The Perils of the Permanent Campaign

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The rush to war was followed by a rush to peace, dictated by public relations needs and wishful thinking. The President's declaration that "major combat operations" were over on May 1, 2003, after he co-piloted an airplane onto the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln and emerged, jazzed, in a jaunty flight suit, seems almost ludicrous in retrospect. And it was accompanied by the utterly irresponsible decision of commanding General Tommy Franks to leave the theater of battle, taking with him his entire headquarters staff—including hundreds of intelligence officers.

And so we come to June 2003, the month that Scooter Libby became preoccupied with Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, CIA operative Valerie Plame. TIME Magazine first used the word mess to describe the situation in Iraq in a June 9, 2003, issue headline. In the same issue, TIME wondered about what ever had happened to the "Weapons of Mass Disappearance." At about the same time, the President was told, in a classified briefing by the CIA, that the U.S.-led coalition was facing a full-blown guerrilla insurgency in Iraq. Rumsfeld foolishly continued to deny this fact for another month.

In sum, June 2003 was the month that the vexing realities of the Iraq adventure first became clear to the Bush White House. It was also the month that the Administration began to act as if the war in Iraq were a public relations problem first and a military problem second. The WMD embarrassment clearly took precedence over the need to fight the insurgency. The White House created the Iraq Survey Group, sending former arms inspector David Kay and 1,200 intelligence officers to search for the nonexistent weapons, an action that infuriated Generals John Abizaid and Ricardo Sanchez, who believed that the top priority should be figuring out who the enemy was. Bush's blithe invitation to the insurgents to "bring it on" a few weeks later was another indication that the Commander in Chief had absolutely no idea what actual combat is all about.

The refusal to acknowledge the seriousness of the insurgency, the obsession with WMD—these were political acts, campaign ploys. And so was Libby's apparent fixation on Ambassador Wilson, who was calling into question the Administration's claims of an Iraqi nuclear program. The most important rationales for the war—that the invasion would go smoothly, that the "smoking gun may come in the form of a mushroom cloud"—were disintegrating. The presidential election of 2004 was looming. It seems a fair indication of the West Wing's whigged-out desperation that Libby even attempted the oblique argument that Wilson was not to be trusted because his wife, a CIA analyst, had sent him to find out if Niger had sold uranium to Iraq.

But it is an even better indication of how the White House reflexively dealt with unpleasant news: destroy the messenger. Last week there was more of the same, according to a prominent Republican, who told me that the White House had sent out talking points about how to attack Brent Scowcroft after Bush the Elder's National Security Adviser went public with his opposition to the war in the New Yorker magazine. "I was so disgusted that I deleted the damn e-mail before I read it," the Republican said. "But that's all this White House has now: the politics of personal destruction."

Libby's grand-jury prevarications seem fairly substantial. But the real felonies of the Bush Administration are not criminal. They are political. They involve spinning, smearing and governmental malfeasance—the sordid tool kit of the Permanent Campaign.