Matthew Yglesias: Striking!

"What is striking," sagely observes Charles Krauthammer, "is how much of the debate in Washington about Iraq has to do not with the war but with the words." In reality, the most striking thing is that Charles Krauthammer, America's Worst Columnist, continues to be published weekly in The Washington Post. Take, for example, this feeble effort at a gotcha. He notes that the Senate unanimously confirmed David Petraeus and then asks, "If you really oppose the surge, how can you not oppose the appointment of the man whose very mission is to carry it out?"

I promise that Jonah Goldberg could do better than this in his sleep. After a cup of coffee he'd probably even find a way to paint surge opponents as Nazi sympathizers.

To answer Krauthammer's question, nobody opposed Petraeus's appointment because there was no reason to oppose it. The "surge" is the president's plan and whichever general was in command in Iraq would be ordered to carry it out; someone has to be in command of the troops in Iraq even if the troops' mission is to withdraw; and just about everyone seems to think Petraeus is a good general. What's more, the president is always granted very broad deference in these kind of decisions.

What's striking is that Krauthammer obviously knows all of this and is just using his column as an opportunity to write in bad faith. The president is extremely unpopular since at this point everyone knows that he's inept, lazy, corrupt, etc. Petraeus, by contrast, gets good press. So the idea is to paint this as Petraeus's war rather than Bush's. Hence, war opponents should oppose Petraeus' appointment and the argument will be made even though it makes no sense.

David Wessel: Bush's Course on Budget Parallels Iraq

The numbers in President Bush's budget add up -- arithmetically. If his assumptions come true, the deficit will evaporate in 2012.

But there are a lot of ifs -- if Iraq and Afghanistan cost only $50 billion in 2009 and nothing thereafter; if the president and Congress hold growth in annually appropriated domestic spending well below inflation; if they let the alternative minimum tax reach deeper into the middle class or raise taxes on others to prevent that; if Congress squeezes $66 billion (4%) from Medicare over five years.

OK. Give him a break. A presidential budget is an opening bid, not an attempt at stating a consensus.

But is it sound? If former Republican Treasury Secretary James A. Baker III and former Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton led a budget commission like their Iraq Study Group, what would they say?

They would hardly need to rewrite their cover letter. "There is no magic formula … . However, there are actions that can be taken to improve the situation and protect American interests," they said in the Iraq report. "Many Americans are dissatisfied, not just with the situation...but with the state of our political debate … . Our country deserves a debate that prizes substance over rhetoric, and a policy that is adequately funded and sustainable."

William Gale of the Brookings Institution think tank -- populated by deficit-fearing Democratic wonks who have been trying to find common ground with deficit-fearing Republican wonks -- has been thinking a lot lately about the parallels between Mr. Bush on Iraq and Mr. Bush on the budget.

"The Bush administration's two signature policies have been the war in Iraq and consistent pressure for tax cuts," he argues. "On the surface, they look quite different and were advocated by different parts of the administration. Look a little deeper and some common patterns emerge -- so maybe this says something about the principles or management style of the Bush administration."

It is a provocative and illuminating exercise. Let Mr. Gale kick it off: The president took the U.S. into Iraq with "falsely rosy scenarios" about the post-Saddam landscape there, he says. Mr. Bush built his tax cuts in 2001 on a similarly unrealistic hope that the budget surplus was large enough to cut taxes without creating deficits.

Let us keep going. As Iraq proved different and more difficult than anticipated, and contingency planning was regarded by the Bush White House as a sign of weakness, rather than prudence, Mr. Bush vowed to "stay the course." When then-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan argued for "triggers" to undo tax cuts if budget reality didn't match projections, the White House scoffed. Even when the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drove spending on homeland security and the military far above projections, Mr. Bush didn't revisit his fiscal strategy.

Smart critics, even inside the administration, were disregarded and shunned...

Dan Froomkin: Washington Journamalism on Trial

Washington Journalism on Trial

By Dan Froomkin Special to washingtonpost.com Thursday, February 8, 2007; 1:34 PM

If you're a journalist, and a very senior White House official calls you up on the phone, what do you do? Do you try to get the official to address issues of urgent concern so that you can then relate that information to the public?

