Angry like far too many of his fellow travelers because Fitzmas didn't turn out as planned, I see Juan is now listing everyone he wants the Democrats to demand resign from the Bush administration over the Plame Affair. While there's sort of a case to be made for Rove's resignation (though when last I checked, he hasn't been charged with anything, where's all the regard for due process that I'm sure Juan would have were the individual under investigation having a "D" behind their name?), near as I can tell the only reason Juan wants Hannah out is because he's a neocon, though to support this crap he cites a lengthy screed he authored in Der Spiegel that includes such anecdotes as this on the motivations for war:
Bush himself appears to have had an obsession with restoring family honor by avenging the slight to his father produced by Saddam's remaining in office after the Gulf War. Cheney was interested in the benefits of a war to the oil industry, and to the military-industrial complex in general. It seems likely that the Iraq war, which produced billions in no-bid contracts for the company he headed in the late 1990s, saved Halliburton from bankruptcy. The evangelicals wanted to missionize Iraqis. Karl Rove wanted to turn Bush into a war president to ensure his reelection. The neoconservatives viewed Saddam's Iraq as a short-term danger to Israel, and in the long term, they hoped that overthrowing the Iraqi Baath would transform the entire Middle East, rather as Kamal Ataturk, who abolished the offices of Ottoman emperor and Sunni caliph in the 1920s, had brought into being a relatively democratic Turkey that was allied with Israel. (This fantastic analogy was suggested by Princeton emeritus professor and leading neoconservative ideologue Bernard Lewis.) This transformation would be beneficial to the long-term security of both the United States and Israel.
And on why the GOP is against Islamic terrorism:
But Cheney's alliance with the neocons was probably driven more by his Manichaean, Cold War-inspired worldview -- in which the U.S. battled an evil enemy -- and his corporate ties, than by an obsession with Israel or remaking the Middle East. Islamist terror provided a new version of the Soviet "evil empire." And the neocons' dynamic foreign policy vision, their "liberalism with guns," offered more opportunities for the military-industrial complex than did traditional Republican realism in a post-Soviet world, where peer states did not exist and no credible military threat menaced the U.S. Only a series of wars of conquest in the Middle East, dressed up as a "defense" against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, could hope to keep the Pentagon and the companies to which it outsourced in the gravy.Such wars could no longer be fought in East Asia, given Chinese and North Korean nuclear capabilities, and there were no U.S. constituencies for such wars in most other parts of the world. The Middle East was the perfect arena for a renewed American militarism, given that the U.S. public held deep prejudices against the Arab-Muslim world, and, after Sept. 11, deeply feared it.
And the utter wickedness of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy:
WINEP had been founded in the 1980s with the backing of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the legendarily powerful pro-Israel lobbying group. The initial impetus for it was that think tanks like the Brookings Institution were felt to be insufficiently pro-Israel. Initially WINEP tended to support the government in power in Israel, but in the past 15 years it has increasingly been drawn into the orbit of the right-wing, expansionist Likud Party.WINEP wields enormous influence, to the point where it almost functions as a governmental entity. The director of a private consulting firm with a contract from the Department of Defense that involved trying to think about the future of the main political parties in Iraq told me in 2004 that he was specifically instructed, as part of his contract, to depend on the material at the WINEP Web site. State Department officials and U.S. military officers are detailed to WINEP to learn about the Middle East and are indoctrinated into a pro-Likud point of view at taxpayers' expense. Despite its highly political activities, WINEP has the status for tax purposes of a nonprofit charitable foundation.
And the evil Wurmser family conspiracy:
Since both Wurmsers and their circle had argued forcefully for the destruction of the Oslo peace process and against the surrender by Israel of any of the Palestinian territories captured in 1967, it seems most likely that they hoped that getting the U.S. to produce chaos in the Middle East by undermining its allies would give hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a free hand to annex most of the West Bank, and perhaps other Arab lands, rather than that it would lead to a just peace. Weakened by the loss of their backers in Baghdad and Damascus, the Palestinians would be forced to make peace on Sharon's terms.
And why was Joe Wilson targeted, you ask?
Clearly Cheney's men had powerful domestic political reasons to try to destroy Wilson. But considering the larger geopolitical ambitions of the neocons in Cheney's inner circle, and their combination of ignorance and arrogance, it could be argued that Iraq and Iraqi weapons were all along a mere pied-à-terre. Syria, Iran and the rest of the Middle East were in the cross hairs, and Wilson and Plame were getting in the way of the next projects.
For those of you out there who are wondering how exactly so many Europeans came to be of the opinion that the US is caught in the thrall of Israel, fanatical Evangelicals, or the cartoon version of the military-industrial complex, one need look no further than articles by American experts like this one.
The funniest thing about all of this is that Fiztgerald himself has said that has already said that Cheney isn't his target during the press conference, just as he also made it clear that the indictment wasn't about the war in Iraq. But then again, Cole has never let a little thing like that get in the way of his conspiracy theories. Here again, any national Democrat who wants to start reciting these talking points courtesy of everyone's favorite online Middle East expert, look no further than here.
Cole then proceeds to list John Hannah, John Bolton, and Elliot Abrams as people he believes the Democrats should demand resign over the Plame Affair. He makes a half-hearted effort to construct a case against Hannah, when it comes to Bolton and Abrams, it would seem that the only crime they committed even remotely connected to the Plame Affair is that, well, Cole doesn't like them. For a man who frequently accuses anyone who dares question him of McCarthyism, methinks the lady doth protest too much.