I've been trying to figure out why the Judy Miller saga has become so all-consuming for so many people.
Yes, you have the soap opera surrounding a controversial reporter at one of America's great newspapers, a woman who went to jail and then sprung herself, and a front-page chronicle that attempts to answer the questions but contains major holes, in part because Miller won't fully cooperate and won't share her notes.
Yes, you have a special prosecutor winding up a two-year probe that could yield charges against senior White House officials (or not).
Yes, the fact that one of these aforementioned senior officials is Karl Rove, who is reviled by the left, has spawned a whole genre of what-would-Bush-do-without-his-brain pieces.
Yes, all this stems from what appears to be an act of petty partisanship, the outing of a CIA operative to rough up her husband.
Yes, the case raises major questions about the rights of journalists to resist prosecutors' subpoenas and protect their confidential sources.
But all of that still doesn't explain the intensity of emotion among those following every wrinkle of this unfolding investigation.
Then it hit me. It's the war, of course. We're re-fighting the war through this case.
After all, Mr. Valerie Flame, Joe Wilson, was accusing the White House of exaggerating the evidence for Iraq having WMDs--based on his CIA-approved fact-finding mission to Niger--when those "senior administration officials" went after his wife.
The people who are mad at Miller are mad because they feel she was a conduit for the administration's erroneous WMD claims, and that she is still protecting Libby. The people who are mad at Libby and Rove are mad because they are seen as among the architects in designing and selling an unnecessary war to the American people, not to mention the press.
The people who are mad at Wilson believe he is a publicity hound who has his own credibility problems and has milked the controversy for a book and television exposure, not to mention a Vanity Fair photo shoot with his now-less-than-covert wife. They feel the press is antiwar and was all too happy to attack Bush over the famous 16 words in the State of the Union on Iraq seeking uranium from Africa, and is still beating the WMD drums as a way of discrediting the war. And they don't believe a crime was necessarily committed in the leaking of Plame's name.
So all this amounts to a proxy war. And there will be more collateral damage before it's over.
