French Connection III

When it rains, it pours.

We are now getting some informed speculation (so labeled because I don't have a pair of independent sources) that the Plame Affair may be at least in part the use, by the French, of professional egotist Joseph Wilson's personal vanity and Democrat-led moles within the CIA, to discredit the Bush administration's engagement in and rationale for the Iraq War. Here's a fanciful but perhaps largely factual story here. More substantial is a piece at The American Thinker, potentially linking Wilson and Plame to an alleged French attempt to use forged documents to sandbag Colin Powell and George Bush in the run-up to that conflict in the UN. In this article's penultimate paragraphs, the author attempts to put two and two together, creating this intriguing scenario, citing Wilson's first journalistic anti-Bush foray:

Was Wilson acting on his own in planting the Times Op-Ed? Were Valerie Plame and her friends at CIA pulling strings? Or was it other Democrats? There is plenty of evidence for CIA backing of Wilson and Plame, as many have previously noted. There may be nothing more to it than a failed CIA WMD intelligence group covering itself with a manufactured diversionary scandal.

But for someone with Wilson's ego, simple flattery by the "sophisticated" French might be a powerful tool of manipulation. He has all the appearance of a wounded narcissist, someone who needs the attention of the world to make up for his inner deficiencies. When the Soviet KGB ran agents all over the Western world they rarely bothered to pay them. They were "idealists" whose vanity could be easily manipulated.

Is all that tangled enough for you? Keep in mind that the whole affair may be a classic disinformation campaign, run by the pros who make their living doing just that. Just as Watergate showed how Mark Felt learned how to make damaging leaks from J. Edgar Hoover, the modus operandi of the Plame-Wilson affair reflects professional intelligence methods.

Author James Lewis could be onto something. Particularly significant is his revelation of a fact not well known to the American public which still probably thinks that the remnants of the old KGB constitute our greatest intelligence and security threats. Au contraire. As those in the military are well aware, it is the French and the Chinese who frequently swap the number one and number two spots on their list of spies to watch out for. The French have supported for years a notorious network of industrial spies--that is, spies who attempt to steal US industrial secrets and pack them off to Paris. Here, indolent French socialists can presumably make use of them to stem their sinking economy, which lacks capitalist incentives to invent the stuff that bring in income. (The secondary intention, of course, is to weaken our competitive advantage.)

Lewis' citation of this esoteric knowledge alone gives his piece a higher level of credibility than would otherwise be the case. Add this to the clear French connection to Saddam re: the oil patch, and you have another classic example of Gallic meddling with Uncle Sam's perfectly logical prerogatives.

Lewis extends the metaphor to more chilling territory, however, putting the French behind the Turkish refusal to extend use of their bases to assist in the US invasion of Iraq from the North, which he argues, prevented the planned pincer movement that may have nipped much of the very fatal current "insurgency" in the bud. Nasty stuff. Read it here and make your own judgment.

You'd never be aware of these possibilities if you were wholly dependent on the MSM's own prolonged disinformation plan zeroing in on the Bush Administration and its foreign policy. Small wonder readers are turning to other sources in droves.