Not if you're NBC Washington bureau chief Tim Russert.

When then-vice presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby called Russert on July 10, 2003, to complain that his name was being unfairly bandied about by MSNBC host Chris Matthews, Russert apparently asked him nothing.

And get this: According to Russert's testimony yesterday at Libby's trial, when any senior government official calls him, they are presumptively off the record.

That's not reporting, that's enabling.

That's how you treat your friends when you're having an innocent chat, not the people you're supposed to be holding accountable.

Many things are "on trial" at the E. Barrett Prettyman federal courthouse right now. Libby is the only one facing a jail sentence -- and Russert's testimony, firmly contradicting the central claim of Libby's defense, may just end up putting him there.

But Libby's boss, along with the whole Bush White House, for that matter, is being held up to public scrutiny as well.

And the behavior of elite members of Washington's press corps -- sometimes appearing more interested in protecting themselves and their cozy "sources" than in informing the public -- is also being exposed for all the world to see.

For Russert, yesterday's testimony was the second source of trial-related embarrassment in less than two weeks. The first came when Cathie Martin, Cheney's former communications director, testified that the vice president's office saw going on Russert's "Meet the Press" as a way to go public but "control [the] message."

In other words: Sure, there might be a tough question or two, but Russert could be counted on not to knock the veep off his talking points -- and, in that way, give him just the sort of platform he was looking for.

Russert's description of how he does business with government officials came when prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald asked him whether there were "any explicit ground rules" for his conversation with Libby.

According to someone taking meticulous notes at the courthouse yesterday, Russert replied: "Specifically, no. But when I talk to senior government officials on the phone, it's my own policy our conversations are confidential. If I want to use anything from that conversation, then I will ask permission."

In his cross-examination, defense attorney Theodore Wells sounded incredulous that Russert wouldn't have asked Libby some questions. After all, former ambassador Joseph Wilson had gone public just four days earlier with his provocative charge that the administration manipulated intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq. Wilson had done that in a New York Times op-ed -- and on "Meet the Press" itself.

"You have the chief of staff of the vice president of the United States on the telephone and you don't ask him one question about it?" Wells asked. "As a newsperson who's known for being aggressive and going after the facts, you wouldn't have asked him about the biggest stories in the world that week?"

Russert replied: "What happened is exactly what I told you."

Tim Burke: Don't Expect Zimbabwe to Improve Much Soon

Much as I think Mugabe is loathsome, and that his loathsomeness was consistently underestimated by many observers and commenters of Zimbabwe's politics in the 1980s, it's important not to overlook the more systemic problems in the postcolonial Zimbabwean state. Mugabe is not in fact a charismatic authoritarian who somehow overwhelmed an otherwise competent or well-functioning liberal democracy and drove into ruin. He's certainly an autocratic and unscrupulous control freak, and has been ever since he first entered politics. But what has happened to Zimbabwe since the late 1980s has as much to do with a wider circle of people around Mugabe, both in the ruling party and in important and powerful institutions, including the military.

When Mugabe dies, I wouldn't expect things to get magically better. First, because much of what gave Zimbabwe a promising economic and social outlook circa 1988 has been thoroughly and structurally destroyed. Second, because at least some of the people around Mugabe have instincts just as self-destructive and have every reason to inhibit good management or democratization (as they will likely be the ones prosecuted by a vengeful reformist regime).

The problem with fantasizing about unilateral military action in this case is connected to this problem. You could drop a bunch of Special Forces guys on the presidential palace in Harare, take out Mugabe, and change absolutely zero. Frankly you could occupy the country with UN forces and change absolutely zero. What's needed is a huge change in the fundamental architecture of the Zimbabwean state and a change in the basic composition of the thin upper range of the most powerful elite. Those are not transformations which occupiers can readily bring about (something which I'd think should be screamingly apparent to everyone by now).

