Nobody plays The Game quite like Bush political advisor Karl Rove. He plays for keeps. The lives of Iraqi civilians and U.S. soldiers are only pawns in Rove’s game.

Officials at the White House say they had always planned to use the formation of a new, permanent Iraqi government as a lever to seize control of a debate that had been slipping away from them. The killing of the top terrorist in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, provided another useful lift. And, they said, Democratic calls for speedy troop withdrawal provided an opening for them to use a “cut and run” argument against Democrats, which Mr. Rove used last week in a speech in New Hampshire.

Apparently, there are some people in Washington who think that war is not a game. Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, like Rove a Republican, said this on the Senate floor:

There is no issue more important than war. The war in Iraq is the defining issue on which the leadership of this Congress and this Administration will be judged. The American people will demand a serious debate about serious issues from serious leaders. They deserve more than a political debate. This debate should transcend cynical attempts to turn public frustration with the war in Iraq into an electoral advantage, and it should be taken more seriously than to simply retreat to focus-group tested buzzwords and phrases like “cut and run.” Catchy political slogans debase the seriousness of war.

Of course, unlike Rove, Hagel is a veteran. Those folks always seem to take war and casualties pretty seriously. They get all worked up when U.S. soldiers are used as pawns. With that kind of attitude, how do they ever expect to play The Game?

From Tuesday night’s episode of Frontline, here’s Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA’s bin Laden team:

The test of an intelligence officer is not so much the ability to accumulate information; it’s to judge between different pieces of information. There is what you could call “intelligence information” available to prove almost any case you wanted to prove, if you were a non-discerning intelligence amateur.

The Bush Administration continually starts with the conclusions and then carefully picks facts to support those conclusions. That might be a good way to win an argument, but it’s a terrible way to fight a war. They may not have much respect for “the reality-based community,” but in real life-and-death struggles, reality keeps trumping fantasy, and real people pay with their lives.