Karl Rove getting ready for frogmarch?
Topic: Bush Administraiton

Oh, this is sweet! Scott McClellan is not saying a word about the Plame case but is leaving it to Karl Rove’s lawyer. (He usually has such an endless line of bullshit!) So, the White House doesn’t have a thing to say about the revelation in Newsweek that Rove spoke to Matt Cooper three days before Novak’s article. "I think the way to be most helpful is to not get into commenting on it while it is an ongoing investigation." Right! McClellan didn’t seem to have any problem denying Rove was the source of the leak for the past two years and smearing Joseph Wilson at ever opportunity, but now…what’s happened? Do I sense of whiff of political scandal the likes of which we haven’t seen since Whitewater? Even with a solid majority in the house and senate, I smell fear. This drags on too long and it might become an issue in the ’06 midterms. (Don’t even mention Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay!)

But, wait! Rove told Cooper it was Joseph Wilson’s wife, but didn’t name her; so, it’s all- good. Sound a bit like “slick Willy” all over again? Gosh, I wonder how long it would take Cooper, or anyone else, to find out, who was married to Joseph Wilson? Notice the equivocal language in Josh White’s, of the Washington Post, article:

“Rove apparently told Cooper that it was ‘Wilson’s wife at the agency on wmd issues who authorized the trip.’” (To Niger.) Is the mighty Post shaking in their boots? ‘Don’t mess with Rove, he’ll kill you!’ According to Rove’s lawyer, this little bit of info was not in regard to the Wilson question but was “ at the end of a conversation about a different issue.” Sure. It’s not at all possible that Rove knew Valerie Plame was an agent at the CIA, is it? How would he have found out? For sure it wasn’t a deliberate outing, because he was just shucking-the-shit with a bunch of Washington correspondents, he couldn’t have known they’d publish this very combustible information, which might lead to her covert career coming to an end, could he? No! P. J. O’ Rourke pretty much summed it up when he opined that sitting at a desk job wasn’t very covert. Well said! After all, the people she had dealt with over the years, in the not very important job of spying on weapon proliferating states, wouldn’t be immediately held under suspicion of being American spies, right? She’s just sitting there typing.

McClellan said in 2003:

"The president has set high standards, the highest of standards, for people in his administration. He's made it very clear to people in his administration that he expects them to adhere to the highest standards of conduct. If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration." So, if it's true, which it is, Bush will fire Rove, right? Nope!

Crime scene? I think not!

Yesterday Sir Ian Blair, London police commissioner, said of the 7/7 bombings that they were the “biggest crime scene in English history.” Last Friday he said it was a “huge police operation.” Is this guy a wimp, or what? While the republicans would be preparing for war, the Brits want to “prepare indictments.” While the Brits are saying, “we must understand our enemies” Karl Rove is saying, “We will defeat our enemies.” So chuck the investigation, you don’t need who did it or how they did it or why, Sir Ian, just pull out the world map, find a suitable target with minimal defenses and maybe some oil, and bombs away!

Did I hear president Bush saying the perpetrators should be brought to justice? That was back in England, though. He must have been playing to the domestic crowd, that won’t get much play back in the good ol’ U S of A. Now, he’s talking renewal of all the 16 Patriot Act provisions that just last week even the house was thinking of flushing. They even want a few more new things, including an “administrative supeona” which the FBI can issue to itself, without a judge, and go right into medical files, business records, you name it. Why, all of a sudden? Because of the London attacks of course! The 9/11 thing kind of fell flat on its face last time he used it as an excuse to “stay the course” at Ft. Bragg, so now it’s 7/7.

