Scarcely Imaginable Treason

Juan Cole reiterates (of course much more eloquently) what I said yesterday about the ramifications of Cheney's office outing Valeri Plame (excerpt):

So between disrupting the work of Plame Wilson's unit at the CIA and letting the Iranians know about the broken codes, the pro-war party managed to make Iran's actual progress on nuclear research opaque to the US government. It was necessary that it be opaque if there was to be a war. Iran is actually a decade or two away from having a bomb even if everything went well. But US intelligence agencies must be less confident they know what is going on in Iran now than before the Neocons destroyed so much of the effort against Iranian proliferation. It was the US withdrawal of inspectors from Ira[q] in 1998 that created the uncertainties that allowed Bush to invade Iraq. For warmongers, good intelligence on the enemy's capabilities is undesirable if that intelligence would get in the way of launching a war. Still, it is just speculation. If the speculation were true, the scale of treason emanating from Rove and Cheney and his staff is scarcely imaginable. Even if they did not set out to create a more plausible cause for war, Rove, Cheney, Libby and the others have either through duplicity or cupidity or stupidity set the stage for even more loss of life and violent conflict.