About the only positive short-term scenario is that some of the younger, smarter, more competent guys in ZANU-PF who have been carefully keeping their heads low through the last decade will move aggressively on Mugabe's death to push aside hacks like Didymus Mutasa and clean out the bureaucratic house. But to really succeed at that, they'd have to reverse a lot of brain-drain and draw back competent managerial and professional elites who have (wisely) left for other countries

Andrew Leonard: Climate change, the North Pole, and an imaginary Chinese navy

Climate change, the North Pole, and an imaginary Chinese navy, by Andrew Leonard: How the World Works does its best to resist the urge to make fun of Wall Street Journal editorials. It's not that it's too easy. It's just unseemly, like taunting a patient suffering from Alzheimer's disease for his forgetfulness. ...

But I am something of a glutton for exposing myself to absurdist displays of right-wing idiocy, so I read the editorial, which cites a certain Lord Christopher Monckton for most of its revisionist claims. Monckton, we are told, is "a one-time adviser to Margaret Thatcher who has become a voice of sanity on global warming."

Oh really? There are few things the blogosphere excels more at than debunking revisionist lies about global warming, so I decided to give myself a quick update on Lord Monckton. There was much to mull over...

Tim Lambert, a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales, noted in his blog, Deltoid, that ... Monckton authored a lengthy piece in the Daily Telegraph that included the following assertion about the medieval era: "There was little ice at the North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found none."

Lambert tracks down the assertion: It comes from Gavin Menzies' book "1421: The Year China Discovered America."

"1421" is probably the single most derided book purporting to be a work of Chinese history published in living memory. It has been mocked and rebutted from one end of the Internet to the other. An entire generation of historians has been forced into debt from the dental bills brought on by endless nights of teeth-gnashing at the very thought that Menzies' work might be considered by anyone to be historically accurate. Suffice to say, the evidence that a Chinese naval squadron ever sailed to the North Pole, is, uh, scant.

Lambert's summing up is spot-on: "Hey, if you are going to ignore the consensus view of scientists, you might as well ignore the consensus view of historians." ...

I'd like to say, "You can't makes this stuff up," but apparently you can!

Martin Wolf: In spite of sceptics, it is worth reducing climate risk

In spite of sceptics, it is worth reducing climate risk

By Martin Wolf

Published: February 6 2007 18:06 | Last updated: February 6 2007 18:06

In the public at large, including sizeable sections of the business community, a new consensus on climate change has emerged: it is happening; it is important; and something needs to be done. The publication last week of the latest assessment from the intergovernmental panel on climate change and discussions at this year’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos made the growing agreement on all these points plain. Yet there is one group among whom dissent reigns: economists.

It was to them, above all, that Sir Nicholas Stern’s review on the Economics of Climate Change was addressed. It has failed to persuade. So much the worse for economists, the environmentally minded will declare. I disagree. Economists are trained to address the costs and benefits of alternative policies rigorously. Scientists are not.

Rick Perlstein: Bloggers upstage the mainstream press yet again

Chalk up 7:22 a.m. EST on Tuesday, January 23, 2007, as the moment a milestone was passed. On Time's new blog, Swampland, D.C. Bureau Chief Jay Carney posted a pre-assessment of the State of the Union address comparing President Bush's political position to Bill Clinton's in January of 1995. Like Bush, "President Clinton was in free fall. ... His approval ratings were mired in the 30's, and seemed unlikely to rise."...

Leonard Weiss and Larry Diamond: Congress must stop an attack on Iran

Congress must stop an attack on Iran

By Leonard Weiss and Larry Diamond, LEONARD WEISS is a senior science fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. LARRY DIAMOND is a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. February 5, 2007

