E-Mail This Article to a Friend Truth and consequences Karl Rove is just the tip of the iceberg

Political leaders have a challenging relationship with the truth. History has yet to record a national leader who speaks the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Citizens in democracies seem to accept that complete candor is incompatible with public life, that what might be unacceptable in a personal relationship is at least occasionally tolerable in political battle. A lie — or even lies — may not be nice, but they can be defensible under some circumstances.

So where do leaders who engage in deception draw the line? Is it possible to engage in one lie too many? These days, those questions must be paramount for President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney as they ponder the fates of their respective political alter egos, Karl Rove and Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Yearlong suspicions that Rove and Libby were involved in the leak to right-wing columnist Robert Novak that illegally unmasked Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA operative have been confirmed. The special prosecutor investigating the leak must now determine whether Rove and Libby were not just principal actors in the drama, but guilty of crimes.

Compromising Plame’s career was not an end in itself. It was merely a means to attack the credibility of then-ambassador Joseph Wilson, who disputed the Bush administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein was buying African uranium to construct nuclear weapons with which to attack the United States, and who argued that such claims were based on forged documents. Since Wilson is married to Plame and Plame recommended him for the job of looking into the African-uranium charge (a job, by the way, that someone else gave him), then husband plus wife must equal treason. That, in any case, was the unspoken justification for the leak.

Today no one in their right mind believes Saddam possessed nuclear weapons, but in the run-up to the Iraq war Bush scared the knickers off the nation by warning that Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. It’s been inconvenient for Bush that neither weapons nor any evidence of their existence has been found, but that didn’t stop his re-election. In recent weeks, however, opinion polls show that the public now doubts that those weapons — nuclear or other — ever existed. They were just part of one of those seemingly acceptable lies that grease the wheels of democracy.

If the last 20 years offer any indication, it’s hard to imagine that Rove wasn’t in some way central to the Plame/Wilson caper, if not its mastermind. When Bush needs dirty work done, Rove is there to do it — rather like Lee Atwater served Bush I. It is all but accepted that when Bush was running for governor of Texas, Rove was the man behind rumors that incumbent Ann Richards was a lesbian. It is a piece of political wisdom that Rove was behind rumors that Senator John McCain, Bush’s rival for the 2000 GOP presidential nomination, was mentally unstable — although McCain’s subsequent embrace of W. may lend support to the claim. The sharp practices — most likely illegal — that kept Senator John Kerry’s supporters from casting their ballots in the key state of Ohio during the 2004 presidential election are likewise seen as Rove’s work.

This trifecta of shame is just a sampling of Rove’s greatest hits. But it conveys his essence. He is a master of the lie, the cheat, the smear. While Bush portrays himself with genuine evangelical feeling as a child of light, Rove serves his master’s darkest interests with the equally genuine dedication of a loyal family retainer.

"Time wounds all heels" goes the adage, and it appears to be catching up with Rove. Whether the special prosecutor can indict Rove — or anyone else — remains to be seen. Meanwhile, New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who probed Plamegate but didn’t publish a word about it, is in jail for failing to cooperate with the investigation. Columnist Novak, for reasons that remain unclear, is still at large. And the war in Iraq continues.

And Iraq, in the end, is what this sideshow is all about: the lies that got us there and the deceptions that keep us there. That Bush misled the nation about the threat posed by Hussein is, according to opinion polls, finally beginning to penetrate the public consciousness in a significant way. And judging from Frank Rich’s op-ed piece in the Sunday New York Times, it is beginning to sink into the mainstream media as well. But the even more horrendous sin — born of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s overweening pride — is that we don’t have enough troops in Iraq to secure any sort of peace, for either our soldiers or the people of Iraq. The increasingly ferocious terror attacks by the Saddam-tolerant Sunnis against the Saddam-oppressed Shiites make the recent London bombings pale in comparison.

Just as Richard Nixon destabilized Cambodia with an invasion intended to help bring the war in next-door Vietnam to a speedy conclusion, so has Bush undermined the stability of the entire Middle East by waging his war in Iraq. Two studies, one by the Saudi government and the other by an Israeli think tank, have concluded that most of the foreign fighters now engaged in Iraq are not former terrorists, but Arab-world Islamists who were radicalized by the invasion of Iraq. Thus, Bush’s most recent lie — that Iraq is but a single battlefield in the larger war on terror — is, in a very special sense, now true.

It’s doubtful that Rove — or Libby, Rumsfeld, Cheney, or Bush — will see the irony in that.

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