Juan Cole on the Wilson/Plame/Rove/Libby/Miller scandal:

The whole point of Bushism is to punish dissidence within the ranks immediately and ruthlessly. Wilson, a former State Department official, had to be destroyed for having stepped out of line. Everyone should remember that when former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill decided to come out with a tell-all memoir about being in the Bush cabinet for a year, he proclaimed, "I'm old, I'm rich, and there is nothing they can do to me" (or words to that effect). Then all of a sudden the Bush administration was finding signs of classified documents in O'Neill's book, implicitly threatening him with spending the rest of his life in jail for having revealed government secrets. O'Neill feebly protested that he had not had access to classified documents. But all of a sudden he disappeared from the airwaves. He had discovered that there were, too, things that could be done to him. He must have been astonished that the Bushes of Kennebunkport would behave like Vladimir Putin. Everyone always underestimates the malevolence of the Bushes of Connecticut.

So the Bush team ordered an investigation into Wilson. It quickly emerged that he was married to Valerie Plame Wilson (though the government documents the White House could get hold of just called her Valerie Plame), and it transpired that Plame worked on preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction at the CIA.

Karl Rove, Lewis Libby, Richard Bruce Cheney, and the Department of Defense mafia considered the CIA an open enemy and not a team player. Richard Perle, their guru on these matters, viewed the CIA as a hotbed of wimpy "liberalism" that especially underestimated the depravity of dark-skinned peoples in the Third World. In short, the CIA was impervious to the Likud lobby and unimpressed with the crackpot theories of far rightwing gadflies like Perle.

So in the hothouse atmosphere of the White House in 2003, when the awful truth was dawning that there was no WMD in Iraq, Rove, Libby, W. and the big Bruce huddled together with others in the administration to think how to discredit Wilson. They care only about image, not substance. It didn't matter to them that Wilson had been proved right. In their world, you only lose if the public sees the truth. The mere discovery of the truth in some obscure quarter is irrelevant. They had to prevent the public from seeing Wilson's truth.

So they would leak it that Wilson's wife was CIA and moreover had had something to do with having him sent on his mission. Apparently among the peculiar tribes that inhabit the press offices in Washington, this information would be enough to tag Wilson as unreliable, as, indeed, a flack for a CIA populated by Walter Mondales who wouldn't recognize a uranium shipment to Iraq if a caterpillar lift truck accidentally dropped it on their toes. In short, Wilson would be not a good-faith witness but a secret agent with a hidden (pinko) agenda, and so safely dismissed.

Rove and Libby were chosen as the hatchet men who would actually talk to the reporters and put the information around. But of course Bush and Cheney were part of the deliberations that set the plan in motion. It involved outing a career CIA operative (and likely getting her contacts in the third world killed). It was very serious business. Bush would have had to have signed off on it, at least orally.

As long as the Republicans control both houses of congress, Bush is probably safe. I'm not sure a special counsel like Fitzpatrick could by himself bring down a president. But if the Democrats can take the House in 2006, this scandal could turn into an impeachment trial.