What did they know and when did they know it?

In a previous post http://conversationswithhistory.typepad.com/conversations_with_histor/2005/07/ambassador_jose.html I discussed the CIA choice of Ambassador Joseph Wilson to check out the "yellowcake" story. The ensuing clash between Wilson and the administration's leading lights was grounded in two very different perspectives on the conduct of U.S. Foreign Policy.  Previously, in its diplomacy,  the U.S., while mixing ideology and national interest,  was, not immune to looking at the evidence that American ambassadors gathered through  contacts  they created while posted abroad.  As a former Ambassador to Niger, Wilson was a logical candidate for determining whether Saddam Hussein was in the market for African uranium. After all, since Renaissance times, this is how ambassadors  facilitate relations between states.  The Bush administration, on the other hand, represents a different tradition.  Define national interest through the lens of ideology and ignore the evidence if it contradicts what that ideology defines as the national interest.

Last week, new details of the controversy emerged in the Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/20/AR2005072002517.html

When news of Wilson's trip became public through his New York Times op ed piece,  Karl Rove and Scooter Libby became interested  in information about Wilson, Mrs. Wilson and the Niger trip.  The work of the special prosecutor seems  to point to special interest in a State Department memo chronicling the Wilson mission and containing a footnote describing Mrs. Wilson's job  at the CIA.  The memo took center stage  not as information useful for making foreign policy but rather useful for destroying the legitimacy of contradictory evidence and the messenger who brought it to the public's attention.

This story calls to mind James Fallows's article, "Blind into Baghdad," (Atlantic Monthly,January/ February, 2004) which chronicles what we can call the Bush Administration's information strategy in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy during its first term.  Fallows demonstrates that the Bush team, prior to the start of the war,  ignored all government information that might inform U.S. policy toward Iraq--especially, if this information contradicted the decision to go to war and the Rumsfeld doctrine of using a limited force.  For the Fallows piece, see http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200401/fallows

With this information strategy in place,the sequence of events in the outing of Mrs. Wilson begins to make sense. Blind sighted by the Wilson op ed piece, the administration found the State Department memo very useful indeed. The prior choices-- about what to do in Iraq, about secrecy in implementing the decision for war, and about how to deal with the rest of the U.S. government--helps us understand the environment in which crimes might have been committed that required a special prosecutor.

For more on this aspect of the Bush policies see my interview with James Fallows in the Conversations with History Archive http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people5/Fallows/fallows-con0.html For parallels with the Vietnam War, see my 1988 interview with Neil Sheehan http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/conversations/Sheehan/ and my 1998 interview with Daniel Ellsberg http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Ellsberg/ellsberg98-0.html