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Saturday, July 16, 2005

Another perspective
Posted by Jill | 9:20 AM

I have a hard time buying the notion of Karl Rove being an unwitting pawn in an elaborate setup by the Pentagon's civilian neocons (for one thing, it smacks of the "all-powerful Jews" meme), but this is certainly an interesting perspective:

This isn't about Rove.

It's about a cabal of war hawks inside the administration who passed on this information to others without telling them about Plame-Wilson's deep cover status, perhaps suggesting that she was just an analyst working at a desk rather than a covert operative involved in a vitally important overseas operation, the knowledge of which was highly compartmentalized and only dispensed on a need-to-know basis. When Rove and his shills blabbed to reporters and anyone who would listen, they didn't realize that they were aiding and abetting an elaborate ploy to stick it to the CIA.

Seen against the backdrop of the fierce intra-bureaucratic war that broke out in the administration in the run-up to the Iraq war – with the CIA and the mainline intelligence and diplomatic communities pitted against civilian neoconservatives in the upper echelons of the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President – the outing of Plame and her colleagues amounts to an act of espionage committed out of a desire to exact revenge. The leakers meant to retaliate not just against Joe Wilson, through his wife, but against the "old guard" that was resisting the campaign to lie us into war. When the CIA wouldn't go along with the neocon program and "spice up" their analyses with Ahmed Chalabi's tall tales and the outright forgery of the Niger uranium documents, the War Party struck back at them with the sort of viciousness for which the neocons are rightly renowned.

The neocons had a fix on their target; now the question was how to get someone else to pull the trigger. The leakers, in order to protect themselves, "laundered" the leak through journalists (Judith Miller, one of their favorite conduits) and Bush operatives – Rove.


Rove may be many things, but he's nobody's pawn. Or is he? If he is, this should put to bed the idea that Washington is Karl Rove's town and everyone else just lives in it. That may be Rove's dilemma here -- should he allow himself to be perceived as a rabid partison so fierce that he'll jeopardize national security to score points for his team, or a hapless pawn in a game conducted by a bunch of shadowy neocons?
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