DESPITE ANGUISH and anger over the Bush administration's decision to escalate its failing war in Iraq, Congress is unlikely to cut off funding. Even most opponents of the war fear that they could be blamed for not supporting the troops in the field and for a possible descent into even greater catastrophe in the face of a precipitous U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. But nothing prevents Congress from using its power of the purse to prevent an American attack on Iran. President Bush's neoconservative advisors and pundit supporters have been beating the drums of war with Iran since 2003, when the president declared Iran to be part of an "axis of evil." Recall that a senior administration official told The Times that Iran should "take a number" in the wake of the invasion of Iraq. In his recent address to the nation on the troop surge in Iraq, Bush issued more threats to Iran. Now the president has named a Navy admiral to head the U.S. Central Command and dispatched a second aircraft carrier and minesweepers to the Persian Gulf, presumably to prevent Iran from closing the Strait of Hormuz in the event of conflict. These developments and other administration moves could presage an air attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. Iran is not innocent of dangerous and provocative behavior. Tehran has supported insurgent groups in Iraq, including helping to provide sophisticated explosives that have killed U.S. soldiers. And Iran's continued development of a nuclear enrichment facility is in defiance of the international community's demand to halt those actions. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's repulsive statements about the Holocaust and Israel add to the nervousness about Iran's future actions. But war is not yet justified, except in the minds of those who have been lobbying for it for years. Iran is still years away from being a nuclear threat, and our experience with "preventive war" in Iraq should teach us a thing or two. Launching another such war without international approval would leave us even more politically isolated and militarily overstretched. Attacking a Middle Eastern country — one much stronger than Iraq and with the ability to cut off oil supplies from the Strait of Hormuz — could inflame the region, intensify Shiite militia attacks on our soldiers in Iraq and stimulate terrorist attacks on Americans and U.S. interests worldwide. But recklessness, not prudence, has been the hallmark of this administration's foreign policy. Beyond this, the president and vice president subscribe to what some call the "unitary executive," which is a fancy way of saying they believe that Congress cannot prevent the president from doing almost anything he wants.

Ogged: AIPAC Is Not "Pro-Israel"; It Is Pro-Blowing Things Up

For What

Posted by Ogged on 02.04.07

This is an obvious point that's been made by (via) lots of people, but I'm going to make it again. It concedes far too much to call AIPAC "pro-Israel." What it is "pro-" is the maximum politically feasible use of American-Israeli military force. If you look at its "issues" and "about" pages, you'll see that it's devoted almost exclusively to touting military threats to Israel, and ensuring that Israel itself remains strong militarily. And it's simply part of the logic of lobbying groups that they will always ask for more: no matter how much opinion shifts toward militarism, AIPAC will argue that more militarism is required. And its greatest success has been in portraying its necessarily marginal views as those of an entire nation; a success which allows it to leverage the moral weight of the safety of Jewish people to advance an agenda which conflates safety with the ability to blow things up.

John Fialka: Global Warming Report May Understate Effects

WASHINGTON -- U.S. government scientists Friday said the long-term outlook for global warming may be more dire than suggested by this week's United Nations' report, which they say doesn't fully address the impact of clouds and melting glaciers.

Recent evidence of accelerated melting of glaciers in Greenland and the Antarctic ice cap came too late to be included in the report released Thursday by the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Glaciers are among the largest sources of fresh water in the world and are contributing to rising ocean levels. Rising sea levels could expose population centers bordering the ocean to more storm damage and could require evacuation in some areas. But the computer models used for the IPCC report based their predictions only on the results of heating of the existing water in the world's oceans, causing the oceans to expand and sea levels to rise, said Tom Delworth, a climate modeler for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the government agency in charge of climate science and weather service.

The IPCC report predicts sea levels will rise by between one to two feet over the next 100 years. Mr. Delworth said there remains "much more uncertainty" over how much accelerated melting of glaciers might add to that.

A second area of continuing uncertainty has to do with the impact of clouds on climate change. Warming the ocean sends more water vapor into the air, and the resulting clouds accelerate global warming by trapping more of the sun's heat in the atmosphere and further warm the ocean. Jim Butler, deputy director of NOAA's global monitoring division, called this "a very scary feedback mechanism."

But, so far, the supercomputers the agency uses to model the effect on the earth's climate -- which were also used for the IPCC report -- aren't detailed or fast enough to predict how much clouds are accelerating the problem. Mr. Delworth said computer models divide the earth's oceans and atmosphere into four million boxes, each about 150 square miles, and that these boxes are too large to model the effects of clouds.

