somehow that this was some nepotism, that I was being sent on an eight-day, all-expense-paid--no salary, mind you--trip to the Sahara Desert. This is not Nassau we're talking about. This is not the Bahamas. It wasn't Maui. This was the Sahara Desert. And then, the only other thing that I can think of is the assertion that she wanted me out of the way for eight days because she, you know, had a lover or something, which is, you don't take lovers when you have two-year-old kids at home. So, there's no logic in it.
The Novak article itself, it does nothing to advance the story. The Novak article, I thought, was kind of a wash anyway. It just didn't make a lot of sense. But I would say this about it to those who sort of leaked this. And, I suspect that it was people who just didn't really understand how the process works. But, notwithstanding that, the fact is that this is an administration that came to office on a--
TPM: Now, when you say that, you mean the people who talked to Novak didn't understand sort of the legal seriousness of disclosing this information?
WILSON: Yeah. If the information is true. It could have been just a complete canard. Assuming for the sake of this that it's true, that they just simply didn't perhaps understand--I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that they just didn't understand the seriousness with which this sort of thing is viewed. I say that because, at the end of the day, after it was pointed out to them, you've heard nothing more from them on it.
Now, irrespective, it's certainly for an administration that came to office promising to restore honor and dignity to the White House. The idea of involving my wife in this little spat that they're having with me because I was the bearer of bad tidings was neither honorable or dignified, quite apart from whether it was legal or illegal. It was really a low-life, slimeball thing to do. And again, as I say, it added nothing to the story.
TPM: Now let me ask you--because in a number of press reports this has been discussed--that I guess it's a month ago now. Jay Inslee, who's a congressman from Seattle or thereabouts, had a town hall forum with constituents. And he invited you out there and there was a big turnout and obviously the discussion were about all the questions related to Iraq--the uranium, the WMD, how it happened, all this kind of stuff. And this question of the Novak article came up. Now there's been sort of chatter in this town about "seems to be the White House" and that people can hypothesize who might be involved there. Now in one of the questions you were asked about this let me--I'll just read the quote, when you're talking about the potential investigations--
WILSON: Actually Amy Goodman cited the quote on Democracy Now--what I--so I don't need to hear the answer--
TPM: OK, well you mentioned the name of Karl Rove.
WILSON: Yeah, and Karl Rove, when I said that, is sort of a metaphor for the White House political operation. And I--what I was saying in that was that I would do everything I could not to impede the investigation and try and help advance the investigation. Because after all, if there was somebody to--that was guilty of violation of a crime--it would be better to have them--and then I quoted Rove's name as a kind of a metaphor for the White House--"frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs" rather than just a sort of sterile exchange of he-said she-said newspaper articles and attacks.
But I've had a number of respected journalists tell me that White House sources were the ones who were telling them that the real story here is not the 16 words, it's Wilson and his wife. Now this was after the Novak article, which was a good two weeks after the White House acknowledged that the 16 words didn't rise to the stature of being included in the State of the Union Address. So I don't understand the White House backfire that they tried to light on this. They acknowledged it--it took them a while to come to grips with it, but they did acknowledge that it didn't rise to the stature of the State of the Union. But they should have moved on rather than try and drag my family into this unfairly. [Crosstalk] But I do think that the reason they did--and I've said this quite publicly--is that they thought that by coming after me they would discourage others from coming forward. The point that they tried to make is that there are consequences if you dare to step forward. And there were any number of analysts who were speaking to the press about the pressure they felt when Cheney went over there. Now I have no way of judging whether that was real or imagined pressure, but you know if they were prepared to say it to the press anonymously they might well have been prepared to come up and say it to their congressman more publicly. Congress was saying, "We welcome people coming up." Not just Democrats, but also Republicans. John Warner said on a number of occasions--this was clearly a shot across the bow at these guys. This was a message to them, "Should you decide to come forward, you too could be looking at this."
TPM: And your comments at that meeting were based on things you've heard from journalists who've come to you and said, "We were hearing this from people at the White House."
WILSON: Right, sure. A journalist will call me and they will seek a comment on something. And in order to seek a comment or a reaction, they have to tell me what they're basing it on. So I can't react to something unless I know what the initial act was, so there have been attempts to elicit comments from me by saying, "White House sources have told me that..."
