It's all about Cheney

While the news and rumors surrounding the Plame case may be focusing on Karl Rove and Scooter Libby it is also bringing to light what many of us have suspected all along, it's all about Vice President Dick Cheney. We heard that from Colin Powell's former chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, last week who said:

....that foreign policy had been usurped by a "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal," and that President Bush has made the country more vulnerable, not less, to future crises.

We are apparently going to hear more of the same from Brent Scowcroft in a New Yorker magazine commentary tomorrow. At The New York Times today Richard W. Stephvenson and Douglas Jehl have a nice summary of the case against Cheney in Leak Case Renews Questions on War's Rationale.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 22 - The legal and political stakes are of the highest order, but the investigation into the disclosure of a covert C.I.A. officer's identity is also just one skirmish in the continuing battle over the Bush administration's justification for the war in Iraq.

That fight has preoccupied the White House for more than three years, repeatedly threatening President Bush's credibility and political standing, and has again put the spotlight on Vice President Dick Cheney, who assumed a critical role in assembling and analyzing the evidence about Iraq's weapons programs.

While Wilkerson's critic was big Scowcroft's commentary on Monday may prove to be "shock and awe" to Cheney, Rumsfeld and their neocon cultists.

Mr. Scowcroft, a self-described realist who prides himself on seeing what could go wrong in any course of action, argues against what he characterizes as the utopian view of neoconservatives within the administration that toppling Saddam Hussein would open the door to democracy throughout the Middle East. He also suggests that Mr. Cheney is a man much changed, and not for the better, from the policy maker he worked with closely during the Persian Gulf war in 1991.

Mr. Scowcroft has long expressed reservations about the current White House's foreign policy approach and about the Iraq war in particular, but his comments could further exacerbate divisions among Republicans, especially to the degree that they are seen as reflecting the views of his close friend, the first President Bush.

"The real anomaly in the administration is Cheney," Mr. Scowcroft told Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker. "I consider Cheney a good friend - I've known him for 30 years. But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore."

The Cheney/Rumsfeld cabal was not only wrong about invading Iraq but were wrong about how to fight the war and what to do after the initial invasion. If the war had gone well there wouldn't be as much controversy now.

There's a daisy chain that stems from the fact that no weapons of mass destruction have been found," said Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

"Iraq was at core a war of choice, and extraordinarily expensive by every measure - human life, impact on our military, dollars, diplomatically," said Mr. Haass, a former senior State Department official under President Bush. "If this war was widely judged to have been necessary along the lines of Afghanistan after 9/11, I don't believe you would have this controversy. If the war had gone extremely well, you wouldn't have this controversy."

Even if no indictments result from Fitzgerald's investigation it has been a win for those who opposed the war and a loss for the Cheney/Rumsfeld cabal because it has shown that either the office of the Vice President manufactured false intelligence to justify the war or they were totally incompetent and out of touch with reality.

Mr. Libby's involvement in assembling the case that Iraq's weapons constituted an urgent threat began well before the invasion. Along with Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, then senior Pentagon officials, Mr. Libby was painting a dark picture of Iraq's capabilities and alleged that Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda.

In late 2002 and early 2003, according to former government officials and several published accounts, Mr. Libby was the main author of a lengthy document making the administration's case for war to the United Nations Security Council. But in meetings at the Central Intelligence Agency in early February, Secretary Powell and George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, rejected virtually all of Mr. Libby's draft as exaggerated.

John E. McLaughlin, the former deputy C.I.A. director, referred to this period in a statement issued in April 2005. "Much of our time in the run-up to the speech was spent taking out material, including much that had been added by the policy community after the draft left the agency, that we and the secretary's staff judged to have been unreliable," Mr. McLaughlin said.

In his 2004 book "Plan of Attack," Bob Woodward of The Washington Post wrote that Mr. Powell had rejected Mr. Libby's draft as "worse than ridiculous," which Mr. Wilkerson alluded to in his recent speech.

That episode added to tensions between Mr. Cheney's office and senior officials at the C.I.A., which had also dismissed as unwarranted claims by Mr. Cheney and others about close links between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

We have seen a move by Republicans to distance themselves from the administration of George W. Bush in recent weeks and facts getting a public airing as the result of the Plame investigation will only increase this. Don't be too surprised if Mr. Cheney doesn't finish out his term as VP.