Not about the war? Of course it is

Right-wing bloggers and Bush apologists spent the weekend assuring us that the Libby indictment was "not about the war," using a quote from the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, to back up their claim.

From the transcript of Fitzgerald's news conference:

FITZGERALD: This indictment is not about the war. This indictment's not about the propriety of the war. And people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel. This is simply an indictment that says, in a national security investigation about the compromise of a CIA officer's identity that may have taken place in the context of a very heated debate over the war, whether some person -- a person, Mr. Libby -- lied or not. The indictment will not seek to prove that the war was justified or unjustified. This is stripped of that debate, and this is focused on a narrow transaction. And I think anyone's who's concerned about the war and has feelings for or against shouldn't look to this criminal process for any answers or resolution of that.

So Fitzgerald, in a very lawyerlike way, explains the indictment. In a narrow sense, he's right; the indictment isn't specifically about the war. But the whole case is.

Fitzgerald's investigation was to try to find who leaked classified information that Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA agent.

We got to that investigation because the Bush administration misled the American public about reasons to go to war in Iraq, citing false evidence of weapons of mass destruction. When Joe Wilson blew the whistle and told the truth, the Bushies moved quickly to smear him, which for complicated reasons included outing Wilson's wife as a CIA agent. Then, when Fitzgerald investigated, Libby lied to him and tried to cover up the role of the vice-president's office, if not the veep himself, in the Wilson-Plame affair.

So make no mistake. It's all about the war.

To say that Libby's indictment isn't about the war is like saying Nixon's resignation wasn't about Watergate.

If it all had come out on one day, and he had told the truth, he might have survived.

The coverup -- and the steady drip ... drip ... drip ... as the truth came out --forced him from office.

Drip ... drip ... drip.