C. Edmund Wright, American Thinker

So Karl Rove was involved in a cover-up. Well, leave it to Karl — the “boy genius” and the “architect” — to orchestrate a cover-up that actually hides information exculpatory to his President and his party. He did just that on the issue of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in Iraq. This is not an outlier either — this is just Rove being Rove. And ‘Rove being Rove’ has sown the seeds of destruction that gave us Barack Obama in 2008, and again in 2012, and has scattered political germs that still haunt Republicans to this day. This goes back to late 2000 in fact. More on that later.

[Related — N.Y. Times confirms: There were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq]

So in case you missed it, the New York Times ran an eight part expose on WMDs and The Daily Beast ran a well-sourced piece entitled Insiders Blame Rove for Covering Up Iraq’s Real WMDs that chronicles a Rove-inspired cover up. You might remember the little kerfuffle the nation got into when ostensibly no weapons were found? You know, “Bush lied, people died” and all of that? It helped run George W. Bush’s administration right into the ground, and he took the Republican brand with him. Yes, Hurricane Katrina was a major factor too, but again, that was related to ‘Rove being Rove’ as well — and more on that later, too.

The WMD issue was one of the major public relations snafus of the Bush Administration, and the whole effort in the War on Terror. And the costs of these mistakes are catastrophic and still mounting. Those include, but are not limited to the 2006 midterms, the 2008 Presidential election, the 2012 Presidential election — and oh, the development of a little outfit known as ISIS / ISIL / IS etc. The costs are incalculable. The electorate, over the course of the years of Bush being hammered about lying on the issue of WMDs, hardened toward Bush — and by extension — all Republicans and even all conservatives. We still have this hangover today! Ask a man named Romney.

So what is Rove’s part? He was the mastermind and chief proponent of the “new tone” White House communications strategy — a strategy of never engaging the other side in a public debate. This unfortunately was the theory that carried the day in 2005-06 on WMDs as well. Consider this from The Daily Beast article:

From the perspective of Rick Santorum…the weapons of mass destruction President Bush promised would be in Iraq …began turning up as early as 2004. Santorum said he and his staff began receiving photographs of discarded sarin and mustard-gas shells from U.S. soldiers in 2004. Two years later, when he was up for re-election, Santorum even went public with some of this information in a press conference disclosing a Pentagon report that found 500 chemical-weapons shells had been found in Iraq.

So, in Santorum’s mind, exonerating Bush on the issue of WMDs would be a good thing to do, especially in a campaign season. Of course it would. But what did “the architect” say about this?

The Bush White House wasn’t interested. “We don’t want to look back,” Santorum recalled Rove as saying (though Santorum stressed he was paraphrasing). “I will say that the gist of the comments from the president’s senior people was ‘We don’t want to look back, we want to look forward.’”

Pete Hoekstra, who was Chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence at the time, corroborated Santorum’s story in an interview with AT Monday. “As we’re (Santorum and Hoekstra) trying to help the Administration, the harshest critics we have are from the Administration. There’s no doubt to me there’s a cover up — the vast majority of the information we have now is stuff we were asking about in 2005 and 2006 and they never told us about it.”

A senior advisor to Dick Cheney, Dave Wurmser, confirmed, saying “in 2005-6, Karl Rove and his team blocked public disclosure of these (findings) and said ‘Let these sleeping dogs lie; we have lost that fight so better not to remind anyone of it.’”

SEE COMPLETE TEXT

  America and ISIL, and how that worked out for GOP, ISIL, Karl Rove, LIFE, Roved: Politics trumped geopolitics, WMD, WorldTribune.com