Word: iraq
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...covert CIA agent - an allotment that is justified from Rove's point of view, since he spent a good chunk of the Bush Administration fighting off an indictment in the case. In July 2003, Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times disputing Bush's claim that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger. There was some exaggeration involved, but the bottom line was accurate. There was no uranium deal; Saddam didn't have a nuclear program. But Wilson's timing was exquisite: there was a growing realization that Bush's casus belli - WMD - was baloney...
...June 2003, just before the White House was transfixed by the Wilsons, Bush was told by the CIA that a classic insurgency was under way in Iraq. His Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, refused to acknowledge that. The war was criminally mismanaged for the next four years, until Rumsfeld was fired and David Petraeus was sent to Iraq to clean up the mess. Along the way, the situation in Afghanistan was criminally neglected as well. This remains an astonishing record of incompetence. Rove doesn't mention it at all. (See pictures of Karl Rove and George W. Bush...
Rove's defense of Bush is partially successful: the President emerges as a man who put policy above politics. You can disagree with the policies, but not with Bush's sincere belief in them. And even though the war in Iraq remains one of the worst decisions ever made by an American President, the possibility of stability in Iraq, raised again by the recent elections, makes it, potentially, a mitigated disaster. Rove is less successful in defending himself: the crucial revelation here is that when you make a political consultant your senior policy adviser, spin supplants substance, oppo research rules...
...storm clouds gather for Iraq's postelection season of political turmoil, the prospects for stable governance as U.S. combat troops prepare to depart appear increasingly uncertain. Preliminary returns released Thursday from four of Iraq's 18 provinces show the incumbent, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, carrying predominantly Shi'ite areas - despite a strong challenge from supporters of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Former U.S.-installed Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, a secular Shi'ite who, like Maliki, leads a broad nationalist coalition with strong Sunni Arab representation, appears to have prevailed in predominantly Sunni areas north of Baghdad...
...that pattern holds, Maliki's State of Law coalition would likely emerge with a plurality of the vote; there are, after all, probably twice as many Shi'ites as there are Sunnis in Iraq's electorate, even though hundreds of thousands more Sunnis appear to have voted this time compared with 2005's turnout. But Maliki is unlikely to win a majority, and would need coalition partners - perhaps from among the Kurdish nationalist parties that again polled strongly enough in their own areas to potentially earn a kingmaking role in Baghdad, or from the Sadrists and other Shi'ite Islamist...