And, naturally, since the bombings, it has become painfully clear we have to stay in Iraq ad infinitum. We have to fight them there so we won’t have to here. Wait, they did hit here, well over there, but you know what I mean, so why are we there? The FT reported this past Saturday that, “ The MoD is to stick to plans based around a gradual withdrawal (from Iraq) over the next 18 months and a big deployment to Afghanistan.” This was before the release of the leaked MoD memo written by John Reid saying there is a “strong U.S. military desire for significant force reductions to bring relief to overall U.S. commitment levels.” (I bet there is.) They’re thinking of going from 138,000 to 66,000 by next year. Right now, they can’t even think about saying that because that would be playing into the hands of the terrorists.

What do they want anyway? Robert A. Pape had a very interesting Op-Ed in the Times on Saturday. He writes, “The overwhelming number of attackers (terrorists) are citizens of Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries in which the United States has stationed troops since 1990…rather than from those the State Department considers “state sponsors of terrorism” like Iran, Libya, Sudan and Iraq.” Apparently, the main impetus for al-Qaeda and their ilk is to get us out of the Muslim world, period. He cites an al-Qaeda planning document from a radical web site found by Norwegian police in December 2003 saying that 9/11 style attacks on the U.S. were not the way to go anymore, but rather, writes Pape, “ it would be more effective to attack America’s European allies, thus coercing them to withdraw their troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and increasing economic and military burdens that the United States would have to bear.” Silvio Berlesconi, by the way, says the London attacks won’t make him speed up the withdrawal of Italians troops from Iraq planned for September. Very macho! The Italian people, however, must be feeling pretty nervous right now.

After predicting that the outcome of an attack before the Spanish elections in March of 2004 would lead to a Socialist victory and the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq, months before it happened, the document goes on to say, “we emphasize that the withdrawal of Spanish or Italian forces from Iraq would put huge pressure on the British presence, a pressure Tony Blair might not be able to withstand, and hence the dominos tiles would fall.”

The FT writes that the talk of withdrawal right now in Whitehall is off the table. “Blair cannot afford to change his foreign policy at the moment. The prime minister feels he has no choice but to stick to his position.” He’s kind of a hostage to his Iraq policy right now, in other words.

Charles Clark, the British Home secretary, said these attacks had nothing to do with British policy in Iraq and pointed out that the U.S. wasn’t in Iraq before 9/11. Remaining in denial is a recipe for more disaster. Please note, that we were in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and in other Muslim countries before 9/11.

The brains behind al-Qaeda don’t seem to be trying too hard to conceal what their strategy is and we know what their tactics are, so it would seem the best thing for us to do would be to get out of Iraq. Right now we’re going bankrupt, economically and diplomatically, losing thousands of good people and at the same time giving them fertile ground for recruitment and an excellent training base. They’ve shown they can rapidly adapt to our counter measures and are now exporting their expertise to Afghanistan, (And who knows where in the future) where we’re starting to lose troops in larger numbers than at any time since 2001, many to IEDs.

The pentagon is rethinking its tried and true “two-war model” and coming to the conclusion that being bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan is limiting our ability to deal with other more conventional threats. Loren Thompson, an analyst at the Lexington Institute, was quoted in an article by Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt as saying, “what we need for conventional victory is different from what we need for fighting insurgents, and fighting insurgents has relatively little connection to stopping the spread of nuclear weapons, we can’t afford it all.” So, we have to make a decision about whether we’re more worried about North Korea, Iran and China, or Jalal Talibani and Ahmad Chalabi slicing up Iraq into their own personal fiefdoms, because once we leave Iraq, all those Saudi Jihadi types are going to go home.

Maybe that’s the thinking at the White House. Keep the pressure off the Saudi royal family by luring all their suicide bombers to Iraq.

Scott Speicher again!

I couldn't believe my eyes when I read that a "new Navy review of efforts to determine the fate of missing pilot Capt. Michael Scott Speicher is recommending that the U.S. government undertake an intensified search in Iraq and that his status be affirmed as 'missing-captured.'" [AP] As I have written at length, Bill Nelson, senator of Florida, has this crusade going on and it won't end. Just read what I wrote and you'll see how absurd this whole thing is.