OxBlog

Monday, July 19, 2004

# Posted 9:45 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

THE WILSON WARS: I pretty muchagree with Kevin Drum's conclusion that Wilson's
Credibility as a source is definitely tattered, but perhaps not quite as thoroughly demolished as his enemies are claiming.
It's also important to point out, as Matthew Continetti does in The Weekly Standard, that the problem is not Wilson's credibility as an intelligence source while working for the CIA, but rather the bombastic attacks he launched against the Bush administration after going public in May 2003.
 
For an opposing perspective on the Wilson wars, check out Josh Marshall, who is still defending Wilson pretty aggressively, perhaps because Marshall's own chestnuts are now in the fire.  As Marshall puts it,
The truth is that we simply don't know whether the Iraqis ever 'sought' uranium in Niger or Africa in the years leading up to the war, though all the evidence we thought we had for such a claim has turned out to be baseless.
Josh has also been pretty insistent about defending the role of Valerie Plame (aka Mrs. Joe Wilson) in recommending her husband for the Niger trip.  While Josh is right that Plame didn't make the decision to send her husband to Niger, Wilson has explicitly stated that she had absolutely nothing to do with it, which is a flat out lie.
 
On another front, Josh takes issue WaPo ombudsman Michael Getler's response to Josh's critique of Susan Schmidt's embarrassment of Wilson in the Post last week.  Both sides score some points, but the whole debate is something of a red herring since the most important charges against Wilson don't get addressed.
 
Once you get past all of the specific questions about what Wilson did or did not say and whether it was or wasn't true, you come back to the basic question of "Who cares anyway?"
 
According to Kevin Drum, the Wilson story is
Hardly a Page 1 blockbuster...Wilson doesn't really matter much anymore except as political sport. The only real issue on the table right now is whether anyone in the Bush administration outed his wife as a CIA agent, and that's a matter under investigation by the FBI.
  I disagree with Kevin pretty strongly.  As Susan Schmidt noted in the WaPo,
Wilson last year launched a public firestorm with his accusations that the administration had manipulated intelligence to build a case for war. He has said that his trip to Niger should have laid to rest any notion that Iraq sought uranium there and has said his findings were ignored by the White House.
The fact is that Wilson's attacks did considerable damage to Bush's credibility.  The heartfelt conviction of most Democrats that Bush lied about the WMD rests to a considerable degree on Wilson's charges as well as the exaggerated criticisms of Richard Clarke. 
 
What's at stake right now is nothing less than the critical issue of whether George Bush is a liar.
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