Schumer and Wilson

Senator Schumer has been scurrying around Washington this week as if the gravest threat to America’s national security is presidential aide Karl Rove. Yesterday, he joined anti-war agitator Joseph Wilson to call for Mr. Rove’s security clearance to be suspended. At each turn, Mr. Schumer has insisted that he is not motivated by partisan animus toward the Bush White House, but rather a keen interest in upholding the secret identities of our nation’s undercover spies.But that’s nonsense. If Mr. Schumer or other Democrats were actually deeply concerned about the prospect of politicians outing the secret identities of our CIA officers, then they would have at least censured Senators Kerry and Lugar in April when in an open hearing they let slip the identity of one Fulton Armstrong, a Latin American analyst attached to the National Intelligence Council. Perhaps Mr. Schumer would take some time from his schedule to join Rep. Curt Weldon, a Republican from Pennsylvania, in pressing the CIA to punish one of its former officers, William Murray, for confirming on the record to newspapers the identity of an Iranian exile in Paris whose real name Mr. Weldon took great pains to protect in his new book about Iran.Yesterday, Mr. Schumer stood alongside Mr. Wilson, the husband of Valerie Plame, the operative Mr. Wilson says Mr. Rove outed as political retribution. Let’s leave aside whether anyone should take Mr. Wilson seriously after so much of his original story about his trip to Niger has been disproved by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee and contradicted by the British government. The thing to remember is that Mr. Wilson is in the camp that scoffed at the liberation of Iraq.On February 28, 2003, Mr. Wilson told Bill Moyers on his PBS program that Mr. Bush’s policy for the Middle East “basically means trying to install regimes in the Middle East that are far more friendly to the United States. There are those in the administration that call them democracies. Somehow it’s hard for me to imagine that a democratic system will emerge out of the ashes of Iraq in the near term. And when and if it does, it’s hard for me to believe that it will be more pro-American and more pro-Israeli than what you’ve got now.”Mr. Schumer distinguished himself among the Senate Democrats by voting both for the liberation of Iraq and for the $87 billion to fund the troops there, a point he emphasized to the voters of New York in getting re-elected last year. On Israel, Mr. Schumer during the Senate re-election campaign pronounced himself in “more or less complete agreement with President Bush.” So it’s a disappointment to see the senior senator from New York fetching up with Mr. Wilson, who apparently believes Arabs are unfit for democracy and that Arab democracies, if created, would hate America. Tell it to the pro-democracy protesters in Lebanon waving American flags and shouting “Bush, Bush!” We thought Charles Schumer had more sense than to make common cause with Mr. Wilson on a national security issue. But again, this one is about politics, not security.

Schumer and Wilson

Schumer and Wilson

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