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Dear Sir:

In his August 31st piece "Missing the Point on CIA Leak Case," Brent Budowsky is right to say that the revelation that Richard Armitage was a source for Robert Novak's column outing Valerie Plame should not distract us from going after all the other Bush Administration members who were telling reporters about Plame's job with the CIA. But he does not give the Armitage story sufficient weight.

Budowsky assumes that Armitage was "anti-Iraq war." Armitage was the Deputy Secretary of State in the months before we invaded Iraq in March 2003, and he did not leave that post until early 2005. If Armitage were truly "anti-Iraq war," would he not have spoken out publicly against the war and/or resigned in protest of the war? He did neither.

This should come as no surprise to readers of the articles at The Consortium. After all, Armitage's boss and bosom buddy Colin Powell laid out the administration case for attacking Iraq on worldwide TV at the United Nations. And as The Consortium has pointed out in more than one article, Powell has never let morality get in the way of his career's advancement. Armitage is cut from the same cloth.

Budowsky mentions Armitage only in passing in "Missing the Point." But Armitage is well worth writing about. He has been a major shaper of the conservative movement's national security policy for decades. He has held important posts in both the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations. He has been particularly influential on Asia policy, including Middle East policy. To ignore him when discussing the Bush Administration is like writing about Truman's "Wise Men" and ignoring John McCloy or even George Kennan.

I strongly recommend James Mann's 2004 book *Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet*. Mann lays out the lives and thought of Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condi Rice, Colin Powell, and Rich Armitage in painstaking detail. (Budowsky calls him "Dick Armitage," but the man's friends call him "Rich": for instance, in Powell's autobiography he is always called "Rich.")

To give some highlights of Armitage's career:

1) While serving in Vietnam, Armitage was almost certainly associated with the Phoenix program of mass assassination. He denies it, but friends and associates of his told Mann that he was involved.

2) For most of the Reagan Administration, he was Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. Basically, Caspar Weinberger made only the biggest decisions. Day-to-day, the Pentagon was run by Armitage, Powell, and Richard Perle. By the way, Armitage worked extremely well with Wolfowitz, who was at State.

3) Armitage was heavily involved in implementing the Reagan Doctrine of providing aid to anti-communist guerrillas. He worked particularly closely with Pakistan's notorious Interservices Intelligence Directorate (ISI) on the Afghan mujahideen's struggle against Soviet forces.

4) He remained skeptical about Mikhail Gorbachev long after Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had vouched for him. In October 1988, he wrote in *The New York Times* that Gorbachev's proposals to freeze seapower, airpower, and nuclear weapon levels in Northeast Asia were "a transparent attempt to get something for nothing while driving a wedge between the free nations of the Pacific."

5) He was a signer of the notorious 1998 letter to Bill Clinton calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. That letter, from the neoconservative Project for a New American Century, was also signed by Don Rumsfeld and such worthies as Wolfowitz, Perle, Zalmay Khalilzad, John Bolton, William Kristol, and Elliott Abrams.

6) Armitage (and Powell) signed off on George W. Bush's "axis-of-evil" State of the Union address.  Calling the governments of Iraq, Iran and North Korea "evil" struck them as unexceptionable, just as Reagan's calling the Soviet Union an "evil empire" had.

I believe, for what it's worth, that Armitage deliberately let slip Valerie Plame's identity to Robert Novak (and to Bob Woodward). I also believe in Mann's thesis that no one in George W. Bush's war cabinet is truly moderate. Powell and Armitage were the most moderate. But Powell made the case for war at the UN and Armitage treated Plame's identity just as cavalierly as Karl Rove or Scooter Libby, so they are not moderates when compared to the average American.

I could say a great deal more about Armitage, but this e-mail has already gone on quite long enough. I hope you will do a piece on him at some point. He deserves it, just as his friend Powell did.

Sincerely,
Todd Plofker