Rove, Bush and the crisis of empire
By
Fred Goldstein
Published Jul 23, 2005 8:01 PM
The case of Karl Rove has become the axis of a
struggle within the capitalist establishment over the political course of the
Bush administration and its disastrous colonial adventure in Iraq.
This
struggle is being played out as a legal contest over whether or not Karl Rove
leaked the identity of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame to reporters in July
2003. Rove is charged with leaking her name as an act of retaliation against her
husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
Wilson had revealed in a New York
Times op-ed piece on July 7, 2003, that certain Bush administration claims made
more than a year earlier, prior to and in justification of its planning for an
assault on Iraq, were completely false. The White House claim was that the
government of Saddam Hussein was buying yellow-cake uranium from Niger to build
nuclear weapons. Wilson had gone to Niger in February 2002 on an official
mission to investigate the matter.
The big business media are focusing
almost entirely on the legal issues of what did Karl Rove say, to whom did he
say it, and when was it said. The media are also raising the issue of
Rove’s tactics and his reputation for dirty tricks and deception.
To
be sure, Rove is a right-wing reactionary and a practitioner of the most venal
methods of political smearing—even of bourgeois opponents. During the
South Carolina primary in 2000, when Bush was running against John McCain, Rove
spread the rumor that McCain’s wife, Cindy, was a drug addict. In 1994
when Bush was running for governor of Texas against Ann Richards, Rove spread
rumors that she was a lesbian in a blatant appeal to bigotry.
Rove was
behind the campaign to smear and get rid of Secretary of the Treasury Paul
O’Neill because he was opposed to the Bush administration’s fixation
on going to war with Iraq.
And it is highly likely that he was the force
behind the leaks about Valerie Plame.
But while taking note of what an
underhanded political operative Rove is, it is essential to get a class
understanding of what is really going on.
Where were they when the war
started?
In the first place, the news media are expressing outrage at
the act of “endangering national security” by outing a CIA agent.
The CIA is in every country in the world carrying out subversion and
covert operations to undermine and destroy the enemies of U.S. big business and
do its part to secure Washington’s world domination. Right now in
Venezuela, agents of a CIA front, the National Endowment for Democracy, are on
trial for taking money to overthrow the revolutionary government of Hugo
Chávez.
The CIA has waged a ceaseless campaign to overthrow the
socialist government in Cuba. CIA operatives are in Iraq, Afghanistan,
Palestine, Colombia, the Ukraine, Georgia—just to name a few
countries—supporting counter-revolution, doing
“interrogations,” and spying on governments. It should not be a
matter of concern to the workers and oppressed in this country or around the
world that one of its agents got exposed.
Valerie Plame was alleged to
have been working undercover in the area of “weapons of mass
destruction” regarding Iraq and perhaps other formerly colonized
countries, helping the U.S. to disarm them and thereby weaken their ability to
defend themselves against imperialism. That is a thoroughly reactionary role and
should be condemned.
But more importantly, it should be noted that the
capitalist media, now dwel ling on the Karl Rove case, themselves spread all the
pre-war lies put out by the Bush administration about the danger of the Saddam
Hussein administration and the necessity to go to war. Further more, this is the
same media that was “embedded” with the military during the war and
put out press releases for the Pentagon, hailing the lightning victory, cheering
on the warmakers, and covering up the war crimes of the “shock and
awe” bombing of Iraqi cities.
In fact, the New York Times, which
printed Wilson’s exposé in its July 2003 op-ed piece, sang a
different tune during the run-up to the war when it printed close to a dozen
articles by now jailed journalist Judith Miller. She parroted the discredited
Iraqi banker-exile, Ahmed Chalabi, who fed Miller unsubstantiated false stories
about Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. These stories were so
fraudulent that, after the war, when things started going downhill for the U.S.
military, the Times had to print a long confession of journalistic
“error.”
With enthusiasm and crass cheerleading, the media
obediently report ed on a unilateralist imperialist war for “regime
change” in which the Pentagon brutally tested all its new high-tech
weapons systems on the Iraqi people in its quest to secure Iraqi oil and bases
for the Pentagon.
The war was unconstitutional, in violation of
international law and the UN Charter. By deliberately targeting civilians, the
U.S. violated the Geneva Convention. And it was widely known and reported in
this same media—before the war—that Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney were
manipulating so-called “intelligence” to make the case for war.
There was not one dissenting voice in any of the major capitalist media
about support for the war. Once the Pentagon sounded the charge, they all fell
in line.
