What Next for Sheehan Saga?

"Larry Diamond, a Hoover Institution scholar who was an adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority that ran postwar Iraq, said, 'We set ourselves up for political embarrassment by pressing so obsessively for this one particular deadline, and I think we need to listen more to our Iraqi interlocutors,' he said."

Furthermore, there are signs that a one-week delay won't do the trick.

Ellen Knickmeyer and Omar Fekeiki write in The Washington Post that the recent debate "appeared to have widened rifts among Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish and secular groups."

Dexter Filkins and James Glanz in the New York Times, quote an administration official saying "there's a lot of nervousness" within the administration over the situation.

Plame Developments

There have been lots of interesting, if not earth-shattering, developments in the Valerie Plame case in the last 10 days or so. To recap:

Mark Sherman writes for the Associated Press: "David Margolis, a lawyer at the Justice Department for 40 years, was named Friday to oversee a special prosecutor's investigation of who in the Bush administration disclosed the name of an undercover CIA officer.

"Margolis, whose title is associate deputy attorney general, is taking the place of Deputy Attorney General James Comey, whose last day of work was Friday. . . .

"Comey made the designation of Margolis. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has stepped aside from the probe because he was White House counsel when Valerie Plame's name was leaked in 2003 and he has testified to the grand jury investigating the unauthorized disclosure."

Murray Waas writes for the Village Voice about how the decision to appoint a special prosecutor was made in the first place: "Justice Department officials made the crucial decision in late 2003 to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the leak of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame in large part because investigators had begun to specifically question the veracity of accounts provided to them by White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, according to senior law enforcement officials.

"Several of the federal investigators were also deeply concerned that then attorney general John Ashcroft was personally briefed regarding the details of at least one FBI interview with Rove, despite Ashcroft's own longstanding personal and political ties to Rove, the Voice has also learned. The same sources said Ashcroft was also told that investigators firmly believed that Rove had withheld important information from them during that FBI interview."

Waas expands on one alleged Rove assertion in his blog: "What has not been previously reported until now (a blog breaks news!?), is that not only could Rove not remember the name of the journalist who purportedly might have told him of Plame's CIA employment, but he also claimed to remember virtually nothing about the circumstances of the purported conversation. He could not even recall whether the conversation took place on the phone or in person."

Richard B. Schmitt writes in the Los Angeles Times that special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald "has a history of invoking perjury laws and related statutes to buttress his investigations.