Rove at War

Karl Rove is a hunter. His favorite quarry in Texas is quail; in Washington, it's foes of George W. Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney. Rove was focused intently, with a touch of anger, on his prey. It was Monday, July 7, 2003, the day after Joe Wilson, a veteran diplomat, had launched a damaging public assault on a central administration rationale for the war in Iraq: that Saddam Hussein had been trying to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger. In a New York Times op-ed piece and a companion appearance on "Meet the Press," Wilson said he had been dispatched to the African country in 2002 by the CIA, at the behest of Cheney, to check out the yellowcake claim--and had found it flimsy at best.

Now here, in the gun sight of Rove, was a bird in flight. Until then, Wilson had been obscured from view, peddling his story and his doubts--but not his own name--to selected reporters, officials and Hill staffers. The resulting stories had attracted the administration's attention. In May, the State Department's intelligence unit had prepared a secret memorandum about the provenance of Wilson's journey and its classified results--including the curious fact that Wilson's wife, a CIA agent then working on weapons of mass destruction issues, had been involved in planning the mission, and had even suggested that her husband undertake it. Still, there had been no cause to criticize Wilson--let alone mention his wife.

But then Wilson went public. Some prominent administration officials scurried for cover. Traveling in Africa, Secretary of State Colin Powell, who had long harbored doubts, disowned the "sixteen words" about Niger that had ended up in Bush's prewar State of the Union speech. So did CIA Director George Tenet, who said they shouldn't have been in the text. But Cheney--who tended never to give an inch on any topic--held firm. And so, therefore, did Rove, who sometimes referred to the vice president as "Leadership." Rove took foreign-policy cues from the pro-war coterie that surrounded the vice president, and was personally and operationally close to Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby.

Soon enough, Rove had drawn a bead on Wilson. The diplomat was a Democrat who had worked on national-security issues in the Clinton administration; he had donated money to Al Gore in 2000. Now, Rove had heard, he was friendly with Sen. John Kerry. Wilson was trying to drag Cheney into the story for partisan reasons--to caricature him as the dark, secret taskmaster of the war. Cheney hadn't dispatched Wilson; the vice president hadn't had anything directly to do with it.

In the World According to Karl Rove, you take the offensive, and stay there. You create a narrative that glosses over complex, mitigating facts to divide the world into friends and enemies, light and darkness, good and bad, Bush versus Saddam. You are loyal to a fault to your friends, merciless to your enemies. You keep your candidate's public rhetoric sunny and uplifting, finding others to do the attacking. You study the details, and learn more about your foes than they know about themselves. You use the jujitsu of media flow to flip the energy of your enemies against them. The Boss never discusses political mechanics in public. But in fact everything is political--and everyone is fair game.

Which now includes Rove. In a familiar Washington twist of fate, Rove's theory of politics is being turned against him--and he is being forced to deploy the Republican machine, which he built on Bush's behalf, for a more personal task: his own defense. A federal prosecutor is now coming to the climax of an investigation into whether any administration official committed a crime by disclosing the identity of a CIA agent--Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame--to reporters. The prosecutor may also be looking at whether anyone lied to the grand jury about the matter--the classic Washington crime of a cover-up. Democrats are in full cry, demanding that Rove be hauled before congressional-committee hearings, stripped of his security clearance, fired outright--or all three.