The Secrets of Scooter Libby

One topic I've been following, though I've been writing about it very sparingly, is the Scooter Libby trial (firedoglake remains the best outlet for in-depth coverage, particularly posts in the "Libby Trial Live Blog" category. In his New York Times Sunday column, Frank Rich also provides some commentary on the Libby trial. Instead of offering blow-by-blow coverage, though, he focuses more on the overall implications of the trial for the Bush administration and how it seems to be making a few people nervous. You can guess one powerful administration official he discusses by his title: "Why Dick Cheney Cracked Up." The strain is apparently getting to the vice president.

In the days since Dick Cheney lost it on CNN, our nation's armchair shrinks have had a blast. The vice president who boasted of "enormous successes" in Iraq and barked "hogwash" at the congenitally mild Wolf Blitzer has been roundly judged delusional, pathologically dishonest or just plain nuts. But what else is new? We identified those diagnoses long ago. The more intriguing question is what ignited this particularly violent public flare-up.

The answer can be found in the timing of the CNN interview, which was conducted the day after the start of the perjury trial of Mr. Cheney's former top aide, Scooter Libby. The vice president's on-camera crackup reflected his understandable fear that a White House cover-up was crumbling. He knew that sworn testimony in a Washington courtroom would reveal still more sordid details about how the administration lied to take the country into war in Iraq. He knew that those revelations could cripple the White House's current campaign to escalate that war and foment apocalyptic scenarios about Iran. Scariest of all, he knew that he might yet have to testify under oath himself.

Mr. Cheney, in other words, understands the danger this trial poses to the White House even as some of Washington remains oblivious. From the start, the capital has belittled the Joseph and Valerie Wilson affair as "a tempest in a teapot," as David Broder of The Washington Post reiterated just five months ago. When "all of the facts come out in this case, it's going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great," Bob Woodward said in 2005. Or, as Robert Novak suggested in 2003 before he revealed Ms. Wilson's identity as a C.I.A. officer in his column, "weapons of mass destruction or uranium from Niger" are "little elitist issues that don't bother most of the people." Those issues may not trouble Mr. Novak, but they do loom large to other people, especially those who sent their kids off to war over nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and nonexistent uranium.

The overreaction of the Bushies to Joe Wilson's editorial in The New York Times has always been suspicious. If there were really nothing to Wilson's claims, why couldn't the administration simply ignore it? Or even better, prove him wrong? Why did they instead decide it was a better strategy to crush him? Well, there's been plenty of speculation, but this trial just might provide some answers.

If the war had been a cakewalk, few would have cared to investigate the administration's deceit at its inception. But by the time Mr. Wilson's Op-Ed article appeared - some five months after the State of the Union and two months after "Mission Accomplished" - there was something terribly wrong with the White House's triumphal picture. More than 60 American troops had been killed since Mr. Bush celebrated the end of "major combat operations" by prancing about an aircraft carrier. No W.M.D. had been found, and we weren't even able to turn on the lights in Baghdad. For the first time, more than half of Americans told a Washington Post-ABC News poll that the level of casualties was "unacceptable."

It was urgent, therefore, that the awkward questions raised by Mr. Wilson's revelation of his Africa trip be squelched as quickly as possible. He had to be smeared as an inconsequential has-been whose mission was merely a trivial boondoggle arranged by his wife. The C.I.A., which had actually resisted the uranium fictions, had to be strong-armed into taking the blame for the 16 errant words in the State of the Union speech.

What we are learning from Mr. Libby's trial is just what a Herculean effort it took to execute this two-pronged cover-up after Mr. Wilson's article appeared. Mr. Cheney was the hands-on manager of the 24/7 campaign of press manipulation and high-stakes character assassination, with Mr. Libby as his chief hatchet man. Though Mr. Libby's lawyers are now arguing that their client was a sacrificial lamb thrown to the feds to shield Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby actually was - and still is - a stooge for the vice president.

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Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of Colin Powell's notorious W.M.D. pantomime before the United Nations Security Council, a fair amount of it a Cheney-Libby production. To mark this milestone, the White House is reviving the same script to rev up the war's escalation, this time hyping Iran-Iraq connections instead of Al Qaeda-Iraq connections. In his Jan. 10 prime-time speech on Iraq, Mr. Bush said that Iran was supplying "advanced weaponry and training to our enemies," even though the evidence suggests that Iran is actually in bed with our "friends" in Iraq, the Maliki government. The administration promised a dossier to back up its claims, but that too has been delayed twice amid reports of what The Times calls "a continuing debate about how well the information proved the Bush administration's case."

Call it a coincidence - though there are no coincidences - but it's only fitting that the Libby trial began as news arrived of the death of E. Howard Hunt, the former C.I.A. agent whose bungling of the Watergate break-in sent him to jail and led to the unraveling of the Nixon presidency two years later. Still, we can't push the parallels too far. No one died in Watergate. This time around our country can't wait two more years for the White House to be stopped from playing its games with American blood.

Will the Libby trial provide the impetus to begin the Prez's exit from office? So far things don't look good for Scooter, but we've got to see how much further things get before we'll know what other consequences may develop.

Thanks this week to truthout for Rich's column.