Worst of all, the Iraq-Niger caper was particularly damaging, since it was tied directly to the office of the vice president. There was that unanswered question regarding who commissioned the forgery in the first place. And not even Judy Miller could help this time, since most thinking folks knew her to be a shill for the Bush administration.
And yet this insubordination, this deliberate sabotage, had to be answered. Something had to be done, and quickly, so that others privy to sensitive information about the litany of lies leading up to the war would not think they could follow Wilson's example and go to the press.
It is hard to believe that the best thing Cheney could come up with was to out Wilson's wife. It is not even clear that this is what he had in mind. It may have been no more than a decision to name her, irrespective of her cover status, in order to suggest that she had been responsible for sending her husband to Niger on an all expenses-paid "boondoggle!" - that somehow nepotism was involved - as if that would somehow impeach Wilson's negative findings regarding the Iraq-Niger fable. Cheney clearly felt that something had to be done - anything. It seems a mark of desperation that this is the best they could come up with. They may have concluded that launching a hardknuckle campaign against Wilson might at least deter others from becoming patriotic truth tellers of the kind Joseph Wilson has modeled so well. Initially, this tactic succeeded. More recently a cottage industry of patriotic truth tellers has taken shape, and (surprise, surprise!) even some among the mainstream media have given them ink and air time.
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