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Will ‘Plamegate’ cripple Bush?
By
Editorial staff
Simon Wilson
Nov 18, 2005
Make no mistake: the tidal wave of troubles now engulfing George Bush’s White House could yet turn out to be “worse than Watergate”, said Andrew Buncombe in The Independent on Sunday. The Watergate conspiracy revolved around a ‘second-rate burglary’ – part of a dirty tricks campaign against Nixon’s political rivals. ‘Plamegate’ – the alleged leaking by the vice-president’s chief of staff of the identity of an undercover CIA agent – revolves around the far more shocking charge of using “false statements and twisted information to mislead a nation” into war in Iraq.
The ins and outs of the case might seem bewildering, said Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail – but the core is very simple. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, Dick Cheney’s right-hand man, is charged with revealing (to friendly journalists) the identity of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent. That’s a federal offence that could earn him 30 years in prison.
According to the prosecution, he did this as “revenge on Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, a retired diplomat who had convincingly debunked the Bush administration’s case for war”. In February 2002, the CIA sent Wilson to Niger to investigate claims that it exported uranium to Iraq in the 1990s, so Saddam could make nuclear bombs. His conclusion: no they hadn’t. Yet the claims, now sourced to British intelligence, were repeated by Bush (and Britain) in early 2003 as a justification for the Iraq war, although it was “known to be baloney”.
The more the case for war is exposed as lies, the more Bush’s credibility will be eroded, said The Independent on Sunday. And Plamegate comes “as Bush is especially vulnerable”, said Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. Hurricane Katrina exposed his administration as “careless, cronyish and, above all, incompetent” – and in the past month, Bush has been assailed from all sides.
What a turnaround, said Ronald Brownstein in the Los Angeles Times. Bush’s first term was a “tutorial on how a determined and aggressive president can multiply his strength and drive sweeping change from a narrow electoral base”. His second-term, by contrast, looks quite the opposite. To reassert his authority, Bush needs to apologise to Plame, get rid of his chief adviser, Karl Rove, who may yet face charges over Plamegate, and sideline Dick Cheney.
In short, said Todd Purdam in The New York Times, he needs to take a leaf out of Ronald Reagan’s book when the Iran-Contra scandal threatened to derail his second term: “shake-up the White House staff, retool his domestic and foreign policy agenda and move on”. Yet there are few signs that he will do this.
“A lame duck in the White House, a lame duck in Downing Street”, said Andreas Whittam Smith in The Independent. Bush and Blair might have “arrived at the same state of powerlessness by different routes” – but the parallels are clear. Both the Republicans and New Labour established themselves as powerful electoral machines, guided by “political strategists of genius at their helms” – Karl Rove and Tony Blair. But in both cases, the rush to war in Iraq corrupted both systems of government – “and may well end up destroying the hegemonies” of both ruling parties.
The question now is when will Britain’s lame duck quietly expire, said Iain MacWhirter in The Sunday Herald. “What is happening right now in the court of King Tony” – Cabinet infighting and a policy vacuum – is “eerily reminiscent of what happens when a monarch loses power or dies”.
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