Is the Memo Too "Reality Based"? (BBA IV)
In a remarkably lucid, detailed, and calm-voiced piece to appear in The New York Review of Books on 9 June 2005 (written 12 May 2005) called "The Secret Way to War", Mark Danner writes about the unfolding of events leading to our invasion of Iraq, and the significance of the Downing Street Memo.
The [Downing Street] memo, which records the minutes of a meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair's senior foreign policy and security officials, shows that even as President Bush told Americans in October 2002 [in a televised appearance after the US Congress had just voted to authorize the President to go to war against Iraq] that he "hope[d] the use of force will not become necessary"—that such a decision depended on whether or not the Iraqis complied with his demands to rid themselves of their weapons of mass destruction—the President had in fact already definitively decided, at least three months before, to choose this "last resort" of going "into battle" with Iraq.
[…]
Seen from today's perspective this short paragraph [summarizing the report of "C", the head of MI6, after his visit to Washington] is a strikingly clear template for the future, establishing these points:
- By mid-July 2002, eight months before the war began, President Bush had decided to invade and occupy Iraq.
- Bush had decided to "justify" the war "by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD."
- Already "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
- Many at the top of the administration did not want to seek approval from the United Nations (going "the UN route").
- Few in Washington seemed much interested in the aftermath of the war.
[…]
What the Downing Street memo confirms for the first time is that President Bush had decided, no later than July 2002, to "remove Saddam, through military action," that war with Iraq was "inevitable"—and that what remained was simply to establish and develop the modalities of justification; that is, to come up with a means of "justifying" the war and "fixing" the "intelligence and facts…around the policy."
The piece continues, detailing the course of events that followed:
- How the British expressed a desire to have the UN issue an ultimatum, presuming that Saddam would react negatively, giving a pretext for invasion.
- How 'Vice President Dick Cheney had appeared before a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and publicly denounced "the UN route." Asserting that "simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction [and] there is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us"….
- How the President manipulated the UN to start marketing his war.
- How Saddam frustrated the Administration by admitting UN inspectors, suggesting that Cheney's worst nightmare had come true: that the "UN route" might succeed.
- How 'As the gap between administration rhetoric about enormous arsenals— "we know where they are," asserted Donald Rumsfeld—and the inspectors' empty hands grew wider, that gap, as Cheney had predicted, had the effect in many quarters of undermining the credibility of the United Nations process itself.'
(Recall: the Administration depended on the UN route's failure to provide an excuse for invasion.)
In his concluding segment, after noting that the publication of the Downing Street Memo apparently affected Tony Blair's majority in the recent UK elections, Mr. Danner notes tht it's had little effect in the US:
The war continues, and Americans have grown weary of it; few seem much interested now in discussing how it began, and why their country came to fight a war in the cause of destroying weapons that turned out not to exist. For those who want answers, the Bush administration has followed a simple and heretofore largely successful policy: blame the intelligence agencies. Since "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" as early as July 2002 (as "C," the head of British intelligence, reported upon his return from Washington), it seems a matter of remarkable hubris, even for this administration, that its officials now explain their misjudgments in going to war by blaming them on "intelligence failures"—that is, on the intelligence that they themselves politicized. Still, for the most part, Congress has cooperated. Though the Senate Intelligence Committee investigated the failures of the CIA and other agencies before the war, a promised second report that was to take up the administration's political use of intelligence—which is, after all, the critical issue—was postponed until after the 2004 elections, then quietly abandoned.
He suspects that, as that unnamed (and manifestly over worked) "senior advisor" to the President famously said, the new breed of politician no longer lives in a "reality-based community", but now he makes hisr own reality:
Though this seems on its face to be a disquisition on religion and faith, it is of course an argument about power, and its influence on truth. Power, the argument runs, can shape truth: power, in the end, can determine reality, or at least the reality that most people accept—a critical point, for the administration has been singularly effective in its recognition that what is most politically important is not what readers of The New York Times believe but what most Americans are willing to believe.
Without irony, our author then quotes Joseph Goebbels on the same topic, who approached it rather more directly:
There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be "the man in the street." Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology.
At the end, the compete text of the Downing Street Memo is reprinted.
[This continues my series of posts concerning the pre-Iraq-war actions of the US administration, aimed at increasing awareness of those activities, as part of the Big Brass Alliance (or BBA) and it's support of AfterDowningStreet.org. For more information from me, see my first posting on The Downing Street Memo: "Worth Remembering"]
on Friday, 3 June 2005 at 11.45
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Big Brass Blogswarm – Friday
By all measures I would say that the After Downing Street Campaign has been a success…so far.
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on Friday, 3 June 2005 at 12.05
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Become the Media: The Friday Blog Swarm
We must not allow the truth to wither away into the darkness. We must not allow the forces of war and empire to succeed. We must hold our leaders accountable for their decisions. Demand an answer. Support the troops