Rove's Exit Denial?/Hollowness in Baghdad

A few days ago, The Washington Post front-paged a piece by White House correspondent Peter Baker who checked on all those Bush aides who have fled the mother ship in recent months. It seems that some are having bad dreams (about Iraq), some have found they've lost friends (who no longer respect them due to their W. affiliation), and some are depressed because they no longer receive a torrent of important email. How sad. None admit that the Bush gang screwed up by invading Iraq and then mismanaging the war.

Karl Rove, for one, told Baker he felt guilty about "deserting" Bush "in a time of war." (Yes, Rove gave such good advice about Iraq up to his departure. What will Bush do with him gone?) But as for the CIA leak case,

Rove adamantly denies doing anything wrong, but the investigation, which hung over him for years before special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald decided against seeking an indictment, gave more grist to enemies who see a ruthless, Machiavellian player willing to destroy his critics. Rove sees it the other way around; he sees a hunt for a crime that did not exist.

The investigation, Rove said, was his lowest moment at Bush's side. "It was really hard for me," he said. "I'm not bitter about it. But I'll tell you, my wife is bitter about all the people who carry those little badges that say, 'Press.' "

It's the denial of reality that has gotten Bush, Rove and the rest of the pack into so much trouble. And this is yet one more example. Rove says he did nothing wrong. The record is clear. He told one reporter (Matt Cooper) that former Ambassador Joe Wilson's wife worked at the CIA, and he confirmed this fact for another journalist (Bob Novak). In doing so, he passed classified information (for Valerie Wilson's employment at the CIA was classified) to two members of the press, as part of a White House campaign to discredit an administration critic. As it turned out, Fitzgerald did not charge Rove with a crime. But that does not mean Rove did nothing improper. Not all wrongdoing in Washington is felonious.

And after the leak story broke, the White House asserted that Rove was not involved in the leak. That was untrue. Yet Rove stood by and allowed this false statement to stand, (He probably had caused the statement to be made in the first place.) This, too, was wrong--even if not illegal. If White House aides could be arrested for peddling lies and false statements, 1600 Pennsylvania would be a very lonely place.

Leaking classified information and lying about it--most people would consider such acts to be wrong. But not Rove. He leaves the White House with his moral compass as unintact as it has ever been.

NO ONE HOME AT THE PALACE? At last week's congressional hearing featuring former Iraqi Judge Radhi al-Radhi, Ambassador Larry Butler, the deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, testified that the Department of State has "devoted considerable effort and resources" to anticorruption efforts in Iraq. His testimony was not credible--after Radhi claimed the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was corrupt to the core and after Representative Henry Waxman, the chair of the House government oversight and reform committee, released a report showing that the State Department anticorruption efforts have been lackadaisical at best. But Butler did say something that intrigued me. While praising the endeavors of the staff of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, he noted that the embassy has an annual turnover rate of 100 percent.

That means that few embassy officers are staying longer than a year and that there is practically no institutional memory within the embassy. So while the Bush administration is building a massive embassy compound in Baghdad that is likely to cost at least three quarters of a trillion dollars, it is unable to fill the building with sufficient human capital. Talk about a hollow shell.

Posted by David Corn at October 9, 2007 10:24 AM