Cincinnatus
Powell
October
27, 2005
By
Chris Sanders and Elizabeth Savage
In
the next few days we are likely to learn whether or not the Federal
grand jury in Chicago investigating the Plame affair is going to return
indictments. These may reach as high as Vice President Cheney. A
transient school of thought on the matter has it that this is an
unlikely outcome, and that the scandal is a distraction from bigger
problems. Scooter Libby may go down as a scapegoat, but that will be
the end of it. Another version is that because the investigation is
dealing with matters of national security, it will fizzle and no
indictments will be handed down.
Not likely.
The
Plame affair is part of a larger series of events that taken together
clearly represent a major political attack on the Bush administration
and its neoconservative allies. The Israeli espionage investigation by
special prosecutor Paul McNulty and another grand jury in Northern
Virginia ties directly into Fitzgerald’s investigation. How? Because
it is likely that Larry Franklin—reserve Air Force officer and former
employee in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans—may have had a role
in the forgery of the Niger uranium documents. It was this
‘threat’—Saddam Hussein’s government trying to acquire fissile material
for a nuclear device—that was at the heart of the administration’s
justification for the invasion of Iraq. This is precisely the issue at
the heart of the Plame affair.
- Given that Franklin has already
pleaded guilty to three counts of what amounts to espionage and
- that the Downing Street memo
has demonstrated the intent to go to war whatever the evidence of Iraqi
WMD violations,
the
implication could not be clearer that the most senior levels of the
administration have broken the law. That this represents a real threat
to the administration is also clear in the troubles plaguing the top
Republicans in Congress:
- Tom Delay, recently resigned
Speaker of the House, and
- Bill Frist, Senate Majority
under investigation for ethics violations in the management of his
personal wealth.
Republican control over the
domestic political agenda is crumbling. As it goes, so goes the
chances of toughing out the two grand juries.
If
Cheney is indicted, he will have to resign. If he does, a replacement
will have to be found, someone with sufficient gravitas, visibility and
name recognition to be a plausible caretaker president. Under similar
circumstances in the late Nixon administration, Speaker of the House
Gerald Ford was tapped to replace the disgraced Spiro Agnew, paving the
way for Richard Nixon’s resignation. Who on earth could be found to
take the job? Condi Rice?
How
about former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of
State Colin Powell? He is perfect. Loyal to Bush senior, well-liked
abroad, articulate and intelligent. He is just the man to be brought in
to clean up the mess made by the younger generation—a pair of steady
hands. Unlike Clinton, who was marketed as a white black man; Powell
plays well as a black white man, just the fellow to be the first black
president of the United States. Hollywood has already set the stage, so
to speak, casting Morgan Freeman as the president in the 1998 disaster
film, Deep Impact.
