As anyone who's ever attended a city council meeting or watched a local planning commission session on the public-access channel can attest, a lot of things is politics are boring, irrelevant and/or incomprehensible to any but those with a very particular interest in a topic.
And most of the issues that are of general interest and importance are subject to a large degree of manipulation, obfuscation, demagoguery, diversion of attention, postponement, co-optation or various other forms of finnessing and finagling.
But some of them present some pretty stark choices that are hard to avoid and offer a limited set of options. The Valerie Plame leak investigation is one of them. Someone in or close to the White House committed a serious crime in exposing her publicly as a CIA agent, and did so out of petty political spite. The Bush Administration has done about all it can do to hide the incident from public scrutiny. But the nature of the crime and the CIA's strong institutional interest in seeing it solved will make any outcome other than a credible criminal indictment a scandal. At the minimum, it will be a serious embarrassment to the Administration. And it could very well open up a whole range of issues related to the "weapons of mass destruction in Iraq" scam.
Another situation with similar dilemmas is the trial of Saddam Hussein. The Christian Science Monitor's Weblog for 12/31/03 focuses on that topic and provides a number of good links. Anything other than a public trial under some sort of international supervision will cause problems in itself because of worldwide alarm at the unilateralist policies of the Bush Administration. And any trial, even a Star Chamber version held in secret, will inevitably produce a good deal of publicity about the past dealings of the United States in Iraq.
Revelations about individuals and companies involved may be more-or-less entertaining. But more serious will be the questions it will raise about just what is the United States strategy toward militant Islam? Because we backed Saddam's Iraq in the 1980s as a balance against radical Islam.
No comments:
Post a Comment