New York Times
News Analysis: Leak case puts spotlight back on war rationale
By Richard W. Stevenson and Douglas Jehl The New York Times
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2005

WASHINGTON The legal and political stakes are of the highest order, but the investigation into the disclosure of a covert CIA officer's identity is also just one skirmish in the continuing battle over the Bush administration's justification for the war in Iraq.
 
That fight has preoccupied the White House for more than three years, repeatedly threatening President George W. Bush's credibility and political standing. Now it has once again put the spotlight on Vice President Dick Cheney, who assumed a critical role in assembling and analyzing the evidence about Iraq's weapons programs.
 
The dispute over the rationale for the war has led to upheaval in the intelligence agencies, left Democrats divided about how aggressively to break with the White House over Iraq and exposed deep rifts within the administration and among Republicans.
 
The combatants' intensity was underscored last week in a speech by Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff to Colin Powell while Powell was secretary of state. Wilkerson complained of a "cabal" of Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld involving Iraq and other national security issues and of a "real dysfunctionality" on the administration's foreign policy team.
 
The intensity could be further inflamed by comments from Brent Scowcroft, who was national security adviser during the administration of the president's father, in the coming edition of The New Yorker magazine. The comments are a reminder that the breach over Iraq had roots in competing views of foreign policy that extended well back into the past century.
 
Scowcroft, a self-described "realist" who prides himself on seeing what could go wrong in any course of action, argues against what he characterizes as the utopian view of administration neoconservatives that toppling Saddam Hussein would open the door to democracy throughout the Middle East.
 
He also suggests that Cheney is a man much changed, and not for the better, since the Gulf war in 1991.
 
Scowcroft has long expressed reservations about the foreign policy approach of the current White House and about the Iraq war in particular. His comments could further exacerbate divisions among Republicans, especially to the degree that they are seen as reflecting the views of Scowcroft's close friend and the former president, George H.W. Bush.
 
"The real anomaly in the administration is Cheney," Scowcroft told Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker. "I consider Cheney a good friend; I've known him for 30 years. But Dick Cheney, I don't know anymore."
 
Cheney's focus on the threat from Iraq has put some of his aides, especially I. Lewis Libby Jr., his chief of staff, in the middle of the investigation by a special prosecutor into the leaking of the CIA operative's name.
 
According to lawyers in the case, Libby remains under scrutiny in the investigation stemming from his effort to rebut criticism by Joseph Wilson 4th, a former diplomat, that the administration had twisted its intelligence about Iraq's nuclear program.
 
Libby has become emblematic of the broader Iraq debate. He is cast by supporters as a loyal aide working diligently to set the record straight and by critics as someone working to smear or undermine the credibility of a politically potent opponent.
 
"The way in which the leak investigation is being pursued is becoming a symbol of who was right and who was wrong about the war," said Ivo Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who worked at the National Security Council during the Clinton administration.
 
"The possibility of Libby being indicted, and the whole Cheney angle," Daalder said, "is all about proving in some sense that they were wrong and therefore that we who opposed the war and never thought the intelligence was right have been proven correct."
 
The passions surrounding the investigation and the question of why the administration got it wrong about Iraq's weapons programs, other analysts agree, reflect the troubled course of the war and the divisions over whether it was necessary or was a diversion from the effort to combat Islamic extremism.
 
Lea Anne McBride, a spokeswoman for Cheney, declined to comment on the remarks by Scowcroft because The New Yorker's article had yet to be published.
 
The administration has acknowledged the failures of prewar intelligence, although its supporters have pointed out that many Democrats, including the former president Bill Clinton, and the intelligence services of other countries were also convinced that Saddam had banned weapons.
 
An administration official said Saturday night that the White House had taken steps to improve the country's intelligence services since the war.
 
 
While the leak case has ensnared other officials - most prominently Karl Rove, Bush's senior adviser and deputy chief of staff - the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, appears to have devoted much effort to understanding the role of Cheney's office and actions taken by Libby, who has twice testified before the grand jury.
 
Fitzgerald has been examining whether administration officials disclosed to the media that Wilson's wife was a CIA officer.
 
The investigation led to the jailing for nearly three months of a reporter for The New York Times, Judith Miller, for refusing to discuss her conversations with a confidential source who turned out to be Libby.
 
In May and June 2003, Wilson began circulating his criticism of the administration's assertions that Iraq had been seeking nuclear material in Africa.
 
At that point, Libby showed an intense interest in Wilson's public statements and argued to colleagues that Wilson should be rebutted at every turn, a former administration official said. The statement confirmed an account on Friday in The Los Angeles Times.
 
 
Libby also sought to insulate Cheney from Wilson's critique, telling journalists that Wilson's trip to Africa to assess Iraq's intentions was planned by the CIA.
 
Libby's involvement in assembling the case that Iraq's weapons constituted an urgent threat began well before the invasion. Along with Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, then senior Pentagon officials, Libby was immersed in painting a dark picture of Iraq's weapons capabilities and alleged that it had ties to Al Qaeda.
 
In late 2002 and early 2003, according to former government officials and several published accounts, Libby was the main author of a lengthy document making the administration's case for war to the United Nations Security Council.
 
But in meetings at the CIA in early February 2003, Powell and George Tenet, then director of central intelligence, rejected virtually all of Libby's draft as exaggerated and not supported by intelligence.