there's no code of honor among the war-wimps

Ex-CIA agent blasts White House - The Boston Globe -- Gloria summed it up this morning as we were talking over this reprehensible betrayal of a government employee by her employers: They just have no sense of honor any more.

It seems to me that all of these present-day political operatives--the Rove- and Cheney-style war-wimps operating behind the scenes and away from the front lines, as they did during the Viet Nam conflict and continue to do today--had read The Art of War by Sun Tzu and forgotten the ethic, the code of honor, that made America as great as it has been. My biggest problem with Sun Tzu is his amorality: You do whatever you need to do to attain the objective. Remember that this book made him the darling of the investment bankers, especially the leveraged-buyout kings of the 1980s, who took apart the wealth of industrial-age corporations without regard to the moral and social ramifications.

Now, we have the war-wimps running their woosie games, ruining peoples' careers, endangering peoples' lives, and undermining the effectiveness of our government agencies (perhaps this will be an ancillary overall benefit to society, though, in the long run). The code of the American West has been sublimated to things Oriental; the code of the cowboy is supplanted by that of too-clever white-shoe boys riding side-saddle; as a people, we are losing the one thing that made us great, the fact that we were trustworthy.

Here's an excerpt of the GLOBE article:

By Susan Milligan, Globe Staff March 17, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Former covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson yesterday publicly accused the White House of destroying her career for political purposes, telling a congressional committee her identity was "carelessly and recklessly abused" by officials who revealed her name to the media.

In dramatic and unusually public fashion, the former undercover spy went before a blaze of camera lights, discussing her ordeal before a hushed, packed committee room. Speaking calmly but with an undercurrent of anger, Plame Wilson described how her "outing" not only derailed her career path in intelligence, but jeopardized the lives of her former contacts as well as future recruitment by the CIA.

Plame Wilson's appearance before the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform ended 3 1/2 years of silence over an episode that began when syndicated conservative columnist Robert Novak identified her as a CIA operative in his column and ended with last week's conviction of a top White House aide who was charged with lying to a grand jury investigating the matter