"We could use computers that are one million times faster than they are today and still not be satisfied," Mr. Delworth said.

Further complicating the issue are layers of haze containing pollutants from human activity. Such pollutants, including sulfates, soot, dust and nitrates, tend to make the atmosphere brighter, reflecting more of the sun's heat back into space. The IPCC has found that the net effect of the added pollution is to cool the atmosphere.

A.R. Ravishankara, an atmospheric chemist for NOAA, said this raises a problem for governments attempting to clean the air by removing pollutants. "If you take away this cooling effect, then the heating effect would be exacerbated. It's a highly complex problem."

Josh Micah Marshall: The Saudi Connection

Interesting. Earlier I noted that American helicopters appear to be getting downed at a much faster rate of late. Now I see that at a press conference today, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Peter Pace said that "ground fire ... has been more effective against our helicopters in the last couple weeks."

So what's going on? A friend passes on to me this AP story from early December, which notes that ...

Private Saudi citizens are giving millions of dollars to Sunni insurgents in Iraq and much of the money is used to buy weapons, including shoulder fired anti-aircraft missiles, according to key Iraqi officials and others familiar with the flow of cash.

Saudi government officials deny that any money from their country is being sent to Iraqis fighting the government and the U.S.-led coalition.

But the U.S. Iraq Study Group report said Saudis are a source of funding for Sunni Arab insurgents. Several truck drivers interviewed by The Associated Press described carrying boxes of cash from Saudi Arabia into Iraq, money they said was headed for insurgents.

...

In one recent case, an Iraqi official said $25 million in Saudi money went to a top Iraqi Sunni cleric and was used to buy weapons, including Strela, a Russian shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile. The missiles were purchased from someone in Romania, apparently through the black market, he said.

This is a thin reed in itself. But it does suggest at least a possible connection. And it points to a disconnect in much of the charges we've been hearing about Iranian meddling in Iraqi affairs. Most of the US troops that are getting killed are getting killed in actions against Sunni insurgents. Not all. But still most, I believe. That's led some anonymous administration officials to speculate that the Iranians are actually supplying both the Shia and the Sunnis in an attempt to foment as much chaos as possible and to make the country ungovernable. That's certainly possible. Iran wouldn't be the first country to pursue such a Machiavellian approach. But a much cleaner explanation -- what Occam's Razor suggests -- is that the people supplying the Sunnis are people who support the Sunnis. And that trail does lead directly south into Saudi Arabia. But it's not nearly as convenient.

Spencer Ackerman: No one should pretend that the 2002 NIE represented an honest, good-faith effort at understanding the truth about Iraq

There's a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq you might have read about. And it puts me in mind of the one written in 2002. Dafna Linzer points out in today's Post that CIA estimates done in January 2003 and summer 2004 hold up rather well in hindsight: the 2003 estimate warned of an insurgency, and the 2004 estimate -- whose time frame ran into mid-2006 -- said the spectrum of political-security outcomes ran from "tenuous stability" to "civil war." The 2002 NIE on Iraqi WMD was an embarrassment to the agency and to the United States. Linzer writes that:

After no such weapons were found, the intelligence community -- particularly the CIA -- significantly altered the way in which it would conduct future analyses, highlight uncertainty and acknowledge dissent.