TPM: And some of these said White House sources were the ones who mentioned--who made this accusation that your wife was ...
WILSON: Yeah, the one quote is, "White House sources insist the real story here is not the 16 words, it's Wilson and his wife." The real question here is how did such a whopper get in the president's State of the Union Address. And you can--the vice president the other day went back to the British white paper--"technically accurate because we cited the British white paper." We spend billions of dollars on intelligence. Intelligence is not a matter of accepting blindly what a third country tells you. Intelligence is a matter of taking pieces of information and testing them against other pieces of information you have in the hopes that you come up with something resembling facts on the ground.
The British have said "We had specific intelligence we could not share with the White House because it came from a third-party source and we were prohibited from doing so by protocols of our agreement with the third country." So we were then taking on faith a third-party piece of intelligence--and we didn't know the contents of it, the substance of it that was relayed to us by the British. And yet we spend billions of dollars on intelligence every year. And so technically accurate or not, are we going to subcontract our intelligence function to the British? I don't think so.
TPM: Before we move on to the lead-up--the positions you took in the lead-up to the war--just to sew this last point up. What you know about this is based on what journalists have told you in conversations asking comment from you and point to White House sources. But that's as far as you know in terms of how this whole thing got started.
WILSON: Yeah. The Novak piece, which sort of cites senior administration sources. Actually, I actually, after I--and these are highly respectable journalists, these are guys who are at the top of their profession. This is not Hedda Hopper, these are serious political journalists--but I did take advantage of a conversation with another journalist on another subject to sort of go over with him what ethical grounding of respectable journalists and the extent to which they would dissemble or not dissemble in order to get a reaction--whether or not they would bait you by lying about who the sources was. And I understand that it is strictly against the journalistic practice--ethics practice. And so I have no reason to doubt that. But I'll tell you quite frankly that the political office of the White House has not called me up to tell me that they were going to smear me or they were going to attack my family. In fact, I've not had a call from the White House in a couple years.
TPM: You're no longer in good graces?
WILSON: Well I regret, actually, that the administration did not actively seek the views of those of us who'd actually spent time there in the run-up to the debate
TPM: Now, "time there" being in Iraq.
WILSON: Yeah, that those of us who had some sense of what the on-the-ground truth was. But that was their decision. They decided they knew better.
TPM: So, obviously when this first issue came up--the whole uranium story and then this kind of followed from that, this story about your wife--advocates of the president have portrayed you as basically someone who is an opponent of the president and an opponent of the war trying to keep up that opposition through a different guise with both of these different things. I guess that my first question would be--just generally, just as there is in the Army and the Foreign Service, there is the tradition of an apolitical stance, but people have politics--how would you, just in general, describe your own politics?
WILSON: Well, I guess the most interesting comment that's been made about me recently was when I walked into a meeting of Democrats, I was introduced as "The Bush I political appointee who's done the most damage to the Bush II administration." There is nothing I am prouder of in my career than having been George Bush Senior's, charge d'affairs in Baghdad, and having been part of the team that put together the coalition that led to Sadaam's defeat and expulsion from Kuwait. I'm equally proud of having served as Bill Clinton's senior director for African affairs, and having had the opportunity to take the president to Africa for eleven days, in what was an historic trip. So my career achievements have spanned administrations.
TPM: Am I right that you left the Foreign Service and then later took the job at the Clinton NSC?
WILSON: No, no, no--I was still--
TPM: OK.
WILSON: My own personal politics, I suppose, the best way to characterize them is that there have been very few times in my adult life that I have voted for a winner in a presidential election.
[Laughter]
TPM: OK, well, that gives people a certain lay of the land.
WILSOn: And I will say that, the older I get, the less conservative that I become, in my view. That I do think that government has a distinct role to play to level the playing field. I do believe that the Declaration of Independence creates essentially a meritocracy, and that it is the government's responsibility to ensure that all of its citizens have an opportunity to advance on merit. Where that puts you in the political spectrum is anybody's guess, but I am against the abolition of the estate tax.
[Laughter]
TPM: Well, let's go back to --
WILSON: I'm certainly not, I believe that the Republican party has been betrayed. Its core values have been betrayed by this coalition of cultural conservatives and neoconservatives that now run the party, and I think that what you see happening is a quintessential Republican-Republican problem that only the Republicans can solve, and they will either solve it while they're in office or eventually, they will be thrown out of office, and they can solve it there.
