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I don't feel it was accidental. I said here a few weeks ago, when the Hatfill thing blew up, that after the "rogue scientist" stall was publicly discredited the next logical question would be: Who gave Atta the anthrax? Since the administration has already endorsed the Atta-Prague meeting and is promising to talk more about it, we can presume that many people will be connecting the dots in the near future. Cheney posing that question -- Who sent the anthrax, Tim? -- sounds like a bit of prep work for that shift.

But is Bush going to tell the UN, "Ha, ha, we lied, we knew it was Iraq all along, that rogue scientist stuff was just to buy time"? He could do that, but I can think of no precedent for it. It's true that this is an unprecedented situation, but it's still hard to imagine. Something more gradual and with more built-in ambiguity is more likely, to my mind.

I see three things in the works that will be relevant to how perceptions change. The first is the Hatfill thing. This is moving more slowly than I anticipated, because his firing sort of puts the ball in play again. However, the reaction to that firing has also been good from the standpoint of retiring the rogue scientist theory: almost every big newspaper in the country, including the Washington Post, has now come out with an editorial condemning the DOJ for persecuting this man. The Weekly Standard has devoted a cover story to debunking it, and Kristof and Rosenberg seem to have gone to ground. But it's not over yet.

Then there is the strangely-timed return of the feds to the AMI building. The search is still ongoing, under a warrant which expires on September 11. Local news reports quote the FBI as saying that the search is going "very well," but they are refusing to comment on whether they have the letter that killed Bib Stevens. So, we are going to hear something at the end of that search, presumably. The question is, what?

And there is the Prague story. Cheney brought it up on MTP, but that's clearly not the last we are going to hear about it. I don't think they're bluffing when they say it "holds up." I think the administration knows that hand-wringing about nuclear capabilities isn't going to be enough to sell the public on what they believe needs to be done. The phase we are in now is preliminary atmospherics. Bush's speech to the UN will probably be more of the same.

They are in no hurry to get this over with. Up to a point, the longer this is stretched out, the softer the blow to the American psyche and the economy, the worse the stress on Saddam and his people, and the more time we have to physically prepare our defenses for the confrontation. So don't expect the tension to be relieved any time soon. I'm still on tenterhooks myself.