But that's not really right. After all, the January 2003 estimate was completed months before the invasion, let alone the acknowledgment of phantom WMD. Linzer is, of course, right that the estimate process has changed significantly since the 2002 NIE, and she's also right that the specter of that NIE has driven those changes. But it's worth highlighting the differences behind the 2002 NIE and the 2003, 2004 and 2007 NIEs. In short, what the 2002 NIE doesn't have is instructive. What it doesn't have, of course, is any assessment of Iraq post-invasion. That was by design. In the summer of 2002, Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, requested and received a letter from then-Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet spelling out, in balanced fashion, an assessment of both the threat from Iraq and what would happen during and after a war. Graham, knowing the debate over war was about to heat up, learned that there was no NIE on Iraq, and requested one be drawn up, hoping to inform the congressional debate. Tenet consented -- but he informed Graham that the NIE wouldn't cover Iraqi politics, and would only cover the Iraqi WMD question. Why? Tenet understood what his bosses wanted, and understood it very well. An NIE that assessed Iraqi politics before the congressional vote on the war would be an NIE that predicted a fragile sectarian politics and Iraqi hostility to a U.S. occupation -- in short, an NIE that looked much like the January 2003 NIE would look. That, in turn, would jeopardize the prospects for the administration winning the war vote; and quite possibly jeopardize George Tenet's job. It was a pattern that had repeated itself throughout 2002. On the question of Iraq's relationship to al-Qaeda, the Directorate of Intelligence's Middle East analysts found no such evidence for collaboration, and a host of reasons to explain that case, but the counterterrorism analysts were more open to the idea. So, when it came time to write an assessment for the White House about Iraq and al-Qaeda in the spring of 2002 -- and compete with Pentagon analysts who insisted on a connection -- Jami Miscik, the head of the Directorate of Intelligence, simply gave the job to the counterterrorism shop. (Their product, still constrained by the facts -- it was subtitled "Assessing A Murky Relationship" -- was rejected out of hand by Doug Feith's analysts as being insufficiently alarmist.) It's good that the intelligence community isn't bending over backwards to tell the administration what it wants to hear anymore. But no one should pretend that the 2002 NIE represented an honest, good-faith effort at understanding the truth about Iraq.

Jonathan Zasloff: Easiest Post Ever

Over at MyDD, diarist Progressive Boy asks, "After 6 Years Can Democrats Finally Forgive Ralph Nader?".

No.

That is all.

Tom Lasseter: U.S. 'Surge' Might Only Help al-Sadr

NEW YORK Tom Lasseter, whose reports from Iraq for Knight Ridder and then McClatchy over the past three years has earned wide praise -- and many notices in E&P -- is back in that country after several months of reporting from Lebanon and elsewhere. He filed the following eye-opening dispatch today. The first part follows, with the rest available at McClatchy newspaper sites or through the McClatchy Washington bureau's main site. * The U.S. military drive to train and equip Iraq's security forces has unwittingly strengthened anti-American Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia, which has been battling to take over much of the capital city as American forces are trying to secure it. U.S. Army commanders and enlisted men who are patrolling east Baghdad, which is home to more than half the city's population and the front line of al-Sadr's campaign to drive rival Sunni Muslims from their homes and neighborhoods, said al-Sadr's militias had heavily infiltrated the Iraqi police and army units that they've trained and armed. "Half of them are JAM. They'll wave at us during the day and shoot at us during the night," said 1st Lt. Dan Quinn, a platoon leader in the Army's 1st Infantry Division, using the initials of the militia's Arabic name, Jaish al Mahdi. "People (in America) think it's bad, but that we control the city. That's not the way it is. They control it, and they let us drive around. It's hostile territory." The Bush administration's plan to secure Baghdad rests on a "surge" of some 17,000 more U.S. troops to the city, many of whom will operate from small bases throughout Baghdad. Those soldiers will work to improve Iraqi security units so that American forces can hand over control of the area and withdraw to the outskirts of the city. The problem, many soldiers said, is that the approach has been tried before and resulted only in strengthening al-Sadr and his militia. Amid recurring reports that al-Sadr is telling his militia leaders to stash their arms and, in some cases, leave their neighborhoods during the American push, U.S. soldiers worry that the latest plan could end up handing over those areas to units that are close to al-Sadr's militant Shiite group. "All the Shiites have to do is tell everyone to lay low, wait for the Americans to leave, then when they leave you have a target list and within a day they'll kill every Sunni leader in the country. It'll be called the `Day of Death' or something like that," said 1st Lt. Alain Etienne, 34, of Brooklyn, N.Y. "They say, `Wait, and we will be victorious.' That's what they preach. And it will be their victory." Quinn agreed. "Honestly, within six months of us leaving, the way Iranian clerics run the country behind the scenes, it'll be the same way here with Sadr," said Quinn, 25, of Cleveland. "He already runs our side of the river." Four senior American military representatives in Baghdad declined requests for comment.

