MacGuffin

The Post's Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen have one of the most lucid chronologies I've yet read of what we know so far of the campaign to discredit the yellowcake intelligence that was the centerpiece, the coup de grace, the cherry on top of Bush's sales pitch to the American people to go to war.

From the article, it's impossible to tell if Rove committed a criminal act. I doubt it. The statute has too many holes and Rove seemed to know where exactly those holes lay (the question remains, who initially told Novak about Plame). Nevertheless, Rove has had a lot of chances to perjure himself.

Lawyers who have sat in on the prosecutors' interviews said Fitzgerald cast a wide net, adopting a broad view of the case. Some witnesses were asked only about the initial disclosure, others about possible misstatements during the investigative phase. Some were brought in several times. Rove, for example, was grilled by FBI agents twice in formal meetings and asked to respond to questions in informal settings, and appeared three times before the grand jury -- all between October 2003 and October 2004, said a person familiar with his testimony.

But as I wrote the other day, Rove is really inconsequential, the administration's thirst for war in Iraq is the real conspiracy, and where the real crimes are to be found. Frank Rich this morning agrees.

WELL, of course, Karl Rove did it. He may not have violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, with its high threshold of criminality for outing a covert agent, but there's no doubt he trashed Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame. We know this not only because of Matt Cooper's e-mail, but also because of Mr. Rove's own history. Trashing is in his nature, and bad things happen, usually through under-the-radar whispers, to decent people (and their wives) who get in his way. In the 2000 South Carolina primary, John McCain's wife, Cindy, was rumored to be a drug addict (and Senator McCain was rumored to be mentally unstable). In the 1994 Texas governor's race, Ann Richards found herself rumored to be a lesbian. The implication that Mr. Wilson was a John Kerry-ish girlie man beholden to his wife for his meal ticket is of a thematic piece with previous mud splattered on Rove political adversaries. The difference is that this time Mr. Rove got caught.

Even so, we shouldn't get hung up on him - or on most of the other supposed leading figures in this scandal thus far. Not Matt Cooper or Judy Miller or the Wilsons or the bad guy everyone loves to hate, the former CNN star Robert Novak. This scandal is not about them in the end, any more than Watergate was about Dwight Chapin and Donald Segretti or Woodward and Bernstein. It is about the president of the United States. It is about a plot that was hatched at the top of the administration and in which everyone else, Mr. Rove included, are at most secondary players.

The conspiracy to discredit Wilson has opened up a Pandora's Box, Rich writes, that brings to light just how the administration used the media's gullibility to snooker Americans into a belief in WMD, a connection with 9-11, and a painless toppling of an evil dictator. And on the road to Baghdad, Wilson, Rove, "Scooter" Libby are all just so many MacGuffins.

Like Rove, his boss will probably get away with it, by playing four corners basketball and riding out the clock with a compliant, partisan Congress. But the details of just how we got to where we are in Iraq are going to keep seeping to the surface, and we're going to learn more and more just how far the administration was willing to go and what a price we paid to satisfy Bush's ambition to be "a wartime president."