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Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter:

Like a lot of President Bush’s critics, I supported the Iraq war at first. Because of the evidence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction laid out by Colin Powell, I agreed that we needed to disarm Saddam Hussein. I even think it’s possible that 25 years from now, historians will conclude that the Iraq war helped accelerate the modernizing of the Middle East, even if it doesn’t fully democratize it.

But if that happens, Bush might not get as much credit as he hopes, and not just because most historians, as Richard Nixon liked to say, are liberals. Bush may look bad because his leadership on Iraq has been a fiasco. He didn’t plan for it: the early decisions that allowed the insurgency to get going were breathtakingly incompetent. He didn’t pay for it: Bush is the first president in history to cut taxes during a war, this one now costing nearly $1 billion a week. And most important of all, he didn’t tell the American people the truth about it: taking a nation to war is the most solemn duty of a president, and he’d better make certain there’s no alternative and no doubt about the evidence.

Why do I mention this now? Because for all of the complexities of the Valerie Plame case, for all the questions raised about the future of investigative journalism and the fate of the most influential aide to an American president since Louis Howe served Franklin D. Roosevelt 70 years ago, this story is fundamentally about how easy it was to get into Iraq and how hard it will be to get out.

We got in because we “cooked” the intelligence, then hyped it. That’s why the “Downing Street Memo” is not a smoking gun but a big “duh.” For two years we’ve known that senior White House officials were determined to, in the words of the British intelligence memo, “fix” the intelligence to suit their policy decisions. When someone crossed them, they would “fix” him, too, as career ambassador Joseph Wilson found when he came back from Africa with a report that threw cold water on the story that Saddam Hussein sought yellowcake uranium from Niger.

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The bigger question is what this scandal does to the CIA’s ability to develop essential “humint” (human intelligence). Here’s where the Iraq war comes in again. The sooner we beef up our intelligence, the sooner we crack the insurgency and get to bring our troops home. What does it say to the people doing the painstaking work of building those spy networks when the identity of one of their own becomes just another weapon in the partisan wars of Washington? For a smart guy, Karl Rove was awfully stupid.