David Ignatius: A Failed Cover-Up: What the Libby Trial Is Revealing

A Failed Cover-Up What the Libby Trial Is Revealing

By David Ignatius Friday, February 2, 2007; A15

Why was the White House so nervous in the summer of 2003 about the CIA's reporting on alleged Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Niger to build a nuclear bomb? That's the big question that runs through the many little details that have emerged in the perjury trial of Vice President Cheney's former top aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

The trial record suggests a simple answer: The White House was worried that the CIA would reveal that it had been pressured in 2002 and early 2003 to support administration claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and that in the Niger case, the CIA had tried hard to resist this pressure. The machinations of Cheney, Libby and others were an attempt to weave an alternative narrative that blamed the CIA.

The truth began to emerge on July 11, 2003, when CIA Director George Tenet issued a public statement disclosing that the agency had tried to warn the White House off the Niger allegations. In that sense, the Libby trial is about a cover-up that failed.

What helped start the whole brouhaha was a 2003 op-ed article by former ambassador Joseph Wilson, disclosing that his fact-finding trip to Niger the previous year had yielded no evidence of Iraqi uranium purchases. His piece opened with a devastating question: "Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq?" A frantic White House tried to rebut Wilson's criticism by leaking the fact that his wife, Valerie Plame, worked at the CIA and had suggested sending him to Niger -- as if the CIA connection somehow contaminated Wilson's allegations and made the White House less culpable.

To understand the Libby case, it's important to look at the documentary evidence, which has been usefully compiled by washingtonpost.com.

The record begins with a Feb. 13, 2002, memo from a CIA briefer who had been "tasked" by Cheney on the uranium issue: "The VP was shown an assessment (he thought from DIA) that Iraq is purchasing uranium from Africa. He would like our assessment of that transaction and its implications for Iraq's nuclear program." The CIA briefer responded the next day with a comment that should have aroused skepticism on whether Iraq needed to buy any more uranium: Iraq already had 550 tons of "yellowcake" ore -- 200 tons of it from Niger. But the CIA, eager to please, asked Wilson a few days later to go to Niger to investigate the claim.

A glimpse of the pressure coming from the vice president's office emerges from a memo from CIA briefer Craig R. Schmall, after he was interviewed in January 2004 by FBI agents investigating the leak of Plame's covert identity: "I mentioned also to the agents that Libby was in charge within the administration (or at least the White House side) for producing papers arguing the case for Iraqi WMD and ties between Iraq and al Qaeda, which explains Libby's and the Vice President's interest in the Iraq/Niger/Uranium case."

CIA and State Department documents show that analysts at both agencies became increasingly skeptical about the Niger allegation and tried to warn the White House. A memo from Schmall to Eric Edelman, then Cheney's national security adviser, recalled: "CIA on several occasions has cautioned . . . that available information on this issue was fragmentary and unconfirmed." A memo from Carl W. Ford Jr., then head of the State Department's intelligence bureau, noted that his analysts had found the Niger claims "highly dubious."

The Niger issue wasn't included in Secretary of State Colin Powell's famous U.N. speech on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, according to Ford, "due to CIA concerns raised during the coordination regarding the veracity of the information on the alleged Iraq-Niger agreement." But despite CIA warnings, Bush referred to uranium purchases from Africa in his January 2003 State of the Union address, attributing it to British sources.

So we begin to understand why the White House was worried about the CIA in the summer of 2003: It feared the agency would breach the wall of silence about the claims regarding weapons of mass destruction. Robert Grenier, a CIA official who was the agency's Iraq mission manager, told colleagues that he remembered "a series of insistent phone calls" that month from Libby, who wanted the CIA to tell reporters that "other community elements such as State and DOD" had encouraged Wilson's Niger trip, not just Cheney.

The bottom line? Grenier was asked in court last week to explain the White House's 2003 machinations. Here's what he said: "I think they were trying to avoid blame for not providing [the truth] about whether or not Iraq had attempted to buy uranium." Let me say it again: This trial is about a cover-up that failed.