“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”   –George W. Bush, 2003 State of the Union Address

Ever since the beginning, it has been clear to a great many people that George W. Bush was not just stretching the truth in his campaign to the American people for a war with Iraq; we knew that he was lying outright. The problem was that there was no “smoking gun,” and Bush could squirm out of whatever wasn’t smoking.

Now, far too late to do much good, we have the smoking gun, in the form of the now-famous “16 Words” Bush spoke in his State of the Union address before the Iraq war. Naturally, the Bush administration is trying to play down the matter, trying to claim that the matter is settled, that the claim was “technically correct,” that it “has been blown out of proportion,” and that it “in no way has any effect on the president’s larger case.”

This strategy, blowing off the story, acting like it’s no big deal, then waiting for the press to play along and move on to the next story, isn’t working this time. It seems like the Bush administration was so used to being able to dismiss anything they wanted, now they’re genuinely puzzled as to why this particular thing is not going away. But it will not; you can feel it in the air, the press has already invested too much time on it, and the smoking gun has too much weight behind it.

The central argument of the administration is that the 16 Words were the fault of the CIA, and that Bush was an unwitting victim, but this has already been proven untrue. Yes, British Intelligence did indeed report that Hussein was trying to buy uranium from Niger, but that makes no difference: the CIA, with Joseph Wilson‘s testimony, had told the administration that the Niger claims were false. So even if CIA chief George Tenet failed to object strongly enough to the administration’s choice to include the faulty British intelligence in the State of the Union, it does not change the fact that the Bush administration, against CIA advice and knowing full well that the evidence was false, nonetheless actively decided to include the “16 Words” in the speech, and thus knowingly deceived the American people.

In her many efforts to kill the story, Condi Rice tried to say that it was irrelevant because it didn’t change the larger argument. Even if we go along with her and ignore the fact that the president knowingly lied to America about the Niger story, does that end the whole matter? The answer, of course, is no–because it was not just Niger that he lied about.

A way to understand this can be found in Chaos Theory. There is a concept in Chaos Theory called “Self-Similarity.” It says that patterns, similarities, can be found at various levels of magnitude; the same patterns that can be observed at small size appear again at larger sizes. Take a snowflake, for example: if you look at the snowflake as a whole and then look at a tiny part of the snowflake, one sees the same patterns emerge, the same basic shapes reasserting themselves.

This same recursive pattern can be found in the Bush administration’s push for the Iraq war. The Niger lie is significant not just because of the 16 Words, but because those 16 Words represent a pattern of deception at a number of levels, from the small details to the whole argument. The Niger lie epitomizes the entire campaign, and gives life and body to what was always clear but never came to the point of proving it beyond any doubt–the usual leeway politicians are granted.

The Niger lie was the Bush administration’s stepping over the line. Bush had been dancing, cavorting, thumbing his nose at us, and we accepted it because he stayed behind the Line of the Smoking Gun. But with Niger, he stepped over the line, and now all the other lies come flooding through the breach, carrying the story onward, past the objections of Rice, Rumsfeld, and others. That’s why Rice might say it seems “out of proportion” and believe it, because she’s just talking about the 16 Words.

But it’s more than that, and woe to the Bush administration if it fails to recognize the fact.