(2 of 2)
A good chunk of Courage and Consequence is taken up by the Joseph Wilson affair and the outing of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a covert CIA agent--an allotment that is justified from Rove's point of view, since he spent a good chunk of the Bush Administration fighting off an indictment in the case. In July 2003, Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times disputing Bush's claim that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger. There was some exaggeration involved, but the bottom line was accurate. There was no uranium deal; Saddam didn't have a nuclear program. But Wilson's timing was exquisite: there was a growing realization that Bush's casus belli--WMD--was baloney. The White House went into panic mode, trying to discredit Wilson and rescue Bush's reputation; the outing of Plame made these efforts potentially felonious. The subsequent investigation devolved into a petty attempt to nail Rove and Scooter Libby on perjury charges for denying they had talked to journalists, and Rove has reason to be outraged by the fishing expedition. But it's also a diversion from the real story.
In June 2003, just before the White House was transfixed by the Wilsons, Bush was told by the CIA that a classic insurgency was under way in Iraq. His Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, refused to acknowledge that. The war was criminally mismanaged for the next four years, until Rumsfeld was fired and David Petraeus was sent to Iraq to clean up the mess. Along the way, the situation in Afghanistan was criminally neglected as well. This remains an astonishing record of incompetence. Rove doesn't mention it at all.
Rove's defense of Bush is partially successful: the President emerges as a man who put policy above politics. You can disagree with the policies, but not with Bush's sincere belief in them. And even though the war in Iraq remains one of the worst decisions ever made by an American President, the possibility of stability in Iraq, raised again by the recent elections, makes it, potentially, a mitigated disaster. Rove is less successful in defending himself: the crucial revelation here is that when you make a political consultant your senior policy adviser, spin supplants substance, oppo research rules and winning the news cycle becomes more important than winning the war.