HARD CASES.(The Talk of the Town)

It's a good thing that you're unlikely to be approached by a small, inquisitive child who wants an explanation of the trial of Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Vice-President Cheney's former chief of staff, because what would you say? The trial has the air of a proxy prosecution of the Bush Administration, but its outcome won't have any effect on the White House. Libby's legal tormentor, Patrick Fitzgerald, a special prosecutor from Chicago, has a reputation as a tormentor of the Washington press corps. (He put one prominent reporter in jail and threatened to lock up another.) Yet, given that we think of the press and the White House as opposing forces, it's difficult to wrap our minds around the notion of them being in the dock together.

What's ultimately behind Libby's trial is the Administration's obsession with finding hard evidence for what it already believes. President Bush is often said to have misled the country into war in Iraq. But it's equally true--and more illuminating of how the White House thinks and works--that the Administration misled itself into war. Since it was convinced that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons, the absence of proof showed only that the wrong people (the C.I.A. and the United Nations) had been looking in the wrong places. So, during the run-up to the war, the search had to be conducted with a little more creativity.

In that spirit, the White House dispatched former Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger, in February of 2002, to find proof that the country had shipped yellowcake uranium to Iraq. Wilson not only came up empty-handed; he said so publicly, in a Times Op-Ed piece that he published five months later. The Administration then went on another search for evidence--the kind that could be used to discredit Wilson--and began disseminating it, off the record, to a few trusted reporters. That led to the unlawful exposure of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a C.I.A. agent. And that, in turn, brought the appointment of a special prosecutor, and another over-the-top search for evidence, this time against the Administration. Libby's trial is the result.

The drama of incriminating evidence--the smoking gun, the damning memo, the DNA match, the latent fingerprint, the surprise confession--pervades American culture these days. It's the lifeblood of popular television shows (surely there's a "CSI: Baghdad" in the works), books, movies, and Web sites. The Bush version is particularly potent, though, both in its emotional content and in its effects. It begins with a certainty that a situation is intolerable and a frustration that most people don't see it that way. The next move is to bend the rules--to play rough, in the manner of a cop show--so that the truth comes out. All that remains is to present the shocking evidence to the world, and give the villains the punishment they deserve.

The problem with the ...