Heart of a lion

The names of Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame have returned to the headlines again. Wilson has been remembered in laudatory obituaries after his death this week at the age of 69, and his ex-wife Plame because she is running for a Democratic seat in Congress in the 2020 election.

Wilson was one of the rare diplomats from any country who dared to stand up against a policy of his government. He disputed faked US intelligence that justified the disastrous 2003 war launched by the George W Bush administration. Born in 1949 into a family deeply involved in politics, Wilson grew up in California and Europe, then joined the US foreign service in 1976 and served in five African countries. From 1988-91 he was deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in Baghdad where he became the last US officer to meet President Saddam Hussein in order to warn him to withdraw from Kuwait. Thereafter, Wilson was appointed ambassador to Gabon, political adviser to the commander of the US military in Europe and special assistant to President Bill Clinton and senior director for African Affairs on the national security council. In 1998, he retired and became a consultant on African affairs.

In late 2002, Wilson was sent by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to Niger to investigate allegations that Iraq had purchased enriched yellow cake uranium used for manufacturing nuclear weapons. The aim of hawks in the Bush administration was to get corroboration of a charge that Baghdad had violated the ban on Iraq developing weapons of mass destruction. This was at that time being used as justification for waging war on Iraq. Wilson disappointed Bush and his warmongers by stating, “It was highly doubtful that any such transaction had taken place.” Bush contradicted Wilson in his January 2003 state of the union address by stating, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

After the Anglo-US conquest of Iraq, Wilson wrote an opinion article for The New York Times entitled, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” and arguing he had concluded “that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program(me) was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.” He found that pre-war discussions between Iraqi and Niger delegations were about trade, not uranium. He questioned the “sanctity of information” the US used as justification for an unjustified war of aggression on a country which did not have weapons of mass destruction and did not pose a threat to the US.

In a 2003 radio interview he stated, “The national security objective for the United States was clear; it was disarmament of Saddam Hussein,” he said. “We should have pursued that objective. We did not need to engage in an invasion, conquest and occupation of Iraq in order to achieve that objective.”

Bush administration hawks responded angrily, and a week after the appearance of Walson’s New York Times article, Robert Novak writing in The Washington Post revealed that Plame worked for the CIA. As this was a breach of US law, the revelation created a media sensation. After investigation, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief-of-staff Lewis Libby was convicted for lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the matter and sentenced to 30 months in prison. The sentence was commuted by Bush and Libby was pardoned by the current occupant of the White House, Donald Trump.

In 2004, Wilson published a book about his career as a diplomat, his mission to Niger, and the outing of his wife as a CIA agent. In 2007, Wilson and Plame signed a contract for a film on the CIA leak and subsequent scandal. In November 2010 Fair Game, partly based on Plame’s book of the same name, was released. The film, starring Sean Penn as Wilson and Naomi Watts as Plame, has kept alive the charge that the 2003 war was not only disastrous for this region but illegal in international law. Bush has generally kept a low profile since leaving office.

The Wilsons quit Washington for New Mexico where Plame is campaigning for a Democratic seat in the House of Representatives. Announcing her intention to run, she stated, “My career in the CIA was cut short by partisan politics, but I’m not done serving our country. We need more people in Congress with the courage to stand up for what is right.”

She was born in 1963 into a migrating military family, studied at Pennsylvania State University, and applied for CIA training in 1985. While the CIA refused to describe her work, she was associated with the agency through July 2003. A significant task towards the end of her career was to investigate allegations that aluminium tubes bought by Iraq could be used in centrifuges for uranium enrichment. She and her colleagues rejected this claim.

In 2011, she began a series of spy novels, and since Trump took office in January 2017, she has, eccentrically, attempted to raise money to buy Twitter in order to turn off his stream of tweets. During her bid for office, she gives priority to combating climate change by supporting the Green New Deal. She calls for upgrading education, granting asylum to persecuted migrants, health care for all, gun control and Trump’s impeachment. She counts herself among the progressive Democrats.

Although the Wilsons divorced in 2017, she continues to honour the man who dared to take on the White House and the Washington establishment, calling him a “hero, a patriot (who) had the heart of a lion.”

In his memoir he wrote, “I come away from the fight I’ve had with my government full of hope for our future. It takes time for Americans to fully understand when they have been duped by a government they instinctively want to trust. But it is axiomatic that you cannot fool all of the people all of the time, and our citizens inevitably react to ... deceit.”

Hopefully, the Republican party will take his words to heart and support Trump’s impeachment, or US voters will turn him and his deceitful administration out of office next November.