I’m not a huge fan of scandals, and I haven’t followed the Plame spy scandal very closely. Still, anyone who reads blogs has known for at least a week that Karl Rove, Bush’s closest advisor, leaked the name of Valerie Plame, a covert CIA operative, as part of a political vendetta against her husband, Joseph Wilson. Bush has presumably known this for many months, the media similarly have known for a long time, and so on. This is a serious offence, at a minimum requiring Rove’s resignation. Yet the average American, reliant on the mass media knows nothing about it, and, as noted at Obsidian Wings there seems to have been no interest in finding out about it.

The NYT has finally woken up to the story, but what took them so long?

If I thought this meant that US journalists were going to give up covering scandal and focus on serious issues, I’d be cheering them on, but there’s no indication of this. Instead, as with the Downing Street memos, the Washington press seems to have been cowed into silence by the Bush machine.

The New Republic has a gloomy but, I think, accurate piece by Spencer Ackerman, focusing on

the disturbing prospect that future attacks against the West will be carried out by those who have gained a wealth of experience fighting U.S. forces in Iraq’s western, Sunni-dominated Anbar province–the premier location for on-the-job terrorist training on the planet. The CIA calls this the “class of ’05 problem.” Such future attacks may very well make yesterday’s carnage seem amateurish in scale.

At this point, I think there’s very little chance that we [in Australia and elsewhere] will escape the attentions of the Class of ’05 indefinitely, whatever policy decisions are taken now with respect to Iraq.

I think the best option is to announce, and adhere to, a timetable for withdrawal of US? Coalition troops from Iraq, and hope that the Iraqis can reach some sort of solution among themselves. But the inevitable short-term consequence of that is that Anbar and other places will be a fairly safe haven for foreign jihadists, until they become more of a liability than an asset for the Sunni nationalists who still appear to dominate the insurgency. The hope is that they won’t get many new recruits, in the absence of US forces to fight.

The alternative is for the US to “stay the course”, and fight the jihadists in Iraq. So far, any successes on this front have been more than offset by the boost to Al Qaeda recruiting provided by the US occupation, and by the stimulus to the domestic insurgency created in part by the mere fact of foreign occupation, and in part by civilian casualties, arbitrary arrests and detention and so on. There’s no reason to think that holding on longer will make things any better – even if the insurgency winds down eventually, the Class of 05 will just disperse aroudn the world.

Either way, there’s every reason to expect more and worse terror attacks. We will endure them, as we must, and we will pursue and bring to justice those responsible. But we have created a rod for own backs in Anbar, as the Russians did in Afghanistan.