Joe Wilson's Career
The whole Plame thing has been unbelievably tedious from the beginning, and the Rove element only makes it a bit less tedious.
Part of what is clear is that Wilson has always been both ambitious and a publicity hound--aching to be a D.C. celebrity. All of this made it practically impossible for his wife, Valerie Plame, to be "covert" in any meaningful sense after she married him; Glenn Reynolds seems right about that.
The to-ing and fro-ing about Niger: Wilson seems not to have learned anything conclusive. The Washington Post wrongly reported that he established a link between Iraq and arms traders, when it was really Iran--a ludicrous mistake (later corrected by the paper) that the Bushies have been repeating recently. On the other hand, to the extent that he found anything, he probably confirmed that there were rumours, at least, of an Iraq connection. He certainly didn't conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that there was no Iraq connection, as he tried to claim in his Op-Ed after Bush's speech. Wilson has hurt his credibility a lot by indicating that his orders came straight from Cheney, and his wife had nothing to do with it; in fact, his wife recommended him internally, through CIA channels, and it is not clear in the media--it was probably not clear to Wilson--to what extent the actual order to go came from outside the CIA, whether from the White House or whatever. It makes some sense that the Bushies were hoping to confirm Chalabi's bullshit about Niger, but let's face it, they were quite prepared to go with the bullshit, on a number of fronts, with no direct confirmation from anyone.
See Clifford May, summer 2004: May is an angry Bushie, and he goes into the whole "the first set of Niger documents were bullshit, but there was another set that weren't, blah, blah," but I think he is good on what Wilson found in Niger. No doubt the Bushies were some pissed at the Op-Ed. They didn't have to be evil or Machiavellian to have that reaction. Wilson was a former public official who directly contradicted a statement by the President, and went beyond or contradicted anything he actually knew in the process. Evidently, he did this to make himself a hero with liberal Democrats--and he had some success with that.
The bigger question is whether Wilson has ever displayed any real competence or credibility through this whole thing. His biggest claim to fame is that he was U.S. Ambassador to Saddam's Iraq: he went toe-to-toe with the dictator, he caused hostages to be freed, etc. But this all came after Bush Senior shit-canned April Glaspie as Ambassador--probably because she told the truth about Bush Senior policies. At the time this was hardly a plum job that the elite of the diplomatic corps was lined up to get--and Wilson got it.
Perhaps charming Valerie Plame is actually this guy's greatest accomplishment.
See also the famous Vanity Fair profile of Wilson and Plame: maybe Wilson was just acting Ambassador in Iraq.
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