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June 20, 2005
The 'Downing Street' Memos
The Christian Science Monitor has a retrospective article on the leaked internal UK government memos concerning UK and US preparations for war in Iraq. The punch line excerpts from the memos are now well known. Or at least they should be.
The rewards from your [Blair's] visit to Crawford will be few. The risks are high, both for you and the government."
There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
The US administration has lost faith in containment and is now considering regime change.
US scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and Al Qaida is so far frankly unconvincing.
In particular, little thought has been given to creating the political conditions for military action, or the aftermath and how to shape it
A postwar occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise. As already made clear, the US military plans are virtually silent on this point.
If you want to read the complete texts of the memos, links to them are on the Houston Chronicle website.
In an attempt to be balanced, the Christian Science Monitor article notes that supporters of the Administration have tried to dismiss the memos with the following claims:
- The memos lack detail.
- Much that is in the memos was widely discussed in the media at the time.
- "The memo does not say specifically that Mr. Bush, or indeed any US official, saw war as inevitable."
- The second memo seems to contradict the claim of the first that war was inevitable.
All of these explanations are attempts to weaken rather than totally refute the argument that the Bush administration had committed to the Iraq war long before they have ever publicly admitted and that they manipulated intelligence to justify what they saw as an enviable war. The hope is that by weakening these points they will also succeed in weakening the claim that the Bush administration was completely unprepared for victory.
I will simply note that the lack of details argument is a common retreat of those that know that the less detail account is correct but want to blunt its force by claiming that more is needed to prove the case. The second point is true only if one considers press and blog speculation and not if one considers Administration statements. The third point, that the memos lack specificity with regard to the inevitability of war is simply contradicted by the plan language of the July 23, 2002 memo, "Military action was now seen as inevitable." While it is true that no US government official is named, the sentence indicates that the whole of the US Administration was of this opinion. If all are of an opinion then any one individual, including the President, is of that same opinion. Finally, the second memo (July 23, 2003) contradicts it self only concerning the possibility that Blair might be able to modify the US Administration's position. There is nothing in anything I have read to make me think that the Bush Administration shared this belief: quite the contrary.
It is good to see that these memos are slowly beginning to get a little play in the mainstream press. But a lot more is needed than a no follow-up question to Secretary of State Rice as happen on ABC's This Week . The memos have been a hobby in the blogosphere for over two months. It's now high time that they got a lot of play. They deserve wide public debate.
Posted by Duane Smith at June 20, 2005 7:44 PM | Read more on Current Events |
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