Mr. Timothy Noah posed a good question in Slate the other day. Why this lie?

It was known for months even to people like me, who don?t have anything to do with politics, that the British and US governments had exaggerated the WMD threat posed by Iraq in order to gain public support for war. Most people (including me) did not feel badly about it since we all agreed that Saddam was a thug and deserves to the thrown to the dustbin of history. But even those who did not think that the war was right, did not feel they could question the underlying ussumptions of war because a. the war was a popular idea b. The president had stratospheric ?ratings? and c. they could not prove that the WMD allegations were wrong.

But now that the body bags are trickling back home and sheer deprivation that the Iraqis are going through is evident to at least the media savvy, the atmosphere is slightly different. People can also afford to be more critical now because of the following chain of events:

-The fact that Joseph Wilson IV decided to open his mouth, gave an opening to the sceptics.

- The situation in Iraq has emboldened the press to follow through. Through the almost daily coverage by David Sanger of New York Times and Walter Pincus & Dana Milbank of Washington Post (who Bush snubbed in a press conference a few months back), political America is slowly reconstructing what happened behind the curtains.

- The uncharacteristic fumbling of White House compounded this. It became blatantly evident even to last day of Ari Fleisher in White House that there is serious bullshitting going on (Both TPM and Milbank had fun with it). A friend of mine from college once told me that if you wanna lie, you really gotta stick to your script. You can?t keep changing it. It is the rapid changing story line that caught every one?s attention.

-Lastly, it matters that the administration has completely pissed off the spooks. CIA leaked like there is no tomorrow. It really depends on the contrite one and his gang how long does the story last.

Meanwhile, it is feeling more and more like a John le Caree novel.. There seems to a war on against Wilson who set the ball rolling. If this story is correct, then the vendetta has already killed his wife?s career. In a rather hilarious turn of events, the ABC news reporter who reported the troop?s disaffection on TV was outed as not only gay, but also Canadian in Drudge report, apparently at the instigation of White House officials! (I don?t think any army will like to see its troops to vent in front of television cameras, but killing the messenger seems rather crude even for this administration.)

Across the ocean, Dr. David Kelly, one of the sources for Andrew Gillian?s story on BBC seem to have committed suicide after his grilling in parliament. The ministry of defense there fed him to wolves was hoping to provoke BBC into revealing their source. I felt sick as I read this. No one, neither the British government, nor the BBC comes out smelling of roses.

In Capital Influx Elizabeth Spiers quoted a funny,

"You know, I'm really disappointed in our military. I can't believe we haven't managed to plant weapons of mass destruction in Iraq yet. We were so good about planting shit [weapons caches, drugs] in Latin America in the 70s... I think I've lost my faith in the military industrial complex."

Update: Excellent backgrounder on why this is important in TPM.