By Matthew Yglesias
This Murray Waas article Josh linked to has a nice scoop up at the top, then goes on for many words, but then has something at the end worth paying attention to:
The Plame affair was not so much a reflection of any personal animus toward Wilson or Plame, says one former senior administration official who knows most of the principals involved, but rather the direct result of long-standing antipathy toward the CIA by Cheney, Libby, and others involved. They viewed Wilson's outspoken criticism of the Bush administration as an indirect attack by the spy agency.
Those grievances were also perhaps illustrated by comments that Vice President Cheney himself wrote on one of Feith's reports detailing purported evidence of links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. In barely legible handwriting, Cheney wrote in the margin of the report:
"This is very good indeed … Encouraging … Not like the crap we are all so used to getting out of CIA."
I've long thought that -- rather than a desire to "get Wilson" per se -- was the correct interpretation of the Plame affair. It's good to see some kind of reporting-related confirmation. The issue gets back to what about the fact that "Wilson's wife works for the CIA" was supposed to tend to discredit Wilson. The answer is that the CIA, as witnessed by Cheney's note on the Feith memo and other things, was regarded as unduly "soft" on Saddam Hussein. That reality, in turn, gives the lie to the theory that the White House was somehow duped by CIA incompetence into invading Iraq.
http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/11/22/23541/082http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2005/1122nj1.htm