The Real Plame Story

For perennial hawk Frank J. Gaffney Jr. the astonishing thing about the Plame game was the identification of leaker Richard Armitage as “no partisan gunslinger.” What do you mean, he writes.

Rich Armitage in truth is the consummate partisan gunslinger. It's just that his partisanship is... the other sense of a partisan: one who wages war from behind enemy lines.

But that is not what astonishes me. What astonishes me is that the unmasking of Armitage as the leaker who put the name of Valerie Plame, CIA wife of former Ambassador Wilson into the public square unmasks something much bigger. “A conspiracy so vast...” as the saying went in another time when the loyalty of the State Department was in question.

It shows that the State Department has been blocking and hindering the Bush Administration’s foreign policy ever since 9/11, and that nobody has paid the price for this disloyalty.

Indeed, it is the Bushies who have paid the price with three years of investigations and humiliations—while everyone else looked on and sniggeringly knew what had really happened all the time.

I would say that many senior revolving-door Republicans, the kind who occupy presidential sub-cabinet appointments in a Republican adminsitration, are going to be taking a long, slow look at the State Department and CIA operations of the past few years. The next Republican president will have a State Department task group whose job it will be to make sure, at any cost, that enough of the president’s men get jobs at State to keep it on-side, or at least prevent it from actively working to sabotage the president’s foreign policy.