OK, so there's a new plan. The Washington Times reports:

The Pentagon [has] adopted a new strategy in its search for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. It is called the "big impact" plan.

The plan calls for gathering and holding on to all the information now being collected about the weapons. Rather than releasing its findings piecemeal, defense officials will release a comprehensive report on the arms, perhaps six months from now.

The goal of the strategy will be to quiet critics of the Bush administration who said claims of Iraq's hidden weapons stockpiles were exaggerated in order to go to war....

David Kay, the special adviser to CIA Director George J. Tenet on Iraq's weapons said recently that the evidence is there. "I think in six months from now, we'll have a considerable amount of evidence, and we'll be starting to reveal that evidence," Mr. Kay said on NBC July 15....

"Six months from now." Gee -- six months from July 15 is January 15, 2004. Six months from now is February 1, 2004.

How curious -- that means the report could come out right around the early Democratic primaries. It might, in a striking bit of synchronicity, appear right after the New Hampshire primary (likely to be won by someone who's harshly criticized Bush) and just prior to a gaggle of February 3 primaries, when the Democratic candidates will be campaigning in states (e.g., South Carolina and Virginia) that went for Bush in 2000.

And by an equally astonishing coincidence, the report might appear right around the same time as the (presumably martial) State of the Union address, which means it could go back-to-back with next year's SOTU just as Colin Powell's Iraq presentation went back-to-back with this year's SOTU.

And the report is likely to be an awful lot like Powell's presentation -- it will probably seem exhaustive and irrefutable, and only gradually will it dawn on observers that the report conflates old and new information and is based at least in part on some dubious sources.

I could be giving the Bushies too much credit, but I think this is what's in the works.