Rove's role, fate in CIA scandal just a sideshow
Dawn Turner Trice/Chicago Tribune
July 18, 2005
I'm considering printing up T-shirts that say: It's the war, stupid!
If we look at the story about Karl Rove and the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame in the narrow scope of whether special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald will be able to indict Rove, we miss a bigger story.
That's the one about how the Bush administration consistently has used questionable tactics (paying "journalists," prepackaging news stories, disparaging adversaries) to promote its policies, seemingly at any cost.
If administration officials merely were peddling "No Child Left Behind" or the privatization of Social Security to the party faithful, we probably would tune it out as we would an infomercial.
But this is war, and the truth about our involvement in it has to trump toeing the policy line. Soldiers, civilians and their families are paying the ultimate price daily. The war continues to raise the question of whether, as the Downing Street Memo says, "intelligence and facts were fixed around the policy."
No Iraqi election or constitution, no Saddam Hussein conviction should ever shake our resolve to obtain the answer to that question.
As of Sunday, the official number of American soldiers who have died in the Iraq war was 1,761, according to the Department of Defense. (That doesn't include the death toll from a weekend of violence in Iraq.) More than 13,000 of our soldiers have been wounded. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have fallen on the battlefield that has no bounds.
Despite more than 500 suicide bombings since the U.S.-led invasion, the upbeat spin from Washington has been unrelenting.
With public discontent about the war rising, last month President Bush delivered his prime-time pep rally on Iraq, standing amid troops from the nation's largest Army base. I was amazed at how he continued to justify the war based on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction.
It doesn't matter that the assertions that Iraq was amassing WMDs have been proved unfounded. It doesn't matter that there has been no connection between Iraq and Sept. 11. The administration has taken a "that's my story and I'm sticking to it" stance that's bordering on shameful.
But the marketing of this war hasn't happened without the media and the public being willing consumers.
We, the media, faced with our own scandals, have been skittish about ferreting out missteps in Washington. The media get hot on the trail of something gone awry in this administration, but have cooled by the time the spin doctors do their thing. Consider Newsweek's speedy retraction of its story about accusations of prison guards mutilating the Koran at Guantanamo Bay.
We, the public, haven't been clamoring for more information about whether we were misled about invading Iraq. In part, we can blame our short-term memory and attention deficits. But there's also our fear, which this administration has been adept at parlaying into big-time political capital.
Each new terrorist attack reminds us of our own vulnerability. And we seem happiest knowing that the administration is doing something to keep us secure. The question is whether being in Iraq really makes us more secure or just makes us feel more secure.
We can't forget that this war also has been effectively marketed because of what has been hidden from view: the bodies of our solders returning home in their flag-draped coffins.
The administration isn't unfamiliar with questionable marketing tactics. We've seen "journalists" getting paid a lot of money to plug Bush's initiatives. We've seen fake journalists given entree to presidential news conferences to lob the easy questions.
But when it comes to the war, the truth shouldn't be glossed over or distorted to fit into sound bites.
Whether Rove is indicted in the Plame scandal or not shouldn't cloud our getting to the bottom of whether this whole ordeal began as a way to get revenge on Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. He accused the administration of twisting facts to justify an Iraq war. Were the facts really twisted?
The line from the White House is that we're safer from terrorist attacks now that Iraq is "sovereign."
If you buy that, maybe I'll have a T-shirt I could sell you.
----------
July 18, 2005
I'm considering printing up T-shirts that say: It's the war, stupid!
If we look at the story about Karl Rove and the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame in the narrow scope of whether special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald will be able to indict Rove, we miss a bigger story.
That's the one about how the Bush administration consistently has used questionable tactics (paying "journalists," prepackaging news stories, disparaging adversaries) to promote its policies, seemingly at any cost.
If administration officials merely were peddling "No Child Left Behind" or the privatization of Social Security to the party faithful, we probably would tune it out as we would an infomercial.
But this is war, and the truth about our involvement in it has to trump toeing the policy line. Soldiers, civilians and their families are paying the ultimate price daily. The war continues to raise the question of whether, as the Downing Street Memo says, "intelligence and facts were fixed around the policy."
No Iraqi election or constitution, no Saddam Hussein conviction should ever shake our resolve to obtain the answer to that question.
As of Sunday, the official number of American soldiers who have died in the Iraq war was 1,761, according to the Department of Defense. (That doesn't include the death toll from a weekend of violence in Iraq.) More than 13,000 of our soldiers have been wounded. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have fallen on the battlefield that has no bounds.
Despite more than 500 suicide bombings since the U.S.-led invasion, the upbeat spin from Washington has been unrelenting.
With public discontent about the war rising, last month President Bush delivered his prime-time pep rally on Iraq, standing amid troops from the nation's largest Army base. I was amazed at how he continued to justify the war based on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction.
It doesn't matter that the assertions that Iraq was amassing WMDs have been proved unfounded. It doesn't matter that there has been no connection between Iraq and Sept. 11. The administration has taken a "that's my story and I'm sticking to it" stance that's bordering on shameful.
But the marketing of this war hasn't happened without the media and the public being willing consumers.
We, the media, faced with our own scandals, have been skittish about ferreting out missteps in Washington. The media get hot on the trail of something gone awry in this administration, but have cooled by the time the spin doctors do their thing. Consider Newsweek's speedy retraction of its story about accusations of prison guards mutilating the Koran at Guantanamo Bay.
We, the public, haven't been clamoring for more information about whether we were misled about invading Iraq. In part, we can blame our short-term memory and attention deficits. But there's also our fear, which this administration has been adept at parlaying into big-time political capital.
Each new terrorist attack reminds us of our own vulnerability. And we seem happiest knowing that the administration is doing something to keep us secure. The question is whether being in Iraq really makes us more secure or just makes us feel more secure.
We can't forget that this war also has been effectively marketed because of what has been hidden from view: the bodies of our solders returning home in their flag-draped coffins.
The administration isn't unfamiliar with questionable marketing tactics. We've seen "journalists" getting paid a lot of money to plug Bush's initiatives. We've seen fake journalists given entree to presidential news conferences to lob the easy questions.
But when it comes to the war, the truth shouldn't be glossed over or distorted to fit into sound bites.
Whether Rove is indicted in the Plame scandal or not shouldn't cloud our getting to the bottom of whether this whole ordeal began as a way to get revenge on Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. He accused the administration of twisting facts to justify an Iraq war. Were the facts really twisted?
The line from the White House is that we're safer from terrorist attacks now that Iraq is "sovereign."
If you buy that, maybe I'll have a T-shirt I could sell you.
----------
posted by Jamie @ 8:50 AM
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