Atrios is (moderately) impressed with what Joe Klein writes here about the Libby trial:

I'm beginning to love this trial.
I love it because it is firmly establishing this fact:

She testified that both Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby were intensely interested in Ms. Wilson and her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, who had been sent to Africa to investigate reports that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium from Niger for his nuclear weapons program.

Why is that important? Because June 2003, when this obsession took hold, was also the month that the CIA first briefed Bush, Cheney, Rumsfled et al. that they were facing a full-blown guerrilla insurgency in Iraq. Were they obsessed by the fact that there war was changing, that it might be more difficult to prosecute than they're bargained for? No. They were obsessed with sliming Joe Wilson....

Nice of him to make that connection -- but, er, is he just now noticing that bringing the war in Iraq to a successful conclusion was not the top priority of the Bushies?

Rove's top priority has always been destroying the Democratic Party. Cheney is obsessed with avenging Nixon by restoring the imperial presidency. Rumsfeld was fixated on Pentagon transformation. All of these things were more important than the Iraq War. And doing the best we could possibly do in Iraq was always subject to restrictions: can't raise taxes (Bush), can't acknowledge that there might be some validity to the Powell Doctrine (Rumsfeld), couldn't hire people who knew what they were doing to help rebuild Iraq after the fall of Saddam -- only loyalists and ideologues need apply.

And, of course, actually getting the people responsible for 9/11 was an even lower priority than trying to accomplish the Iraq mission.