TPM: Okay. Let's go back to about a year and a half ago, a little before the time that you made this trip to Niger. And this was the point--
WILSON: Actually, after.
TPM: Well, I may have my--my addition's never been great. Let's say, January 2002. This was the point when war with Iraq was still a good ways off, but you could see it on the horizon. The predicate was being laid on various counts, and obviously, in this country, we had a debate--if you can call it that--that went roughly a year. How would you--what was your position? How would you describe your position?
WILSON: Well, I first articulated my position, quasi-publicly, at a conference hosted by the American Turkish Council. And I co-chaired a session with the former deputy commander in chief of the Turkish Armed Forces--the Turkish General Staff--Cevik Bir, who was an old friend of mine who had served in Somalia under the UN flag and with whom I'd worked a lot on Operation Provide Comfort and Operation Northern Watch. And in my opening remarks--and my remarks came after Richard Perle's keynote address that opened the conference, so he spoke in the morning, I spoke to this group--
TPM: Was this in Washington?
WILSON: This is in Washington. And I said, at that time, that I thought that those who had listened to Richard Perle in the morning, before they provided him with their full, unqualified support, ought to consider the possibility that a year from now, if we went in the direction that we were going, the land to the south of Turkey might well be a chemical, biological and nuclear wasteland. I always thought--and that was the first time I spoke out on it. I then refined my thoughts in a series of conversations on CNN and Fox and a series of other places. And I wrote an article later in the summer in which I tried to articulate a position which was that disarmament was a good objective. It was a legitimate national security objective and concern. And the problem was, that the enforcement mechanism for the UN security Council resolution covering disarmament was broken. In other words, the inspection regime--the policing operation--had fallen apart. The solution to this was to summon again the international will, to go back at disarmament in an aggressive way. And that in order to ensure that you got Saddam's attention and compliance, that you were going to have to approach the issue from a position of strength. In other words, that you were going to have to make it very, very clear to Saddam that you were prepared to use force in order to disarm him consistent with the UN Security Council resolution. And in order for that threat of force to be credible, you actually had to be prepared to use it. So it was what I would have called sort of "muscular disarmament."
But the one thing I always cautioned about was, that you did not want to back him into such a corner that there was no face-saving way to get out, because in that corner, he would lash out. And the things that I suggested he might do, were all the things he did in the first Gulf War--but including using every weapon in his arsenal. I said that based on what Tariq Aziz had told me when I was in Baghdad in 1989, and what Saddam Hussein himself had suggested in meetings that I had with him in August of 1990, that they were prepared to use every weapon in their arsenal.
So, I suggested that the way it ought to be put to him was much the way that Jim Baker put it to Tariq Aziz in his letter, delivered to the Geneva meeting in 1990. That is, "You will disarm, or we will disarm you. Should you resist our efforts to disarm you, either by attacking our forces--using weapons of mass destruction--or by attacking any neighbor in the region, that, then, is what triggers our destroying your regime."
Now, when Jim Baker said that to Tariq Aziz, they were talking about use of nuclear weapons against our troops when we were expelling them from Kuwait. That was the red line to him: you use weapons of mass destruction against our troops, we'll come all the way to Baghdad. Otherwise, we're going to expel you from Kuwait, whether you go peacefully or not.
TPM: Now, let me ask you a question as I guess it's four or five months now after the fall of the regime, and to date, no evidence of weapons of mass destruction have been found. You know, as the standard phrase goes, "Maybe it'll turn up" but it's looking less and less likely that our fundamental appraisal was right, that there was at least chemical--at least a kind of an ongoing chemical and biological capacity. Now, there's this whole debate in this country about whether the administration hyped the evidence or deceived the public. It certainly seems to me that there was a very broad consensus in this city, at least, that he, that Saddam Hussein, maintained some sort of biological, chemical and biological capacity, certainly might've been working on nuclear weapons, but very few people thought that he had gotten out of the chemical weapons business. What did you think before the war and how did that inform your--
WILSON: I always thought that he had chemical weapons because we knew that he'd obviously used them, we knew that he had an appetite for them. There was no reason to suspect that he wasn't continuing to manufacture chemical weapons as best he could. We knew that he had biological precursors; the question was always whether he had perfected the way of weaponizing the precursors--in other words, turning smallpox into a real weapon. And we were all surprised when, in 1995, we found out after Hussein Kamel's defection that his nuclear program was as far and vast as it was.
