An indictment pool is up.  There are doubts about the reliability of prediction markets; but not much of the weekend remains and–whatever happens–the coming week will be eventful.

If you have access to today’s (Sunday, Oct. 23) New York Times, and are still wondering why we are in Iraq, you should read Frank Rich’s "Karl and Scooter’s Excellent Adventure."  What follows (as Larry Solum (Law, Illinois) might say on his excellent Legal Theory Blog) is "a taste":

Let’s go back to January 2002. By then the
post-9/11 war in Afghanistan had succeeded in its mission to overthrow
the Taliban and had done so with minimal American casualties. In a
triumphalist speech to the Republican National Committee, Mr. Rove for
the first time openly advanced the idea that the war on terror was the
path to victory for that November’s midterm elections. Candidates "can
go to the country on this issue," he said, because voters "trust the
Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening
America’s military might and thereby protecting America." It was an
early taste of the rhetoric that would be used habitually to smear any
war critics as unpatriotic.

But there were unspoken impediments
to Mr. Rove’s plan that he certainly knew about: Afghanistan was
slipping off the radar screen of American voters, and the president’s
most grandiose objective, to capture Osama bin Laden "dead or alive,"
had not been achieved. How do you run on a war if the war looks as if
it’s shifting into neutral and the No. 1 evildoer has escaped?

Hardly
had Mr. Rove given his speech than polls started to register the first
erosion of the initial near-universal endorsement of the
administration’s response to 9/11. A USA Today/CNN/Gallup survey in
March 2002 found that while 9 out of 10 Americans still backed the war
on terror at the six-month anniversary of the attacks, support for an
expanded, long-term war had fallen to 52 percent.

Then came a
rapid barrage of unhelpful news for a political campaign founded on
supposed Republican superiority in protecting America: the first report
(in The Washington Post) that the Bush administration had lost Bin
Laden’s trail in Tora Bora in December 2001 by not committing ground
troops to hunt him down; the first indications that intelligence about
Bin Laden’s desire to hijack airplanes barely clouded President Bush’s
August 2001 Crawford vacation; the public accusations by an F.B.I.
whistle-blower, Coleen Rowley, that higher-ups had repeatedly shackled
Minneapolis agents investigating the so-called 20th hijacker, Zacarias
Moussaoui, in the days before 9/11.

These revelations took
their toll. By Memorial Day 2002, a USA Today poll found that just 4
out of 10 Americans believed that the United States was winning the war
on terror, a steep drop from the roughly two-thirds holding that
conviction in January. Mr. Rove could see that an untelevised and
largely underground war against terrorists might not nail election
victories without a jolt of shock and awe. It was a propitious moment
to wag the dog.

Enter Scooter, stage right. As James Mann
details in his definitive group biography of the Bush war cabinet,
"Rise of the Vulcans," Mr. Libby had been joined at the hip with Dick
Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz since their service in the Defense Department
of the Bush 41 administration, where they conceived the neoconservative
manifesto for the buildup and exercise of unilateral American military
power after the cold war. Well before Bush 43 took office, they had
become fixated on Iraq, though for reasons having much to do with their
ideas about realigning the states in the Middle East and little or
nothing to do with the stateless terrorism of Al Qaeda. Mr. Bush had
specifically disdained such interventionism when running against Al
Gore, but he embraced the cause once in office. While others might have
had cavils – American military commanders testified before Congress
about their already overtaxed troops and equipment in March 2002 – the
path was clear for a war in Iraq to serve as the political Viagra Mr.
Rove needed for the election year.

But here, too, was an impediment: there had to be that "why" for the
invasion, the very why that today can seem so elusive that Mr. Packer
calls Iraq "the ‘Rashomon’ of wars." …Polls in the summer of 2002 showed
steadily declining support among Americans for going to war in Iraq,
especially if we were to go it alone.

For Mr. Rove and Mr. Bush to get what they wanted most, slam-dunk
midterm election victories, and for Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney to get
what they wanted most, a war in Iraq for reasons predating 9/11, their
real whys for going to war had to be replaced by fictional, more
salable ones. We wouldn’t be invading Iraq to further Rovian domestic
politics or neocon ideology; we’d be doing so instead because there was
a direct connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda and because Saddam was
on the verge of attacking America with nuclear weapons. The facts and
intelligence had to be fixed to create these whys; any contradictory
evidence had to be dismissed or suppressed.

….

This is what Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, then-Secretary of State Colin
Powell’s wartime chief of staff, was talking about last week when he
publicly chastised the "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal" for sowing potential
disaster in Iraq, North Korea and Iran. It’s this cabal that in 2002
pushed for much of the bogus W.M.D. evidence that ended up in Mr.
Powell’s now infamous February 2003 presentation to the U.N. It’s this
cabal whose propaganda was sold by the war’s unannounced marketing arm,
the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, in which both Mr. Libby and Mr.
Rove served in the second half of 2002. One of WHIG’s goals,
successfully realized, was to turn up the heat on Congress so it would
rush to pass a resolution authorizing war in the politically
advantageous month just before the midterm election.

Joseph Wilson wasn’t a player in these exalted circles; he was a
footnote who began to speak out loudly only after Saddam had been
toppled and the mission in Iraq had been "accomplished." He challenged
just one element of the W.M.D. "evidence," the uranium that Saddam’s
government had supposedly been seeking in Africa to fuel its ominous
mushroom clouds.

But based on what we know about Mr. Libby’s and Mr. Rove’s
hysterical over-response to Mr. Wilson’s accusation, he scared them
silly. He did so because they had something to hide. Should Mr. Libby
and Mr. Rove have lied to investigators or a grand jury in their panic,
Mr. Fitzgerald will bring charges. But that crime would seem a
misdemeanor next to the fables that they and their bosses fed the
nation and the world as the whys for invading Iraq.

Did somebody use the words "crime" and "misdemeanor" in the same sentence, in the New York Times, in a story about the Bush Administration? 

(PS, More language, this time from paleo-con par excellence George Will: "any Republican senator who supinely acquiesces in President Bush’s
reckless abuse of presidential discretion — or who does not recognize
the Miers nomination as such — can never be considered presidential
material.")  (Thanks to Stephen Smith for the pool pointer.)