Setbacks for the monarchs of spin

Lots happening that I’ve been wanting to blog about. First, a good discussion about the utility of war developing on the Comments board under the next post down: check it out.
Second, the emergence of details on the great story of how Colin Powell and the Pentagon brass out-maneuvered Rumsfeld and the neo-con Pentagon suits in order to get Washington to take the Iraq dossier back to the UN. A good story on this today in the Wash. Post
The story, by Dana Milbank and Thomas E. Ricks, starts off:

On Tuesday, President Bush’s first day back in the West Wing after a month at his ranch, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell walked into the Oval Office to present something close to a fait accompli.
In what was billed as a routine session, Powell told Bush that they had to go to the United Nations with a resolution seeking a U.N.-sanctioned military force in Iraq — something the administration had resisted for nearly five months. Powell, whose department had long favored such an action, informed the commander in chief that the military brass supported the State Department’s position despite resistance by the Pentagon’s civilian leadership. Bush and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, whose office had been slow to embrace the U.N. resolution, quickly agreed, according to administration officials who described the episode.
Thus was a long and high-stakes bureaucratic struggle resolved, with the combined clout of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department persuading a reluctant White House that the administration’s Iraq occupation policy, devised by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, simply was not working.
The effort by Powell and the military began with a t