Politics: Rove's War, Unraveling

The war in Iraq is slowly unraveling. Karl Rove's brilliant campaign strategy, to occupy a shell-shocked nation with a fictional threat to its already fragile stability, eventually had to fall apart. The fundamental question -- the what did he know and when did he know it -- of this deception of the American people will be about whether the president's advisors were relying on leaps of logic they made in the moment or whether they were simply looking right at the truth and deciding that it didn't meet their needs.

Today's Post story begins to focus the story:

In an example of the tenor of the administration's statements at the time, the president said in the Rose Garden on Sept. 26 that "the Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons. The Iraqi regime is building the facilities necessary to make more biological and chemical weapons."

But a Defense Intelligence Agency report on chemical weapons, widely distributed to administration policymakers around the time of the president's speech, stated there was "no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing or stockpiling chemical weapons or whether Iraq has or will establish its chemical agent production facilities."