So all of those, I thought, were absolutely legitimate. Saddam Hussein had not complied, to the satisfaction of the international community, with 687, it was important to get his compliance. I thought it was important to establish beyond the compliance, long-term monitoring, just because it was clear that just as long as his regime was in power, you had a government that was prepared, not just to build weapons of mass destruction but also to use them--he had demonstrated that.
The fact that we haven't found weapons of mass destruction is surprising to me, based on that, but that doesn't negate the necessity of having a robust disarmament campaign against him. Now, for all the reasons that everybody's articulated, the problem that I always had, was the multiplicity of objectives that ended up being raised to get us over the top in getting public opinion for the war, which sort of served to confuse everybody and to perhaps mask the real reason we did this. And, more to the point, the necessity or the assumption that by taking the--what I considered to be the highest-risk, lowest-reward policy option as your best way of getting at disarmament, and/or preventing the transfer of weapons of mass destruction from Saddam to an international terrorist organization. Invasion, conquest, occupation, always seemed to me to be not the smartest way that we should go after the disarmament objective.
TPM: Given--let's fast-forward to late 2002, when we were in this kind of final skirmish, really, with our allies in Europe. We got into this back-and-forth with the Turks, it--a lot of people in this country, and I think that their assumption was largely vindicated--that sort of, the fix was in, that we didn't want this to end in a way short of the regime being taken out. To the extent that the administration made the judgment that we couldn't--that our national security interests were simply not compatible with his staying in power, how would you evaluate how they went about it? I mean, obviously, we didn't end up getting a large coalition. We fought the war in ways that now seem to have made it more difficult to win the peace. What about this question of how the diplomacy was handled?
WILSON: Well, I think that we short-circuited the international community, but I think that it was more than just the timing of it, more than just rushing up there trying to get a second resolution and not doing it. It was also through the multiplicity of objectives. One of the things that we found in the first Gulf War was that if you wished to do this multilaterally, you had to have objectives to which everybody could sign up. Otherwise, everybody would find reasons not to sign up, leaving you alone. So that meant that you had to narrow your objectives to something that was sustainable, both in the context of the coalition you're trying to build, and also in the context of international law and the UN Charter. And the genius of the first Gulf War was that everyone understood this as part of what the then-President Bush called the New World Order, which would be that over the next twenty or thirty years that we would have a lot of these small wars, which we would want to resolve through international coalitions and with the legal imprimatur of the United Nations.
This administration turned all of that on its head. They went with the multiplicity of objectives, none of which were in and of themselves necessarily sustainable, otherwise, they would not have gone with the other ones. And, as a consequence, they ended up doing it essentially with the British. And, you know, they can talk about their thirty-six other countries, but Tonga, frankly, does not count, when you talk about this. So, it was, for all intents and purposes, a unilateral activity. I think that the consequences of this have been enormous. I think that, first and foremost, you have seen that support for, and affection for the United States that we saw the outpouring of on September 12, 2001--that's all gone away. I cannot imagine what the newspapers' headlines would look like again after--if we got hit again by a massive terrorist attack, but I doubt seriously that you would see a lot of headlines saying, "We are all Americans now," as you did after September 11. Brzezinski, I think, has put it just right when he says that at a time when our military power's at its zenith, we find our political and moral authority at its lowest ebb ever.
Moreover, I think that, to a large extent, we've taken the whole doctrine of collective security, and we've turned it on its head. When you get Richard Perle gloating in newspaper articles that he writes in The Guardian that one of the side benefits of this is the death-knell of the United Nations, and yet, the only thing that they have to put on the table to replace it is Tommy Franks' Central Command--where we've seen already, less than a hundred days or a hundred days after the end of major combat operations, we've seen that Tommy Franks and CENTCOM cannot play the role of Globalcop. So, we've seen the limits to which we can actually replace the doctrine of collective security with aggressive unilateralism or illiberal imperialism--what Max Boot calls jodhpurs and pith helmet imperialism--which I frankly think is what you should call it.
