The Always Reliable Juan Williams

As a semi-regular watcher of FNS, I can count on two things when the panel comes around: Juan Williams will say something ridiculous and Brit Hume will slap him down over it. This week was no different.

On arguments that Republicans aren't making, he had this to say:

JUAN WILLIAMS, NPR: To me this is all about politics this week, these speeches. I think the administration feels they have a choice. They can either talk about the war in Iraq or not talk about the war in Iraq, and they're choosing now to talk about the war in Iraq as we approach five years out from 9/11.

And they would like to draw a connection between 9/11 and the war in Iraq and try to say to the American people these are connected, even though the president says he never said it. I think Vice President Cheney and many others tried to make that connection. And so now what they're saying is well, you know what, these Democrats are defeatists, these Democrats would -- the president says they'd cut the funding if they take control of Congress, and if they cut the funding, that leads to withdrawal. The terrorists win. I think it suggests somehow that the Democrats are with the terrorists. I mean, that's ineluctable.

It's an article of faith with some that the Administration sold Iraq as some sort of 9/11 pay-back. Polls have said for years that many in the American public believe the two are/were related though any serious reading of the Administration's case for war finds nothing to this nonsense and even if they had, Republicans are most certainly not making that argument 5 years later.

On the situation on the ground in Iraq, he gave us this:

WILLIAMS: But the way that you're framing it, Brit, is stay the course or you don't believe we're at war. Why can't it be that you believe we're at war with terrorists and the way that this war has been conducted so far has been unsatisfactory -- in fact, it's been a failure -- and let's look at some alternative strategies that may include things like...

HUME: Withdrawing the troops.

WILLIAMS: ... saying wait a second, we have a civil war here, we don't want American soldiers in the midst of civil war.

Is it possible that we should allow for this country to be divided differently? Is it possible that we would look at different strategies involving different forces and have different ends...

HUME: No.

WILLIAMS: ... so that we define victory in some other way than thinking we're going to kill all the terrorists and force democracy on Iraqis?

HUME: But, Juan, at the end of the day, when you're fighting an enemy who's shooting at you, you've either got to defeat the enemy or let the enemy win. If these...

WILLIAMS: What if they're shooting at each other?

Which gave us the slap-down of the week from co-panelist Hume:

HUME: ... these alternative -- if they're shooting at each other, then Americans are not in any great danger, then, are they? And if you think about it in any historic terms, these casualty rates, as regrettable as they are -- and they're regrettable, indeed -- are quite low for Americans.

So when you get down to it, all these alternative strategies that you're talking about amount to one thing: Retreat.

Undeterred however, Juan responded with the now too-common Democrat version of the "Nazi" game:

WILLIAMS: We're fighting these guys longer than we've been fighting Nazis. I mean, that's, you know, a problem.

Well, no not really. Rich Lowry explains it well here. Nazi Germany was a state, as was of course Hussein's Iraq. It took nearly 4 years to ultimately defeat the Nazi armies and some time longer to kill off it's remnants. What took that long in WWII was effectively done in a month in Iraq.

We're not fighting a nation state in Iraq at this point, we fight an insurgency and if Juan is going to lecture us all on the perils of Iraq I'd certainly hope he knows the difference. But I digress.

Finally, saving the best for last we're treated with this truly astounding bit of clarity followed by a load of sheer nonsense on the Plame revelations of last week. Consider it two steps forward and one step back:

HUME: The problem with that is that the only so-called leak -- and I don't believe that for any meaningful purposes there ever was a leak. I think Armitage's so-called leak was entirely innocent. But the fact is the only one that made a difference without which none of this would have happened was the Armitage comment to Novak.

Novak was the one who revealed the identity of Valerie Plame, Joe Wilson's wife, as being CIA. That was the only one that had any consequential effect. Other reporters heard about it but they never did anything with it because it didn't occur to them or it didn't happen.
So the only effective release of this information that made a difference was that one. Once he knew how that one had come about, the investigation, in my view, should have been over.

WALLACE: Let me move on. Let me move on, Juan, and I'll bring you up here to the next player in all of this, and that is Joe Wilson, the aggrieved husband of Valerie Plame.
In an editorial this week, the Washington Post, which ran with the story just as much as anybody else did -- in this editorial, the Post said, "It now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson, her husband."

