The Downing Street Memo(s)

[saavedra77]

Fred Kaplan has an interesting article in Slate analyzing the various British Iraq war planning memos that have been dribbling into the media, recently. You've no doubt heard of the infamous Downing Street Memo; in fact, several additional documents have been published in the Times of London and the Los Angeles Times during the past week.

Some excerpts from Kaplan's article, with my comments:

"By mid-summer 2002—at a time when Bush was still assuring the American public that he regarded war as a 'last resort'," the Downing Street Memos (there are now at least 8 of them in the public domain) portray a U.S. Administration that regarded war as (in the words of the original Downing Street Memo) practically "inevitable." In fact, more recently-released documents show the U.S. Administration already intent on war with Iraq by early 2002, not long after the U.S. succeeded in ousting the Taliban from Afghanistan.

Many commentators have simply shrugged off this supposed revelation: after all, Kaplan notes, "we've read over and over that Bush was hellbent on war even earlier than this. The point has been made in Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack, Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies, and Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty, as well as in articles by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker and Walter Pincus in the Washington Post."  Been there, heard that, so what, right?

"True," Kaplan continues, "but let's get serious. When the scholars write the big tomes on this sordid saga, they'll want to base their findings on primary-source documents—and here is one [sic], flashing right before us. The Downing Street Memo will be a key footnote in the history books; it should have made front-page headlines in the daily broadsheets of history's first draft."

I would venture a bit further than Kaplan does, here, because the claims made by Clarke, Hersh, Pincus, Suskind, Woodward have been highly controversial: The White House has rejected reports that they shaded the facts, misled the public and Congress, and stinted diplomacy during the leadup to war. In particular, the Administration has dismissed former insiders like former counterterrorism chief Clarke, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, and (Suskind's source) former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil as motivated by political or personal grudges. The Downing Street Memos are important precisely because they corroborate many of Clarke et al's criticisms, and this is of far more than "historical" interest.

Take shading the facts: The memos certainly make it much harder to argue that the U.S. drive to overthrow Saddam Hussein was driven just by faulty intelligence: In them, British officials judge the case against Iraq on weapons violations "weak" and the underlying intelligence "thin." (They also dismiss alleged Iraqi links to al Qaeda as "unconvincing.") If the intelligence was so demonstrably inadequate, you might ask, where did all of that rhetoric about the threat of Iraqi weapons come from? Was the whole thing, dare we say, a big lie? Well, that depends on who you think was kidding who: Despite the lack of credible intelligence, Kaplan writes that "top officials" in both the U.S. and U.K. appear to have "genuinely believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction." Indeed, this was assumed from the outset: "They just knew Saddam had WMD, and if the facts didn't quite prove he did, they would underscore and embellish the tidbits that came close." [Italics added] In other words, "Bush and his aides had decided to let policy shape intelligence, not the other way around; they were explicitly politicizing intelligence...." They cherry-picked facts that reinforced their preconceived opinions about Iraq; they exaggerated the "scant" information that they had--but only because they were so sure that they were right.

Consequently, when the U.S. and U.K. later demanded renewed U.N. weapons inspections in Iraq, the memos make clear that it was not to determine whether the Baathist regime possessed banned weapons. Rather, British officials viewed the renewed inspections primarily as a means to trip up (or "wrong foot," as one of the memos puts it) the Iraqis: the British fully expected Saddam Hussein to refuse or obstruct the inspections, providing the U.S. and its allies with a justification for "switching to other methods"--meaning military ones. But, as we've already seen, nonmilitary options had been taken off of the table before the inspections even began: by June 2002, the head of British intelligence was reporting to his superiors that the mood in Washington made war "inevitable." So much for diplomacy.

As it happened, the anticipated showdown between U.N. weapons inspectors and Iraqi forces never materialized. Absent such a confrontation, or concrete evidence of banned weapons, and despite U.N. inspectors' requests for more time to complete their work, the U.S. decided to ratchet up its demands, arguing that the onus was on the Iraqis to "disarm"--surrendering weapons they claimed not to (and, as it turns out, probably didn't) have. Finally, the White House made the one demand they could be reasonably sure that the Iraqi dictator would refuse outright, calling on Hussein to give up power and exit his country, or face war. If the prospect of U.N. inspectors breathing down the regime's neck failed to produce an Iraqi refusal, this certainly did the trick. (Although, one wonders what the U.S. would have done had Hussein and his sons had fled to some distant capital: there would probably still have been a Baathist regime left to topple ... )

On balance, Kaplan's is not a bad analysis, although rather milder than I think the facts warrant. The memos may not demonstrate that U.S. and U.K. officials "lied outright" about Iraqi weapons (at least, if we take their claims at face value), but they do suggest that both governments wildly exaggerated what they knew about Iraq during 2002 (particularly in baseless U.S. warnings about "mushroom clouds"), and approached prewar debate in Congress and the U.N. in what could at best be described as bad faith.

In any case, I strongly encourage those with the time and patience to follow the above links to the original documents, as published in the London and L.A. papers, and judge for yourselves.