In her view, former President George W. Bush did not have a foreign policy agenda nearly as well-defined as the senior officials surrounding him. Vice President Richard Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who had served respectively as President Gerald Ford's cheif of staff and defense secretary in the mid-1970s were far more more certain about what they sought to achieve.

This view of America's involvement in Iraq has been shared by many including President George H.W. Bush. Almost immediately after the September 11 attacks, Plame said Rumsfeld indicated that Iraq was the place America needed to "go after."

In contrast to the war in Iraq, Plame said it was easier for Americans to support the war in Afghanistan after September 11 because of the cooperation of that nation's ruling Taliban with Al Qaeda. Initially popular, the war in Iraq would eventually lose support amng the American public, when the U.S. military was unable to find any significant WMDs. In the 2016 campaign, President Donald Trump repeatedly called it one of the biggest blunders in American history and blasted former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and many of his opponents in the Republican primaries for supporting it.

But after Plame was exposed by Novak, she knew her career was over and sensed an immediately loss of privacy. Reading about her husband and herself in the newspapers, she wondered, "Who were these people?"

She admitted she felt like she fell "down Alice's rabbit hole," where "white is black and black is white." Ultimately, vice president Cheney's chief of staff Scooter Libby was convicted on four of five counts of perjury. Last month he was pardoned by President Trump.

After losing her job at the CIA, Plame wrote Fair Game: My Life As A Spy, My Betrayal By The White House. In addition to being an author, she is now an advocate for women and sits on the boards of start-up companies, urging them to bring diversity of all kinds to their organizations.

Half the population of the world cannot be ignored if countries expect progress, she said, and the same is true for businesses. She used the example of Xerox, a company that started out dominating its market, but then ran out of new ideas. Its lead slipped away, first to Japanese firms and then to others. Evenutally, the market changed and time passed Xerox by.

“It might have been different for Xerox if they had paid attention to diversity and added people to the company who did not think exactly like everyone else,” Plame said.

“Women go into a situation thinking it is important to reach a consensus” among differing views, she said. Men don’t think they need one.

The “Me Too” movement arising in response to widespread reports of sexual harassment in the media and other industries has brought more attention to women’s issues, “but it cannot stay with celebrities.” Plame related her own personal experience of being asked by her boss to turn around in front of him before being OK’d for a job.