Michael Barone deconstructs Joe Wilson and his hapless wife:
It has long since come out that just about everything Wilson said was false. He was not, as he suggested, sent on his mission to Niger by Dick Cheney. He was recommended for the trip, contrary to his denial, by his wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame. He reported to the CIA that an Iraqi official had come to Niger on a trade mission in 1999 — evidence that tended to confirm rather than refute the British intelligence claim that Iraq was uranium-shopping in Africa — a claim that Britain’s Lord Butler judged “well founded.”
Now come Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and the Nation’s David Corn with a new book disclosing that it was not Karl Rove who first disclosed Plame’s name to reporter Robert Novak. It was Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state, and a skeptic about, if not an opponent of, military action in Iraq. Interestingly, Justice Department officials knew this even before Patrick Fitzgerald was named a special prosecutor. And they knew, as Corn has admitted, that Plame had not worked overseas within five years of her name’s disclosure, which meant that she was not covered by the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
Yet for more than two years, Fitzgerald investigated Rove and other White House aides and indicted one for providing false testimony. All this, even though it was clear there was no underlying crime.
The Wilson-Plame narrative obscured the fact that Bush did not lie. Given Saddam’s history of WMD development and use, given his successful attempts to obstruct inspection, any responsible American president had to assume that he had WMDs. Bill Clinton so assumed in 1998. George W. Bush so assumed in 2003. The record of Saddam’s deeds left them no choice.