Is it folly to be wise?

According to someone in the '6os -- was it Jules Fieffer? -- Julie and I were guilty of premature morality for protesting against the Vietnam War well before it got seriously underway. It now appears we were also guilty of premature intelligence because we knew back in 2002 that the George W. Bush administration was totally wrong about WMD or any legitimate reason for asking Congress for War Powers to attack Iraq.

I say premature intelligence because now, in late 2005, nearly everbody seems to know that Dick Cheney and the Bush Administration had no viable intelligence about WMDs or any other terrorist threat in Iraq. Suddenly, Democratic Senatory Diane Feinstein says she was duped, along John Kerry with most other waffling Democrats, by White House misinformation. What I don't understand is how we uninformed, out-of-the-loop California Dreamers had a better understanding of American Oil/Middle East politics than our highly briefed Washington representatives. Excluding the all too perceptive Barbara Boxer, of course.

The Libby indictment is all about the lengths of lying that the Bush cabal will stretch to. No matter how they try to paint it, the case can be put very simply. An Ambassador name Wilson revealed what the UN and most of the EC already knew: there was absolutely no evidence of WMD in Iraq. In an attempt to discredit and intimidate Wilson, they used accomplices in the media to blow the cover of an important CIA operative who happened to be Wilson's wife.

They broke the law. They ended her useful career and they endangered the lives of her operatives overseas. They did this in order to smooth their path to an illegal takeover of Iraq, its oil reserves and infrastructure. All of which would then come under the corporate control of Halliburton, Bechtel and the Carlyle Group.

They continued to break the law by lying to investigators of the original criminal disclosure. The reporters who publicly revealed the agent's name were not journalists, they were publicity hacks for Cheney and his lackey Bush. They were co-conspirators in the revelations and manipulators of their publications and readership and deserve their own indictments and convictions.

To give this ugly crew some benefit of the doubt, they probably thought the attack on Iraq would be fairly brief and might only cost a couple hundred American lives. In their cost efficient world, they were willing to spend those lives in the interest of increasing their own wealth and power. They knew some Iraqi lives would also be lost, but hey!

But their miscaculations are proving to be enormous. Already there are over 2,000 American dead and ten times that many wounded. Not to mention the 80,000 Iraqi dead, but hey!

So have the Feinsteins, Kerrys, etc. suddenly acquired belated intelligence? Or are they merely pursuing political self-interest in a new environment of public awareness and dismay? I feel I am caught tightly in the grip of a new political campaign. . . and premature skepticism.