WASHINGTON -- Let us remember the real reason that White House political enforcer Karl Rove was chatting with selected reporters in the summer of 2003.

It was not necessarily to blow the cover of CIA operative Valerie Plame. It was not, entirely, to mete out vicious retribution against her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, for writing an op-ed article in The New York Times that discounted administration claims about an alleged Iraqi effort to acquire uranium from Niger.

The malevolence was more fundamental. Rove was trying to sustain the lies that led us into Iraq.

``He (Rove) implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate Iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro(m) Niger,'' Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper wrote, describing his July 11, 2003, conversation with Rove in an e-mail to his superiors. The e-mail was obtained by Newsweek.

On that very day, CIA Director George Tenet issued a statement conceding the dubiousness of the Niger claim. Tenet said it ``was a mistake'' to have included the allegation in President Bush's State of the Union speech in January. The previous October, Tenet called the White House to demand that a reference to the alleged Niger caper be deleted from a presidential speech. At that time, it was.

By the time Rove had his conversation with reporter Cooper, insisting that there was much to indicate an Iraqi-Niger nuclear connection, the White House knew this was untrue.

Indeed, by the time Wilson penned his account and Plame was later exposed, there was plenty to indicate that Iraq had no nuclear weapons program. And no weapons of mass destruction.

Early in January 2003, U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix reported that after two months of resumed inspections in Iraq, ``we haven't found any smoking guns.'' International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei said that aluminum tubes touted by various high-ranking administration officials as proof of a nuclear program were, in fact, intended for rocket engines.

Late in January -- a day before Bush's State of the Union address would warn of Iraq's nuclear ambitions -- ElBaradei reported to the Security Council that inspectors ``found no evidence that Iraq has revived its nuclear weapons program since the elimination of the program in the 1990s.'' The very next night, Bush's speech ignored ElBaradei's new findings. The president instead touted an outdated analysis of Iraq's nuclear program as it had existed after the first Gulf War.

By early March, a few weeks before the Iraq invasion began, ElBaradei had debunked the Niger allegation, saying the documents that led to the theory were forgeries. Blix had repeatedly reported that he'd found no weapons of mass destruction, despite searching suspect sites provided by U.S. intelligence and notwithstanding the effort of 250 inspectors from 60 countries.

Their honesty came at a price.

A cacophony of administration voices depicted Blix as an incompetent, bent on appeasement. His New York office, Blix believes, was bugged. ElBaradei was secretly wiretapped as part of an effort by State Department official John R. Bolton to force his removal as head of the atomic monitoring agency. The putsch failed when no other country would go along. No matter. Bush wants to promote Bolton to U.N. ambassador.

The president condones skullduggery against the leaders of international institutions who answer to the world, not to him. It should not now be so shocking that Rove is responsible for such treachery at home. What's a little destruction of a man's family -- what, indeed, is this trifle about outing a CIA employee and breaching national security? -- when the fate of such a grand project as Iraq is on the line?

The media psychodrama now turns on the trivia about the leak investigation and whether or not Rove broke a technical statute on exposing secret operatives. The familiar sounds of Washington scandal -- will the president stand by his man, or won't he? -- drown out the sordid, underlying theme.

The president took this nation to war on a false premise, one which already was unraveling before the first attack planes flew. When experts such as Blix and ElBaradei came up with information that undermined the assumption that Iraq possessed the world's most fearsome weapons, they weren't heeded. They, like Wilson, were assaulted by political hacks.

Karl Rove may or may not pay some price for his malicious politics. But make no mistake. This nation pays -- every day in Iraq -- with our blood and treasure.




Marie Cocco's e-mail address is mariecocco(at symbol)washpost.com.