Stop Trying to Spin the Iraq War

By Joe Klein

"You're gonna protect me on this, right?" the magic words. When someone in Washington makes that request and a journalist agrees to the deal, a blood oath has been signed, no matter how scurrilous or trivial the information involved. You don't break the oath or even hedge on it. You agree to stand outside the law respectfully, not "above" it, and to suffer the consequences. You go to jail to protect your source, if necessary. If you do not adhere to these tribal rules, other potential sources will surely notice and you will be considered unreliable. It is not an elegant system--and yes, there are exceptions to the rules (on matters of imminent national or individual peril)--but it is a bedrock principle of the freest and fairest press in the world. And so I disagree with the decision of Norman Pearlstine, the editor-in-chief of Time Inc., to hand over our White House correspondent Matt Cooper's electronic notes and e-mails to the special prosecutor investigating who disclosed the identity of an undercover CIA officer.

To be fair, Pearlstine made his decision on this case only, not on the more general principle of journalistic confidentiality--and this was one tough case: an instance of confidentiality twisted to protect nonvital and vindictive information and also, perhaps, to provide cover for a criminal act. It is easy to understand why some people--perhaps even most--would have trouble supporting standard journalistic practice in such a situation.

It was, in fact, a story that had everything to do with politics and not much to do with national security--a story that illuminates a signature disgrace of the Bush presidency: its tendency to treat the war in Iraq as an issue to be spun, rather than a life-and-death struggle to be won. In this case the White House was trying to "knock down" a former ambassador, Joseph Wilson, who had disputed the claim--made by President Bush in his State of the Union address--that Iraq attempted to buy uranium in Niger. The Administration had built its case for war on the probability that Saddam Hussein had "reconstituted," in Vice President Dick Cheney's felicitous and inaccurate phrase, his nuclear-weapons program.

Eventually, the White House was forced to retract the Niger claim. There had been no uranium deal. But there was collateral damage: in the course of trying to "knock down" Wilson's story, White House sources implied that the ambassador had been sent to Niger by his wife, a CIA operative. In fact, Valerie Plame had worked undercover--and it is a crime to knowingly reveal the name of a covert officer.

Karl Rove, who was one of the sources, was running the President's re-election campaign at the time. Clearly, he was trying to deflect attention from a very real political problem--the absence of weapons of mass destruction--to the question of whether Wilson, a supporter of John Kerry's campaign (and a distressingly flamboyant fellow), could be trusted. This is a standard political tactic and, arguably, fair game in matters of electoral politics--but perhaps not in matters of war and peace. No doubt, the battle against Kerry seemed more immediate to Rove, who was immersed in it, than the battle against the insurgency.

The election is long over, but the campaign-style spinning persists. Last week, after Rove's name was divulged, the Republican National Committee engaged in a freestyle vitriol spew, attempting once again to discredit Wilson and suggest that Rove was merely trying to "knock down" a bum story. This was so much smoke and baloney--and all too typical of the persistent fecklessness on the part of the Administration and its allies when it comes to Iraq. Cheney continues to spin dross from the hard currency of military intelligence: he recently said that the insurgency was in its "last throes." The President makes a prime-time television address to the nation about Iraq in late June and merely rehearses campaign platitudes without offering a serious discussion of the problems on the ground and the real sacrifices needed to overcome them. Some liberals--equally feckless--may have complained that Bush didn't announce a timetable for withdrawing the troops, but the speech was far more disappointing to those who see success in Iraq as crucial to the larger war against terrorism.

"There is still a peacetime mentality," a military-intelligence officer told me. "The folks in the White House are sincere but not serious," a Republican military expert agreed. More troops are needed. So is a more active diplomatic effort to ensure Sunni--and secular Shi'ite--participation in Iraq's governing coalition (perhaps even reaching out to former Baathists involved in the insurgency). A more focused intelligence effort is needed to root out the insurgency both within Iraq and among its supporters in neighboring countries--including "allies" like Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. It is long past time for the White House to stop fighting the press and the Democrats and figure out how to fight the war. There are, after all, oaths more important than those between reporters and sources. One is the oath between the Commander in Chief and his people. I mean, Mr. President, you are going to protect us on this, right?