Moreover, classified Halliburton documents obtained by CounterPunch over the past month prove that the war in Iraq was as much about controlling the world's second largest oil reserves as it did about overthrowing the regime of Iraq's President Saddam Hussein.

The change in rhetoric, apparently designed in part to dampen public expectations, has unfolded gradually in the past month as special U.S. military teams have found little to justify the administration's claim that Iraq was concealing vast stocks of chemical and biological agents and was actively working on a covert nuclear weapons program.

"The administration seems to be hoping that inconvenient facts will disappear from the public discourse. It's happening to a large degree," said Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Police Studies, a liberal think-tank which opposed the war. ...

In his March 17 speech giving Iraqi President Saddam Hussein 48 hours to leave the country, Bush said: "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."

Earlier, in a speech last Oct. 7, Bush said: "The Iraqi regime ... possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons.

"We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas ... And surveillance photos reveal that the regime is rebuilding facilities that it had used to produce chemical and biological weapons."

In his State of the Union address last January, Bush accused Iraq of having enough material "to produce over 25,000 liters of anthrax -- enough doses to kill several million people ... more than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin -- enough to subject millions of people to death by respiratory failure ... as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent."

In his dramatic presentation to the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 6, Secretary of State Colin Powell said the United States "knew" that Baghdad had dispersed rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agents to locations in western Iraq.

"We also have satellite photos that indicate that banned materials have recently been moved from a number of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction facilities," Powell said. "There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more."

In Congressional testimony last month, Powell insisted that banned weapons "will be found." He said of his U.N speech that, "everything we had there had backup and double sourcing and triple sourcing."

You can be absolutely sure that if an Al Gore White House had comparably misled citizens about the reason for a presidential made-for-television visit to an aircraft carrier, Gore would have been pilloried for engaging in yet another "little lie."

As the president's chief political adviser, Rove is involved in every decision coming out of the Oval Office. In fact, he flat out makes some of them. He is co-president of the United States, just as he was co-candidate for that office and co-governor of Texas. His relationship with the president is the most profound and complex of all of the White House advisers. And his role creates questions not addressed by our Constitution.

Rove is probably the most powerful unelected person in American history. The cause of the war in Iraq was not just about Saddam Hussein or weapons of mass destruction or al-Qaida links to Iraq. Those may have been the stated causes, but every good lie should have a germ of truth. No, this was mostly a product of Rove's usual prescience. He looked around and saw that the economy was anemic and people were complaining about the president's inability to find Osama bin Laden. In another corner, the neoconservatives in the Cabinet were itching to launch ships and planes to the Middle East and take control of Iraq. Rove converged the dynamics of the times. He convinced the president to connect Saddam to Bin Laden, even if the CIA could not.

This misdirection worked. A Pew survey taken during the war showed 61 percent of Americans believe that Saddam and Bin Laden were confederates in the 9/11 attacks.

And now, Rove needs the conflict to continue so his client -- the president -- can retain wartime stature during next year's election. Listen to the semantics from Bush's recent trip to the aircraft carrier Lincoln. When he referred to the "battle of Iraq," Bush implied that we only won a single fight in a bigger war that was not yet over. I first encountered Rove more than 20 years ago in Texas. I reported on him and the future president as a TV correspondent there, traveling with them extensively during their race to the governor's mansion in Austin. Once there, Rove was involved in every important decision the governor made and, according to Bush staffers, vetted each critical choice for political implications.