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But worse, far worse, was the tendency of the White House--particularly Karl Rove's message apparatus--to see the war as part of the Permanent Campaign, as a political opportunity at first and then, as the news turned bad, as merely another issue to be massaged. There is something quite obscene about the existence of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG). Its job had nothing to do with the military or political situation in Iraq; it was created to market the war and to smear the President's opponents. Rove and Libby were at the heart of this group. Their decision to ask Congress for a war resolution in September 2002, two months before the congressional elections, seemed an obvious marketing ploy. Rove told Republicans that they could "go to the country with this issue," that it would reinforce the party's image as strong on defense. The simultaneous decision to take the Iraq situation to the United Nations was also a campaign ploy--polls showed the vast majority of voters favored this course--and a chimera. Both Cheney and Rumsfeld were opposed to the move, and Rumsfeld pretty much ignored it: he proceeded full-speed ahead, deploying troops for a late-winter invasion.
The rush to war was followed by a rush to peace, dictated by public relations needs and wishful thinking. The President's declaration that "major combat operations" were over on May 1, 2003, after he co-piloted an airplane onto the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln and emerged, jazzed, in a jaunty flight suit, seems almost ludicrous in retrospect. And it was accompanied by the utterly irresponsible decision of commanding General Tommy Franks to leave the theater of battle, taking with him his entire headquarters staff--including hundreds of intelligence officers.
And so we come to June 2003, the month that Scooter Libby became preoccupied with Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, CIA operative Valerie Plame. TIME magazine first used the word mess to describe the situation in Iraq in a June 9, 2003, issue headline. In the same issue, TIME wondered about what ever had happened to the "Weapons of Mass Disappearance." At about the same time, the President was told, in a classified briefing by the CIA, that the U.S.-led coalition was facing a full-blown guerrilla insurgency in Iraq. Rumsfeld foolishly continued to deny this fact for another month.
In sum, June 2003 was the month that the vexing realities of the Iraq adventure first became clear to the Bush White House. It was also the month that the Administration began to act as if the war in Iraq were a public relations problem first and a military problem second. The WMD embarrassment clearly took precedence over the need to fight the insurgency. The White House created the Iraq Survey Group, sending former arms inspector David Kay and 1,200 intelligence officers to search for the nonexistent weapons, an action that infuriated Generals John Abizaid and Ricardo Sanchez, who believed that the top priority should be figuring out who the enemy was. Bush's blithe invitation to the insurgents to "bring it on" a few weeks later was another indication that the Commander in Chief had absolutely no idea what actual combat is all about.