[Mb-civic] (RE: Joseph Wilson) The atypical ambassador - H.D.S. Greenway - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

The atypical ambassador

By H.D.S. Greenway  |  November 8, 2005

BAGHDAD
I PASSED by the old American Embassy the other day, a modest, 
nondescript building of the kind you find all over town. It appeared to 
be deserted, and people say it is for rent. I would have liked to take a 
longer look, but in the Baghdad of today Westerners do not linger, or 
even get out of their cars, unless absolutely necessary.

The old embassy that I came to know in the runup to the Gulf War in 1991 
is a far cry from the present embassy -- that great pile of 
neo-Babylonian splendor called the Republican Palace, from which Saddam 
once ruled. Its ceilings are high and festooned with chandeliers. Much 
of the furniture is of the type cheerfully described as Louis Farouk. 
American diplomats today live in isolation, along with Iraq's 
provisional government, inside the hyper-protected Green Zone away from 
the lawlessness, insurgency, and chaos that now dominate Iraq.

Back in January 1991 the acting ambassador was Joseph Wilson IV, and it 
didn't take long to find out that Wilson was an unconventional, even 
flamboyant diplomat. Those were trying days as America prepared for war. 
But Saddam wasn't about to give up Kuwait, and Wilson knew that the 
embassy would soon have to be evacuated.

 From time to time Wilson would invite the press in for a briefing, and 
they were usually precise and informative, even though there was little 
to report. He used to come around from behind his desk and lean back 
against it to take questions. There was a little black box on his desk 
near his hand, and when the question was too aggressive or silly, he 
would press a button and the box would speak a four-letter expletive 
followed by ''you." Invariably it got a laugh, and, of course, no one 
could accuse him of saying anything rude. It was just the little black 
box talking. But whatever you thought of the gimmick, you knew that Joe 
Wilson was not cut out of the same cloth as most diplomats.

He would later be commended for his time in Iraq by George H.W. Bush, 
whom Wilson admires to this day. When the day did come to evacuate the 
embassy from Baghdad, it was done with efficiency and dispatch. Wilson 
served his country well at a difficult time.

I didn't hear of him again until his now-famous op-ed article telling a 
tale of White House misinformation concerning Saddam Hussein's quest for 
nuclear material. There then followed the White House effort at 
wholesale character assassination. One famous organ of the right opined 
that Karl Rove was a hero for warning journalists of how dangerous and 
despicable Wilson was.

For the left, Lewis ''Scooter" Libby's indictment is another Watergate, 
but prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was surely correct when he said that 
the trial should not be construed as an indictment on America's war in 
Iraq. This particular case will be limited to whether or not Libby is a 
liar.

Yet the lengths the White House would go in order to discredit Wilson 
are astonishing, even if no one is ever indicted for exposing his wife's 
CIA connection. I am sure the White House heard in Wilson's 
whistle-blowing the voice of the little black box and were both outraged 
and determined to squash him. For the White House did not want it 
revealed how they had massaged intelligence in order to create a casus 
belli.

We know now that the decision to invade Iraq was made on a neo-imperial 
design for the Middle East, and weapons of mass destruction were the 
excuse that people would accept. We know that this administration took 
advantage of Sept. 11 to scratch its Iraq itch, even though Sept. 11 had 
nothing to do with Iraq.

We know now that then secretary of state Colin Powell's WMD performance 
at the United Nations was nonsense, and, as he himself admits, an 
indelible stain on his record and reputation. We know how men like Vice 
President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld bought into 
a utopian grand design and took a deeply inexperienced young president 
along with them.

And we know now what a deep and damaging failure this botched dip into 
idealistic colonialism has been, and how it has hurt our cause of trying 
to combat Islamic extremism.

I left here with Joe Wilson nearly 15 years ago, but because the son 
lacked the wisdom of the father, I am back in this demeaned and bitter 
city witnessing the greatest foreign debacle of a lifetime.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/11/08/the_atypical_ambassador/
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