It's something of a stretch to call Karl Rove, the Machiavellian political advisor to President Bush, "innocent."

But in this case, he just might be.

And there's been something positively unseemly about the transparent glee with which many Democrats have been calling for Rove to be frog-marched out of the White House.

That glee is a form of tribute, really. It's an acknowledgement of just how successful (and ruthless) Rove has been, as a political strategist, in building Bush's political empire, and forging a solid Republican majority in Congress.

So why would he be so stupid as to leak Valerie Plame's name?

In the matter of Valerie Plame, it's entirely possible that Rove isn't the culprit, and is guilty of nothing more than talking about her to a reporter when, two years ago, the White House said that he had not. That doesn't mean he did so knowingly, or knew Plame was undercover, two aspects of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act -- a law that is extremely difficult to prosecute.

It could well be that Robert Luskin, Rove's lawyer, is being entirely truthful when he says that Rove testified voluntarily before the federal grand jury, never invoked the Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination, and has been assured by prosecutors that Rove is not a focus of the investigation into who leaked Plame's name.

In their zeal to nail Rove, liberals and progressives may be missing the real story here. Rove says he first learned about Plame's status from reporters. If so, somebody had to tell those reporters.

A clue as to who comes from who the reporters are. Matthew Cooper, Time correspondent, says he talked with Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, after he talked with Rove. Libby has also claimed in the past not to have talked with reporters about Plame.

The leak originally hit print with Robert Novak, a columnist tight with Bush's neocon crowd. But the most intriguing figure is Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter previously most notorious as the credulous scribe who reprinted, on page one, mountains of pre-war lies about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction, lies often sourced to Iranian spy Ahmed Chalabi.

Chalabi was a favored protégé of the neocon war hawks who pushed the Bush White House into war, a cabal led by Cheney himself. Miller was their favored mouthpiece.

It's no stretch of the imagination to picture a situation in which the neocons were alarmed by the nerve former Ambassador Joseph Wilson struck with his revelations that the Bush team knew that accusations Hussein tried to purchase yellowcake uranium from the African country of Niger were not only false, but based on crude forgeries. Their preferred response was to go after the messenger -- to discredit Joseph Wilson, just as this administration has attacked Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, and various other high-profile critics of administration policy.

Karl Rove is not the only figure in the Bush administration who plays nasty. But these men are not stupid. They would not have leaked such an explosive secret about Plame, one that endangered CIA agents and compromised national security, without some level of deniability. One reason it's hard to imagine Rove as the culprit is that he's simply too smart to blurt out something like this.

Those people wanting Karl Rove's head probably aren't going to get it. There are too many doubts about his guilt, and he is too indispensable to George Bush, for Bush to fire him.

But that doesn't mean heads aren't going to roll somewhere. By all accounts, the investigation of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is expanding rapidly. It is probably, at this point, encompassing far more than the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

In all likelihood, this is about more than Karl Rove, more than simply getting back at Joseph Wilson for his criticisms of the administration. This is about taking on members of the Bush administration who were and are so committed to war, so committed to empire, that compromising national security is less important than maintaining the political momentum necessary to launch an illegal invasion.

In this way, the leaking of Valerie Plame's identity goes much more to the heart of the Bush administration than it would if it were a simple case of a political operative exacting vengeance. This is, once again, all about the lies that the Bush administration used to justify its war. As with the Downing Street Memos, we are learning more and more about just how desperate some members of the Bush administration were to have their war, no matter how flimsy the public rationale.

It's easy, and fun, to imagine Karl Rove in handcuffs. It's far more damning to get to the heart of what actually happened here. In all likelihood, Rove did not do what he is accused of.

But somebody did.

Geov Parrish is a Seattle-based columnist and reporter for Seattle Weekly, In These Times and Eat the State! He writes the daily Straight Shot for WorkingForChange. He can be reached by email at geovlp@earthlink.net.

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