Introduction by Tom Pauken:

Two months ago, I wrote an opinion piece for the Dallas Morning News asking why conservatives were defending Lewis Libby and Karl Rove in their “outing” of CIA operative Valerie Plame. I received a flurry of email responses with some readers agreeing while others accused me of being a RINO (Republican in name only), anti-Bush, and disloyal to the Republican Party. My Republican friend Sandy McDonough gave me a hard time as well for my views; but Sandy (always the gentleman) made his case for the war in Iraq and the reasons why he believed that Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, had an ax to grind against the President.

In light of Lewis Libby’s indictment for lying to the federal investigators and obstructing justice in the CIA leak investigation, Sandy and I agreed to continue our debate here at DallasBlog. A lot of people don’t realize that conservatives are divided over the War in Iraq and have been since before the war. For example, a recent poll in the Wall St. Journal reported that “43% of Republicans say that there should be a public investigation and hearings into exposure of operative Valerie Plame’s identity ….. Among conservatives, 60% say other administration officials aside from Libby may have acted illegally.”

Just like the polls suggest, Sandy and I are two conservatives who strongly disagree about these issues. We thought it might be interesting to our readers to lay out our cases and get the debate going here at DallasBlog. Our fellow bloggers of the left, middle, and right should feel free to jump in with their own take on the ongoing investigation being conducted by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

Sandy begins and Tom follows ….. The Dead Horse Caper by Sandy McDonough:

Democrats, devoid of meaningful ideas and desperate for power, keep flailing away at the old dead horse “Bush Lied”. Many of these same guys who had the same intelligence as the president , such as Senators Schumer, Kerry, Rockefeller, Reid, Clinton, and ex-president Clinton, just to name a few were all for going to war and ousting Saddam Hussein (“an evil dictator who has long sought WMDs” – Harry Reid) from Iraq just a few years ago after the 9/11 attack. Notwithstanding their previous proclamations, these then pro-war democrats have undergone a convenient political conversion and today are anti-war resurrecting the old dead horse.

The 180 degree flip-flop is attributed to the now famous 16 words in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Importantly, it was British intelligence not Bush who made the claim and that Hussein was “seeking” uranium. The bi-partisan report of the US Senate Committee on Intelligence as well as a collateral British investigation on pre-war intelligence both validate and confirm that the Bush statement was “well-founded” then and is now “credible”. The senate report states that British and French intelligence reported to the CIA about Iraqi procurement efforts to acquire yellow cake uranium in Niger citing at least 3 separate intelligence reports from foreign intelligence services. Robin Butler head of the British investigation says in the report “..it is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999 …this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium.” The Butler report concludes that President Bush’s 16 word statement was “well-founded”.

Now here comes Joe Wilson the latest poster boy for the left who was the bizarre choice of his CIA wife Valerie (not the Vice –President) to go to Niger and verify the above matters. His subsequent “report” and editorial in the NYT was disputed by the US Senate Committee on Intelligence as well as the CIA. As it turns out Wilson blew his wife’s so-called covert cover on several occasions and the 2 year Fitzgerald investigation into the “outing” of her name was a not even applicable to the law. Valerie Plame Wilson worked a desk job at the CIA in Langley for the past 7 years, was not a covert agent and therefore there was no crime here regarding a name leak - a fact that Special Counsel Fitzgerald should have realized at the beginning of his investigation.

Response to McDonough by Tom Pauken:

Sandy, is correct in pointing out that most of the Senate Democrats, who are attacking George W. Bush now over the war, originally supported the President’s decision to go to war in Iraq. What he failed to mention, however, is that there were many Americans opposed to that war from the very beginning – and, not just liberals. A number of conservatives (myself included), retired military leaders, along with current and ex-CIA questioned both the rationale for sending American forces to Iraq and the dubious intelligence used as a justification for going to war. We did not believe that it was in our vital national interest to send American troops to topple the Iraqi dictatorship. Moreover, we were concerned that such a campaign could do more harm than good in the long run when it came to dealing with the serious, strategic threat of militant Islam. I should add that this latter group of conservatives, retired military, and ex-agency types generally supported the President’s decision to intervene militarily in Afghanistan in order to capture Osama bin Laden and eliminate his training camps for militants in that country.

Among those who warned of “the law of unintended consequences” if we went to war in Iraq were men like James Webb, Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan Administration; Gen. Brent Scowcroft, National Security Council (NSC) Advisor to George Herbert Walker Bush; General William Odom, Director of the National Security Agency in the Reagan Administration; General Anthony Zinni, U.S. Peace Envoy in the Middle East; Michael Scheuer, a CIA officer and head of the agency’s Bin Laden unit; conservative columnist Robert Novak; Chronicles Editor Thomas Fleming, and many Goldwater-Reagan conservative leaders.

What we have done in Iraq is topple a bloody, secular dictator only to replace him with a Shiite fundamentalist regime closely tied to the Mullahs in Iran. Are we better off or worse off in combating the threat of our military intervention in Iraq. I would suggest we are worse off today than we would have been had we kept our focus on capturing Osama Bin Laden and reducing the influence of his militant allies and sympathizers.

One can like or dislike Ambassador Joseph Wilson; but the real question is whether he was right or wrong in debunking administration claims that Saddam Hussein was attempting to acquire a form of uranium from Niger to make WMDs. He said that wasn’t the case; and the Niger documents in question, (which were the basis of the original investigation into this matter) turned out to be forgeries. Smart, experienced officials like Stephen Hadley at the NSC, Lewis Libby in the VP’s office, and Paul Wolfowitz at the Defense Department should have been saavy enough to question this “dubious intelligence” of the “Niger documents” before allowing those 16 words to be inserted in the President’s 2003 state of the union address, i.e., unless some people inside and outside the administration were so determined to go to war in Iraq that they were willing to do or say whatever was necessary to make that happen.

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