Memorandum for
Ever since Blair was in town and some reporter (Steve
Holland) had the temerity to ask at Q&A photo op. about the Downing Street memo
as it has come to be called. Some of the more adventurous editors
greenlighted the subject to appear on their pages against this angle
and the cat was out of the bag. Dana Milbank wrote about it for the
Washington Post in just such circumspect cat paws terms
Seldom-Discussed Elephant Moves Into Public's View. Salon
Wash. Post reports on Blair memo and
others noticed this and commented on that. I surprised as must have
been the White House that this story continued to have legs. I'm sure
they thought they had shut it down. I pulled the London Times article
down late on Sunday 14 May after seeing references to it all over the
amateur web, but nothing from the professional journalism world for a
day and a half. My first reaction was 'isn't this old news, haven't I
seen this on Metafilter half a dozen times over the past couple
years."
I had absorbed the story of how our own intelligence apparatus
had been intimidated and bypassed into not contradicting Administration
policy made as it was on the basis of preconceptions, ideology, and
credulous and amateur intelligence work. Breaking Iraq and removing
Saddam from power was outside the normal realm of events the flux of
facts and demos. It was something that people inside this
administration were going to make happen. This is no real secret (their
secret was and continues to be what they thought all this was going to
accomplish). The Washington Post in the small way they have of
sometimes opining on things made a similar point within Al Kamens
column in Fridays paper.
This just seemed a little starker, poignant beyond the cold
facts, like reading an antique letter from a forgotten consul of a
lesser king at one of histories corners rail against inevitability and
fate. Despite the administration's uniform dismissal of it, I hadn't
heard or read til they suggested it, that this memo wasn't authentic.
Not even from Mr. Blair. Last night on Letterman President Clinton
tried to appear to have never heard of it, he didn't appear to want to
be dragged into a discussion of it either.
There is an argument that the left ought to stop crying winging on
about WMD's and confront the real issues the war was fought (which, I
suppose, they feel validate what they did). Insert your grade school
stratego (tm) thinking here: oil,
instability-producing-non-integrating-geo-economic-zones (formerly
known as the third world), oil, militant islam-clash of civilizations,
oil, aging populations, oil, globalization, and of course oil. The
problem with that is: that isn't the policy debate they held. There
were two reasons for that. They did not want a policy debate at all.
They wanted an fear based emotional reaction. They doubted that the
public would actually back their enterprise, based on their real
reasons, so they did not talk up those issues then denied them and
castigated even those who thought they supported the administration if
they did so. They did not deal with the American people honestly. By
illuminating the lack of post war planning, the disdain for it. The
carnival show that was the CPA. These memo's
Ministers were told of need for Gulf war "excuse" - Sunday Times - Times Online reveal the architects of this war to be the bellicose authoritarian fantacist amateurs that they are.
I would like to go back what was being written, in the press, in
the think tanks, in academia. In light of how things have turned out
and in what we know now and tease out what valid facts and opinions
were known and promulgated. Which of the worlds reporting bodies was
closest to the truth. Perhaps through their eyes we might see a world
clearer.
11:40:45 PM  ;;
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