Warmongers?

I don’t know if this story is true, it has not been confirmed by anyone other than Raw Story, so that leaves it, at least in my mind, still in the category of speculation. But if Plame was indeed working on Iran, the implications are huge.

Juan Cole has some thoughts.

If she was working specifically on Iran, this theory becomes more plausible. We know that Cheney, the Neocons and other factions in the Bush administration desperately wanted to get up a war against Iran so as to overthrow its government.

If the CIA was successful in a measurable way in preventing proliferation to Iran of technology required for making a nuclear weapon, and could certify as much to Congress, that very success would make it harder to justify a war on Iran.

So between disrupting the work of Plame Wilson's unit at the CIA and letting the Iranians know about the broken codes, the pro-war party managed to make Iran's actual progress on nuclear research opaque to the US government. It was necessary that it be opaque if there was to be a war. Iran is actually a decade or two away from having a bomb even if everything went well.

For warmongers, good intelligence on the enemy's capabilities is undesirable if that intelligence would get in the way of launching a war.

If true, this means that outing Plame not only helped obfuscate intelligence on Iraq, but also on Iran – the next war. Incredible.