They’re trying.

In the year and half before the war began in March, Cheney and the neocons constantly disparaged the CIA for underestimating the threat posed by Iraq. In public and in private, they lambasted the agency for overcautiousness. Behind the scenes, they pressured analysts—not to mention George Tenet, the CIA director, whose spine seems made of soft clay—to find more, more, more evidence of Iraq’s WMD and of Iraq’s (nonexistent) connections to Al Qaeda. They created a mini-intelligence unit inside the Pentagon, staffed by neoconservative ideologues such as Abram Shulsky and David Wurmser, to scour mounds of intelligence tidbits and extract incriminating evidence to prove what wasn’t provable. They treated Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress as a virtual Oracle of Delphi, giving credence to the lying defectors and bogus intelligence he produced, even as the CIA warned that Chalabi was a fraud. They gave credence to the cockeyed theories of Laurie Mylroie, who believed not only that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11 but that he was the mastermind behind Tim McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing, too. And, disregarding CIA warnings, they convinced Bush to say that Iraq was secretly trying to buy uranium for A-bombs in West Africa, even though the documents they cited were forged.

Now, believe it or not, they want you to think that it was the CIA that got it wrong. That it was the CIA that presented the White House with alarmist intelligence about the supposed threat from Iraq. And that—acting on the CIA’s conclusions—the White House and Pentagon went to war. David Kay, who helped lead the snark hunt in Iraq that failed to find a thing, now says that the CIA owes Bush an apology, that he could find no evidence of political pressure on the CIA, and that it was all just a big mistake. “Sorry, world,” says Kay. “It was the CIA’s fault.”

Yet Bush isn’t quite ready himself to go to war with the CIA—don’t expect him to demand an apology anytime soon.

That’s the secret behind the White House’s decision to support an investigation into the Iraq intelligence mess. Faced with the nonexistence of WMD in Iraq, the White House finally realized that it couldn’t keep saying, in effect, “Wait a little longer. We’ll find them.” (Or, as Bush actually did say last summer, “We found them.”)

But the president couldn’t attack the CIA himself. Not only would that look silly and unpresidential, but it would probably unleash a flood of resignations, op-eds by former CIA officials, leaks to the media by current ones, and more. The CIA may not be very good at covert operations, but they’d manage to run an effective one against the White House.

So, aided by the malleable Kay, the White House decided to punt, calling for one of those Kissingeresque blue-ribbon commissions that will report back in, oh, say, 2005. And though its scope is supposedly undecided as yet, you can count on it picking apart years of CIA reports on Iraq while avoiding an inquiry into Cheney’s office and the Pentagon’s Shulsky-Wurmser Office of Special Plans. Same in Congress: the GOP-led intelligence committees have no intention of investigating the politically explosive Cheney-OSP nexus, and they’re resisting Democratic demands for a wider inquiry.

The only important question doesn’t have anything to do with the commission the White House wants—whose conclusions will probably end up on President Kerry’s desk, anyway—or with the weak-kneed congressional panels. That question is: do the Democrats have the courage to make the Bush-Cheney lies and exaggerations over Iraq a campaign issue? Stay tuned.

- Robert Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Virginia, who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is currently working on a book about America's policy toward political Islam over the past 30 years.