War and Piece, Laura Rozen’s blog, has the complete update. Turns out that she, Josh Marshall and Paul Glastris have been on this story for quite some time, and have details not previously disclosed on the matter. Read Laura’s update, and keep an eye on the site. As she says towards the end, there’s clearly more than is out right now, and we’ll likely be hearing a lot more.
One thing appears certain: the original leak of damaging info on Chalabi, now this. If this is politically motivated, someone inside the Bush Administration is playing hardball to get rid of Perle, Feith and Wolfowitz.
This spy story puts me in mind of a
ReplyDeletepiece titled "Look Who's Feuding," by Danny Postel in the July American
Prospect (www.prospect.org). It notes some
friction between neoconservatives (like, say, the aforementioned Perle, Feith and
Wolfowitz?) and other factions of the GOP, stemming in large part from
the Iraq adventure and its ill effects. Here are his closing
paragraphs:
Of course,
it's still possible that the
extraction process [i.e., the expulsion of the neocons from the GOP
temple] might not occur. For one thing, Republicans have
been nothing if not disciplined; surely they will apply whatever Scotch
tape and glue they need to in order to keep these rifts from becoming
too public before November. For another, Iraq could yet "work out," at
least in the sense that the situation will settle down a bit and
elections will be held as scheduled.
But whatever the future brings,
something dramatic has already happened -- and continues to happen
every day behind closed doors in conservatism's rarefied redoubts,
where the quiet whir of confident manifestoes being typed out on
computers has been replaced by the more insistent buzz of knives being
sharpened. Irving Kristol famously defined a neoconservative as "a
liberal who has been mugged by reality." Many Republicans -- reaching
the point of critical mass -- are now coming to define themselves as
conservatives who have been mugged by neoconservatives. If Bush loses
the election over Iraq, their ranks will only grow more critical and
more massive. But even if he wins, listen closely for the sounds of
silence.
.