Update: October 3, 2006.
Waiting on my desk: Plamegate's ridiculous conclusion. By Christopher Hitchens in Slate Magazine:
As most of us have long suspected, the man who told Novak about Valerie Plame was Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's deputy at the State Department and, with his boss, an assiduous underminer of the president's war policy.Read my lips: There is NO conclusion yet for "Plamegate".
(His and Powell's—and George Tenet's—fingerprints are all over Bob Woodward's 'insider' accounts of post-9/11 policy planning, which helps clear up another nonmystery: Woodward's revelation several months ago that he had known all along about the Wilson-Plame connection and considered it to be no big deal.)
From the documents released up to this moment, only one conclusion can be made.
There has been an organized, concerted, Cheney-led, intrigue against the CIA, againist Valerie Plame, with the stated object,
- to undermine the credibility of her husband's report on the Central African Republic (i.e. that there has never been a beginning of a deal about yellowcake with Saddam Hussein),
- to dislodge the CIA frontstore in Istanbul, led by Plame, that monitored Middle East nuclear fuel dealings by Israel, Turkey, Iran, and, probably other countries in the region,
- to bring the CIA as a whole in discredit, so as to eliminate a source of truths that ran counter to the Bush war propaganda.
The attack by Cheney, Libby, Rove et alia was not directed against Ms Plame or her husband, but against Colin Powell, Charles Tenet (CIA), and Richard Armitage, who signed the Manifest for an American Century in 1998, was one of their pawns in the enemy land of the State Department. Poor Richard, who couldn't help to like his boss, Powell, had been judges "unstable" by the Cheney cabal and the hard core of the Neocons, and was just good for doing dome dirty and nasty shopping.
In an old Stalinist tradition, Armitage was, after being declared lost for the Neocon cause, first forced to do the despicable things, and then, having done his service, sacrified as a scapegoat. Let us compare this story with Stalin's revenge on the old Boshevicks during the 30's. Bukharin, right-leaning Bolshevick, was used against the left oppposition by Stalin in the twenties, then eliminated from power during Stalin's left turn from 1928 on. But the man loved power so much, that he begged for years to be reinstated, renegating his former views. Then, at the next turn in Stalin's policy, he was put in some relatively low position and ordered to write and do some dirty work. When most of the first generation Communists, against whom Bukharin had agitated, had been condemned in "show-trials", in 1938, he was tried and condemned himself for things he had done to please Stalin.
The Hitchens of that place and time, was called Karl Radek, a genial journalist, who was always in the ever changing frontlines to explain, heat up, and construct an ideology for the policy of the day. Radek himself was condemned not long after Bukharin, and disappeared.
He was too intelligent and knew too much.
Hitchens, who is stupid and doesn't know so much, for few people ever tell him anything, will probably not share the fate of Radek.
Like old Karl Marx said in 1849: "In history, things happen as a tragedy at first, and then, later on, repeat themselves as a comedy."
