So, you're Dick Cheney and you've got a war to start

Letter from Here: "So, you're Dick Cheney and you've got a war to start


Picture this: You're the most powerful vice president the country has ever known. In your dark, saturnine view, there are a lot of good reasons to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein, but you need a casus belli. Weapons of mass destruction should do it. You're sure they've got some stuff left over from 1991. Its just a matter of finding it.

You start to pressure the limp-wristed wimps at CIA to do their jobs and dig up the evidence you know is there. In the summer of 2001, even before 9/11, the agency's Counterproliferation Division expands one of its units and renames it the Joint Task Force on Iraq. They're tasked with finding the evidence. They have a network of covert ops operating under deep cover. But they don't find squat. It seems to you that the JTFI is ineffectual or worse. They keep debunking WMD claims. Even when hand-picked defectors provided by Ahmad Chalabi are set right in front of them, all they do is discredit them. Two years, and they're still empty-handed. Hopeless.The war goes forward, no thanks to the JTFI, but you don't forget. Those crypto-liberals at CIA need to be taught a lesson. You don't want them getting in the way next time -- in Iran, say.

You wait for the right opportunity and eventually, that summer, you arrange to have the covert director of operations of JTFI outed. The entire network has to be rolled up and sources are compromised, and the director's career is ruined. That should be a lesson those weasels in the agency will never forget!The insiders get the message. For everyone else, you cover your tracks by making it seem that the real target of your little vendetta was the director's spouse. Meanwhile, you've eliminated a lot of the dissenters who disagree with your interpretation of the intelligence. The rest should be much more docile now.If all this damage had been done by a spy, it would have been a major scandal, but hey -- you're the vice president and your friends control most of the government.

Oh, and the name of the director of operations? Valerie Plame."