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BIGGER PICTURE. David Ignatius has an excellent column in the WaPo today that steps back from the Scooter Libby trial and poses the still-puzzling question about the events surrounding the administration's attack on Joe Wilson in summer 2003:
Using some of the documents that have been put into evidence in the trial, Ignatius offers what I think is probably a correct answer: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?
I also think that answer can be generalized: in light of the failure to find WMD in Iraq, the administration, and in particular the Office of the Vice President, probably recognized that the 16 words controversy could be just the beginning of the revelation of the ways in which the administration did not proportion its claims to the evidence in making the public case for war. And as another piece of evidence I've already mentioned made plain, Libby himself was the point man in the White House's efforts to build its public justification. So the administration sought to squelch the 16 words controversy, partly through pushing back against Wilson, in order to forestall the larger controversy.They did succeed at managing that larger controversy to some extent, in part by effectively overseeing congressional oversight. Things have changed, of course, as the just-released declassified bit of the new NIE (pdf) on Iraq and the debate over (and deferral of) the administration's public presentation of the case against Iran-in-Iraq make clear. The intelligence community seems determined to try to avoid its own mistakes and not get played by the administration again; and there is now a great deal of public and congressional skepticism of the Bush administration's claims. The administration has had to modify its behavior to some extent to take this skepticism into account. What remains to be done is to actively constrain those elements of the administration who remain unbowed.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.
--Jeff Lomonaco
