Every Frog March Begins With a Single Step

It has been a long time in coming. Twenty-one months ago, in one of my rare fits of optimism, I wrote the following about the Plame affair:

During the Clinton years, we got used to more-or-less constant pseudo-scandals -- great waves of public disgrace signifying nothing. These were of course topped off by a single, authentic scandal. But even that exception proved the rule, as the story of one very public middle-aged man's entanglement in a very private moral snare was overwhelmed by the sheer size and volume of the scandal machinery deployed to exploit his personal failing for partisan gain.

So it comes as something of a shock to be confronted with the real thing, probably for the first time since Iran-Contra, and it's perhaps understandable that most journalists have had a hard time getting their bearings. They are, after all, out of practice handling the real thing. But that is where we are.

After some initial confusion (much of it intentionally sewn by administration apologists) the basics of the story are now completely clear for all to see: At least two top White House officials repeatedly disclosed the identity of an undercover CIA officer, in probable violation of federal law, in order to punish and/or discredit an influential critic of the administration's Iraq policy.

Early efforts to tone down the story were doomed by the facts: According to several sources, the CIA officer in question is apparently a career spy who has worked under the deepest level of cover. Her work focused on the very issue (WMD proliferation) that the administration hyped as their rationale for speeding to war in Iraq, and the CIA itself has formally notified the Justice Department that national security was in fact compromised by the revelation of her identity. The officials who revealed it were both highly placed and quite deliberate in their efforts to get the story out. Finally, there is nothing remotely routine about this particular kind of leak (that of a covert officer's identity) -- least of all originating from the White House.

I do not see how this can now stop short of high administration officials being questioned under oath (and probably under the gaze of television cameras) about their involvement. Because the Democrats do not control any of the relevant investigative machinery, it is possible that the day of reckoning may be put off for a while. (If Bush holds on to win reelection, '04 may prove to be his '72.) But once the process begins, the incentives for more disclosures -- whether anonymously to the press (Deep Throat) or publicly to the investigators (John Dean) -- is likely to become overwhelming.

Will it bring the administration down? This depends on how much of a house cleaning (if any) Bush is willing and able to do, and how soon he does it (if at all). The longer he waits, the worse will be the eventual revelations, for the closer they will come to the presidency. At the limit of recklessness (or assuming there is already an evidentiary trail that leads straight to the top, one that is too well established to permit of erasure), the administration will bring itself down -- exactly as Nixon's did.

I am pretty sure this is the beginning of the end.

In retrospect, I ought to have closed with Churchill's old line: "This is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end, but it may be the end of the beginning." For that's what the original Plame revelation has proved to be: the end of that first phase of the Bush administration's grand snow job regarding the Iraq war, during which no potentially fatal public mistakes had yet been committed in the effort to cover up the fundamental chicanery of the whole project.

By that schedule, we might only now be reaching the beginning of the end -- the phase when the normally-somnabulent Washington Press corps rouses itself, shakes off its collective professional stupor and begins to realize that, on this matter (as indeed on nearly everything touching the Iraq war), they have been played for fools. At least that is what Garance Franke-Ruta and Kevin Drum think, while both Digby and Yglesias are, for different reasons, quite a bit more pessimistic.

Franke-Ruta and Drum have on their side the fact that today's blistering White House press gaggle, following upon the Newsweek revelation (that Karl Rove was Matt Cooper's source) triggered a rare trifecta of homepage headlines in both The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as an actual piece of critical journalism from the often-obsequious AP.

I, too, would like to believe that this one good day portends many more to come -- that the floodgates of critical press scrutiny will at last swing wide. But I fear that Yglesias is probably right:

"The issues here, fundamentally, run much deeper than the subjective attitudes of the press corps vis-à-vis the White House. It has to do with the conception of journalism as primarily a stenographic activity, concerned with duly recording official statements and, perhaps, balancing those statements with contradictory quotations from official or quasi-official members of the opposition."

For the time being, therefore, I am pinning my hopes, not on any sudden change in professional self-conception on the part the Washington press, but rather on Mr. Fitzgerald, his Grand Jury, and his subpoena power. Until and unless the Democrats can win control of the House in '06 (so far still an unlikely prospect, given the system of incumbent protection), this is the only game in town -- and by far the most likely source of continuing pressure on the press to begin probing the manifold web of lies whereby the country was led down a pre-determined path to unprovoked war.

And that, let us never forget, is what the Plame affair is all about. It is the most prominent of many loose hanging threads which, if pulled sufficiently far, could unravel the entire dark, knotted history of what Mark Danner has called "the secret way to war." As Danner reminds us:

Whether or not the Downing Street memo could be called a "smoking gun," it has long since become clear that the UN inspections policy that, given time, could in fact have prevented war—by revealing, as it eventually would have, that Saddam had no threatening stockpiles of "weapons of mass destruction"—was used by the administration as a pretext: a means to persuade the country to begin a war that need never have been fought.

The crime behind the crime, in other words, is perhaps the highest crime the executive of a democratic country can commit -- namely, deceiving his own people in order to make war, not for their necessity, but at his pleasure.

For the leak of Plame's identity was a naked attempt by the White House to discredit Joe Wilson's public airing of his finding that the Niger uranium story -- so instrumental to the Bush case for war -- was transparently false. As Josh Marshall and others have reminded us, behind the attack on Wilson's public unmasking of the Niger yellowcake hoax stand the forged documents themselves -- the ones that launched that hoax to begin with. And, we might add, alongside those documents sits the putative "evidence" of the aluminum tubes that proved not to be appropriate for uranium enrichment, and all the tall tales of "curveball" regarding Iraqi WMD, not a single one of which proved to be true.

The attack on Wilson was not simply an ad hoc response, however ruthless and possibly even illegal, to a particularly troublesome administration critic. It was instead part of a systematic cover-up of the process whereby, in the words of the Downing Street Memo, the pre-war "intelligence and facts" had been "fixed around the policy" of regime change in Iraq.

This, and not simply the legal culpability of Karl Rove in this single incident (bad as that is), is the real quarry here -- just as the real quarry in Watergate wasn't mere legal culpability for the famous "third-rate burglary" but an entire mechanism of force and fraud aimed at supressing domestic opposition to the continuation of a bitterly unpopular war, deceitfully and unjustly begun. And Nixon of course did not launch his war, but rather inherited it; the Bush administration is, in this respect, like the worst of Johnson and Nixon combined.

Only time will tell if a quarry of that size can be brought to bay without an opposition party being in control of at least part of the federal government. But I tend to think that it can not be. So even if this is the beginning of the end, we still have a long, long way to go before we reach that end.