So why has the massive capitalist propaganda machine suddenly
become outraged at the deceptions and possible illegal measures of Karl
Rove?
The answer is the Iraqi resistance and the crisis of empire
building.
A ruling class struggle
This is an inner struggle
of the ruling class over the war. They were all for it when they thought it
could be won. Now the Penta gon is sinking into a morass. Instead of expanding
U.S. imperialism’s domination, the heroic struggle of the Iraqi resistance
has dealt it a great blow. The worldwide repercussions of this mighty military
machine being unable to subdue a country of 26 million people who are fighting
against the occupation are profound and are just beginning to be
felt.
Instead of demonstrating the prowess of U.S. imperialism, the
occupation has demonstrated its vulnerability. The troops in Iraq are exhausted
and demoralized. The military cannot make its recruiting goals. The dilemma of
having to institute the draft or pull back is fast approaching.
Thanks to
the communications revolution, every setback for the U.S. military in Iraq or
Afghanistan is instantly transmitted to every corner of the globe. These
setbacks are observed by every government, every political party, every
liberation movement around the world. And Washington is slowly losing its grip
on world events.
The Karl Rove case is not about deception per se.
The ruling class and its media have no inherent opposition to deception. They
all went along with the Gulf of Tonkin falsification, which led to the
escalation of the Vietnam War. They all went along with covering up the
CIA-engineered massacre of a million communists and progressives in 1965 during
the counter-revolution in Indonesia. They all went along with covering up the
Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1962, until it failed.
They surely have
no qualms about deception of the workers and the oppressed.
But now they
are crying foul because the Bush administration promised them profits and
conquest in Iraq and it has all come apart because of the
resistance.
Bourgeois politics in an imperialist democracy is a continuous
exercise in deception. The fact is that the democracy is really exercised by
different imperialist factions. They fight and contend with each other by
getting control of different parts of the capitalist state, controlling
different sectors of the media and lining up different factions of the political
establishment while manipulating the electoral process.
The task for them
is to carry out their struggles and at the same time conceal their true essence
from the workers and the oppressed, as well as the middle class.
The
Watergate debate was discussed in terms of illegal break-ins, wiretaps and other
violations of bourgeois legality. This was an exposure of the criminality of the
Nixon administration on one level. But the struggle over criminality masked a
deeper struggle over Nixon’s attempt to carry out a virtual coup and
transform the capitalist state itself into an authoritarian dictatorship
Capitalists disillusioned
with Bush
While the
Rove controversy has not risen to this level, it is directed at Bush himself and
his entire regime and the occupation is the underlying issue. The fact that Time
magazine, Newsweek, the Washing ton Post and the New York Times—organs of
the mainstream imperialist ruling class—are all going for Rove’s
jugular indicates a deep disillusionment with Bush. Rove is, after all,
“the architect” or “the brain,” as they say.
Wilson is an inconsequential ambassador and an accidental figure. He was
elevated to become a witness against the Bush administration by the New York
Times and the Washington Post in July 2003, after the giddying taste of victory
in Iraq subsided and the resistance started up in earnest.
The exposure
called into question the credibility of Cheney, who started the nuclear weapon
scare, Condoleezza Rice, who spoke about preventing “mushroom
clouds,” and Bush himself, who referred to the yellow-cake uranium in his
State of the Union speech in January 2003. It was a broadside at the entire
administration, including Secretary of State Colin Powell, who repeated the lies
at the Security Council in arguing for war.
Wilson’s trip was made
in February 2002, almost a year and a half before the Times opened up its pages
for the exposure, once the occupation began to come apart.
The problem of
the critics is that none of them have a solution to the crisis in Iraq. They
cannot devise any strategy to defeat the Iraqi resistance and reestablish the
upper hand for U.S. imperialism.
The Rove controversy should be seen as a
struggle between two warring camps of bandits, both enemies of the Iraqi people,
the people of the world, and the working class and oppressed people right here
at home. These bandits do not want truth or legality. They are trying to find a
way out of their crisis—one that has impeded the imperialist plunder of
Iraq, the Middle East and Latin America and is sure to spread.
The
working-class movement, the anti-war movement, should take advantage of this
split to expose them all and use the opportunity to mobilize, particularly for
the Sept. 24 anti-occupation demonstration at the White House in Washington,
D.C.
That is the proper reaction to the Rove controversy: to have no
confidence in either camp in this dispute. Only the independent mobilization of
the people can make any progress—against the war or against the attacks on
living standards at home.
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
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