Boulevards and Avenues

Which track will the investigation of special prosecutor Fitzgerald take. There seems to be as many possibilities as there are bloggers and pundits.

I would like to see it stroll down this boulevard of White House Conspiracy:

There is much evidence now emerging that indicates the Bush inner team of Cheney, Rove and Rumsfeld were in awe of the UK's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's ability to win re-election based on poll numbers greatly improved by a nice neat war in the Falklands. This revelation comes from no less than a Bush family biographer, Herskowitz. This writer ascribed a quote to Vice President Dick Cheney, when he was chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, "Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade."
"One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief," said George W Bush in 1999.
Other documents to come from the Blair organization suggest that the timing of the mid-term elections was a serious consideration in the urgency with which Bush pushed for the Iraq invasion. One can only assume that this was being driven by Rove's calculation this would drive the sagging economy off the front page and place Bush in the commander-in-chief role that brought loyalty, improved poll numbers and a remarkable seat gain in the mid-term elections.
All legitimate political warfare in Rove's and Cheney's world, but beyond the sophomoric tricks normally attributed to Rove. This is where they crossed the red-line into a dark and criminal world.
The Bush team systematically smeared people like Ambassador Wilson and head of counter terrorism Richard Clarke, who both sought patriotically, and at great peril to their own careers, to inform the public that the reasons given to go to war were not true.
The added crime that Fitzgerald might consider as evidence of a conspiracy to commit a war of aggression, is the now-published fact President Bush ordered thousands of bombing sorties over Iraq to destroy targets unrelated to the no-fly zone, and clearly intended them as the first step towards an invasion.
These actions seem to breach the constitutional powers solely given to Congress to authorize war. Could Fitzgerald net Mr. Rove and his cronies into a charge of criminal conspiracy to fraudulently misrepresent the facts to provide cover for a war they knew was illegal unless they had a casus belli? The British memos say as much.(emphasis mine)

Starting a needless war is the father of all crimes. Aside from the avenues of murder and mayhem visited upon innocent civilian and soldier alike, the lifetime of physical and psychological scarring; the economic waste and war profiteering, the loss of time and treasure that would have been better invested in make life more beautiful, the real crime is that war begets more war as the fire spreads once the flames of death and suffering find fuel in the tinderbox of humanity's darkest impulses.


(via Smirking Chimp)