How to View the Plame Affair

This is a view I really didn't have one year back, but now seems very logical:

Tuesday, September 30, 2003
While I suppose it is fun to use the Wilson/Plame/Rove situation to attack the Bushites, and the incident may create a short-term partisan advantage for those opposed to the junta, and it would be very nice to see Rove do the perp walk, Cryptome has a much deeper truth:

"The idiot furor over naming Valerie Plame as a CIA officer, and the CIA's phony call for an investigation, should not obscure the need to name as many intelligence officers and agents as possible. It is a hoary canard - long-practiced intelligence disinformation - that naming these persons places their life in jeopardy. On the contrary, not identifying them places far more lives in jeopardy from their vile, secret operations and the overthrow plots they advance. These officers, their agencies and governmental funders want their names kept secret so they do not have to face retribution for cowardly misdeeds they are fearful of executing openly."

It is impossible to disagree with one word of this. There is certainly a great deal of irony in the continuing pattern that the Bushites make all their political hay on purporting to fight the 'war on terror', while simultaneously doing everything they can to subvert that war, in this case rendering ineffective an operative who was working on combating weapons of mass destruction. But the contradictions are everywhere. Bush can destroy the economy with his tax cuts, starve social programs, allow corporadoes to rape the country, destroy the environment, and start an illegal and immoral and extraordinarily expensive war, and nobody seems to care. When the CIA is insulted, suddenly it becomes a national issue. It was inevitable that the arrogance and stupidity of the Bush Administration thugs would lead to their picking on a foe who could fight back, but the CIA reaction shouldn't obscure the fact that this isn't a battle of Good against Evil, but just a contest to determine the greater of two Evils. While Democrats piously develop a concern for the well-being of CIA employees, some of these same employees are working right now to subvert the democratically-elected government of Venezuela.
Link.

Found via "Oil vs Empire".