The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity – Joseph Wilson

The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity – Joseph Wilson, Carrol & Graf Publishers/Avalon Publishing Group, Inc. (2004) 513pp. (S) ****

Ambassador Joseph Wilson is at the center of a controversy that two and a half years later, continues to brew in Washington. The leaking of his wife’s identity, Valerie Plame, as a CIA operative is a crime that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is still investigating. Having already dispensed with an indictment of vice-president Cheney’s chief-of-staff, Lewis Libbey, one can only hope that Fitzgerald is just starting to warm up his legal guns, in spite of the many near Byzantine twists and turns the investigation has taken. Why, for instance, is the man who actually did the leaking in newspaper print, somehow miraculously immune from a subpoena summons? Is it because Robert Novak belongs to the good ‘ol boys neo-con club? Has he cut some kind of deal with Fitzgerald? Surely an efficient way to get to the bottom of things would be to put the squeeze on Novak, the man who committed the actual crime, not journalists like Judith Miller, who essentially, because she never went to print with anything, has been prosecuted for what for the most part amounts to a mind crime (i.e. not publishing a name that was given to her unsolicited). Whatever some may think of her incredulous pieces of dubious sourcing on Iraqi WMD, surely this is not the way to make her answer for that. What a strange world we live in, indeed, one that would do George Orwell proud, or as Joe Wilson has observed, when it comes to the Bush Jr. administration, down the rabbit hole we go.

That said, we find in Joseph Wilson anything but a flaming liberal, as his ardent belief in the necessity of the first Gulf War reflects. “ . . . in [Wilson’s] judgment Desert Storm was fully justified . . . ”(p.174) “Desert Storm was a just war, sanctioned by the international community, and supported by a broad multilateral coalition.”(p.467) (Not to pick too many bones, but this reviewer would take humble umbrage with such an accounting, since the “liberation” of a sovereign monarchy strains credulity.) Wilson himself was left in charge of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad when ambassador April Glaspie left for vacation, and thus earned the distinction of being the last American Saddam Hussein dealt with face to face with before the war. Wilson was also credited with securing the release of many Americans from both Iraq and Kuwait. For his service in Baghdad, Wilson was given personal recognition by president George H. W. Bush. It goes without saying that such goodwill from the father didn’t carry over with the son.

Wilson identifies the South Carolina Republican primary in the 2000 presidential election and the Bush campaign’s personal slandering of Senator John McCain, as a formative experience. Earlier, Wilson had been a campaign donor to Bush the junior, despite having done work with Al Gore’s senate office in the mid-eighties and having a generally positive experience. But after South Carolina, Wilson concluded that “[T]he Bush campaign tactics in the South Carolina Republican primary represented the worst in American political discourse and should have been repudiated by [Bush]. Campaigns rooted in the exploitation of people’s fears, prejudices, and hatreds prevent us from identifying and electing our most capable leaders.”(p.279-280) Later, when the election hung in legal limbo, Wilson “was appalled by the gutter tactics of the out-of-state rabble that bullied public servants and intimidated them into stopping the recount of ballots in Miami-Dade county.”(p.282) Not surprisingly, Wilson ended up joining the Gore campaign in an advisory capacity.

In his latter pages, Wilson saves space to level his gravest charges toward the neo-con set. “This Bush [Jr.] administration clearly operates on the principle that it is acceptable, and indeed desirable, to shift the debate from the issue to the person, to divert attention from the facts, and to confuse rather than enlighten the American people. This administration knows no such thing as a fair fight; all that counts is who wins and who loses.”(p.341) Wilson also observes how the administration is over-taxing our domestic resources: “at a time when we must be vigilant against the possibility of further attacks on our own soil, every call-up of National Guard or Reservists means that more of our first-responders are over there instead of over here, where they should form our first line of homeland security.”(p.383) And then there is this “ . . . [T]here is no doubt that the administration cherry picked, exaggerated, and manipulated information often no more credible than gossip to fabricate a justification for war.”(p.414) “ . . . they [neo-cons] have actively subverted the intelligence process by inserting their own ideological biases into the analysis.”(p.431) Wilson’s recommendation is for Bush to clean house and fire all the neo-conservatives within his administration, a small group of ideological zealots he believes number no more than fifteen individuals. “This would clear the administration of parasites who are loyal only to their agenda and who have found the Republican party a willing host for more than twenty years.”(p.431) Of course, Wilson has serious doubts if Bush is so intended, since he himself may already be sold on the neo-conservative agenda. As to the future and the war in Iraq, Wilson hypothesizes that the actual break-up and “balkanization” of Iraq may in fact be part of the wider neo-con agenda, an objective that would keep formerly one of Israel’s greatest adversaries, broken and divided, and weakened by in-fighting. If such is the case, then surely we face a tumultuous road ahead.