Rove, Bush and the crisis of empire

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.