If I could put a name on this, it would be the jodhpur and pith helmet imperialism. Thirdly, I think that from a strict perspective of the war on terrorism, we have created this new front by having attacked Iraq. This is not a front that was there, that we had to go into. It became the front because we made it the front. It is not, first and foremost, a terrorism battle. It is, first and foremost, a battle against an insurgency, nascent to be sure. And it is an insurgency that will draw in jihadists. Just like the Spanish Civil war drew in Ernest Hemingway and others, but first and foremost, it is an insurgency. But, more to the point, in the aftermath of 'Shock and Awe', which was viewed by a population of 1.2 billion through the eyes of Al-Jazeera as a humiliation, you have expanded the community of potential terrorists. I don't think that benefits us going forward in the war on terrorism, which is another legitimate national security objective, but one which cannot be won by fighting it as if you were playing Whack-a-Mole.
Other than that, I have no strong opinions.
End of Interview ...
Later this week the complete text of the interview with links will be posted in the TPM Document Collection
--Josh Marshall
Are those same "senior administration officials" who blew Valerie Plame's cover to Bob Novak bending his ear again? You don't have to look too hard at the avalanche of mud being pushed against Wes Clark to get a very clear idea of who the White House doesn't want to run against next November.
In any case, back to Mr Novak, our cog in the machine. Novak's column today accuses Clark of hobnobbing with various and sundry war criminals. In particular he describes a meeting between Clark and Bosnian-Serb arch-war criminal Gen. Ratko Mladic. They were in fact photographed wearing each others' caps.
Thus Novak ...
Clark was a three-star (lieutenant general) who directed strategic plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington. On Aug. 26, 1994, in the northern Bosnian city of Banja Luka, he met and exchanged gifts with the notorious Bosnian Serb commander and indicted war criminal, Gen. Ratko Mladic. The meeting took place against the State Department's wishes and may have contributed to Clark's failure to be promoted until political pressure intervened. The shocking photo of Mladic and Clark wearing each other's military caps was distributed throughout Europe....
U.S. diplomats warned Clark not to go to Bosnian Serb military headquarters to meet Mladic, considered by U.S. intelligence as the mastermind of the Srebrenica massacre of Muslim civilians (and still at large, sought by NATO peacekeeping forces). Besides the exchange of hats, they drank wine together, and Mladic gave Clark a bottle of brandy and a pistol.
Now, why would Clark meet with a man who'd masterminded the Srebrenica mass-killing? Perhaps because the event hadn't occured yet. Clark met with Mladic in late August 1994. The Srebrenica massacre happened in July 1995.
Now, we knew Mladic was bad news well before Srebrenica. So in itself this doesn't settle the matter. And this incident deserves to be looked at in the context of all of Clark's activities in the Balkans -- which stretch through much of the 1990s. But I put it forward as an example of the caliber of honesty and integrity in reporting that we're dealing with in this case.
Certainly we can expect more and more of this from the usual suspects.
--Josh Marshall
Coming up later today, part two of TPM's interview with Ambassador Joseph Wilson. And part one of the Cheney Files, the the full text of the Vice-President's most recent financial disclosure statement.
--Josh Marshall
Once an adman, always an adman. When reading Bill Safire's columns I sometimes wonder when and how he distinguishes between things he actually believes to be true and those which he simply makes up in order to craft a cleaner argument.
Eventually you realize that it's not a distinction he makes.
Read his column today on Wes Clark, in which he unveils the grand-plan of the Clinton's to use Clark to knock Dean out of the race and weaken the other candidates to prepare the way for Hillary's eventual entrance into the race sometime in early 2004. Clark, says Safire, will then be rewarded with the #2 slot.
There are a lot of Clinton folks around Clark right now. And there are more than a couple Clinton insiders who don't realize, to my undying surprise, that she will never be president of the United States or, I think, even run.
Those details aside, you'd think Safire would steer clear of these double-bank-shot conspiracy theories after all the Clinton hokum he got caught peddling in the 1990s.
--Josh Marshall
Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. Those, of course, are Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages of grieving. But the model applies to public policy as well. And sometimes, shall we say, more than others.
I had moments of imagining -- a forlorn hope, I grant you -- that the White House might have gotten up to the 'bargaining' stage in dealing with the de