Question: Where does Joe Wilson's credibility stand now?

WILLIAMS: His credibility -- first, you know, saying that somehow that Iraq had not been seeking yellowcake uranium in Niger turned out to be wrong, and so that's at the base of his credibility. I think that hurts, because he in the piece made the suggestion somehow that he had undermined the basis for the pre-war intelligence as it was being gathered by the White House.

If only he'd stopped there:

But to come back to something Brit was saying, if, in fact, the White House -- and the White House had a White House Iraq group, and Scooter Libby, Lewis Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, was on that group. If he asked for a memo intending to rebut Joe Wilson's charges because the administration was concerned about what Joe Wilson had to say and viewed it as a threat to the basis that they were going to war, and then that memo gets to Armitage and Armitage sees it, Armitage possibly learns from that memo that Valerie Plame is a CIA operative, and then says it coincidentally to Novak...

HUME: Juan, the prosecutor investigated that. He didn't find that. If he had found that, presumably, there was a deliberate leak, a malicious leak of some kind, he would have been prosecuted for it. He didn't.

WILLIAMS: I didn't say that it was a leak. I said he commissioned a memo intended to rebut Wilson. It circulates. Armitage sees it. Armitage in passing references this to Novak.

Which led to this free for all at the end of the segment:

HUME: Juan, the prosecutor investigated that. He didn't find that. If he had found that, presumably, there was a deliberate leak, a malicious leak of some kind, he would have been prosecuted for it. He didn't.

WILLIAMS: I didn't say that it was a leak. I said he commissioned a memo intended to rebut Wilson. It circulates. Armitage sees it. Armitage in passing references this to Novak.

WALLACE: All right, guys.

WILLIAMS: But the point is that the White House -- you can have two things happening at one time, Brit. You can have the White House going after their critics at the same time that Armitage says this in passing to Novak.

HUME: Well, look. The White House...

KRISTOL: Rebutting your critics is a legal thing to do.

WILLIAMS: Correct.

KRISTOL: And this was criminalized. Scooter Libby has been indicted for something that was not a crime and for a...

WALLACE: All right.

(CROSSTALK)

KRISTOL: ... he was not responsible for.

WALLACE: Now, that brings us -- thank you very much, Mr. Kristol -- the final player and the person who's really been punished, the only one so far who's really been punished in this whole thing, Scooter Libby, the vice president's former chief of staff, because he's the one who's been charged and now has to pay huge legal fees trying to defend himself on charges of obstruction of justice and perjury.

KRISTOL: Bush was not told by Powell or Armitage who the source of the leak was. Ashcroft appointed an independent counsel who got totally out of control. He had to indict someone, I suppose he felt, in December of 2003, which never should have happened.

Bush should pardon Libby. He should do it now. It would be fantastic. The Democrats would go crazy. We could have a debate for two months about whether once you criminalize what was a totally innocent attempt to respond to, as Juan said, a mendacious critic of the administration -- it's really an outrage that the one guy indicted here is Libby.

And the outrage is that criminalizing works, you know? I mean, he was forced to leave the White House...

BUMILLER: But we are still talking about disclosing someone's identity that -- it's still in the gray area possibly being a crime. So I think it's not...

KRISTOL: No. Has Libby been charged with that crime? No. There's no underlying...

HUME: No one has.

KRISTOL: ... crime.

HUME: No one has been charged.

WALLACE: But he has been charged with lying to a grand jury. And if he lied to a grand jury...
KRISTOL: And the things he allegedly forgot about are much less consequential than what Richard Armitage forgot. Richard Armitage forgot for three months that he had talked to Novak.

He forgot for two years that he had talked to Bob Woodward three weeks before he talked to Novak. Richard Armitage has not been indicted, and he shouldn't be. The idea that Libby is indicted for less serious...

WILLIAMS: Die he lie or didn't he lie?

KRISTOL: No, he didn't lie, in any serious meaning of lying before a grand jury.

It's like he wants to be a dead-ender but his heart just isn't in it.