The CIA's Attempted Coup

Consider this scenario for a moment.

The CIA, unhappy with the conservative leanings of the Bush administration and paranoid about pending house cleaning in their bureaucratic ranks, decides to undertake a palace coup to replace Bush with Kerry by undermining the president's credibility leading up to the 2004 elections. But how to do it?

9/11 gave Bush a huge boost as a result of his steadfast leadership. The CIA knows that, in order to replace Bush it has to surreptitiously attack him on this point. The president, from almost immediately after 9/11, points to Iraq as a terrorist nation. But Bush is cautious. He doesn't want to just drop a cruise missile somewhere in Bagdad like his predecessor had a predilection to do. No, he needed a very powerful set of verifiable reasons to go the whole nine yards: REGIME CHANGE!

The CIA, seeing that Bush requires a rationale for the impending liberation of Iraq, provides him with what he needs: Saddam has a major chemical weapons program and maybe worse! This makes sense in that Saddam had used chem WMDs before and he has made no bones about his desire to go nuclear. The CIA thus provides a willing White House with bogus information regarding mobile labs, weapons grade tubes that can be used to make nukes, weapons stockpiles, etc.

The CIA has connections deep inside Interpol and other spy agencies in semi-friendly "allies", all who are eager to undermine Bush as well. They go along with the charade that Saddam has an active WMD program knowing that soon, Bush will have been revealed to have gone to war for the wrong reasons.

In order for this coup to actually work however, it needs to have a trigger mechanism. Once the administration was successfully set up, the CIA needed a Washington insider with cred to go public with a high profile critique of Bush's WMD assertions. This leads us to the Wilson Gambit. The CIA can't send one of its own out to criticize the White House but it can send a proxy. But said proxy should have a pretext for making such a bold proclamation as "Bush lied". So Joe Wilson is deployed by the CIA to Niger who comes back and immediately writes an op ed about how Saddam had no intention of buying material to build nuclear weapons.

This cements the notion in a great many people's minds that Bush lied his way into war. The CIA need only wait for the first Tuesday in November.

Too bad the American people still voted a second term to Bush. D'oh!