Downing Street memo pretty mild

By Michael Kinsley The Los Angeles Times - 06/14/2005

After about the 200th e-mail from a stranger demanding that I cease my personal cover-up of something called the Downing Street Memo, I decided to read it.

It's all over the blogosphere and Air America, the left-wing talk-radio network: This is the smoking gun of the Iraq war. It is proof positive that President Bush was determined to invade Iraq a year before he did so.

The whole ‘‘weapons of mass destruction'' concern was phony from the start, and the drama about inspections was just kabuki: going through the motions.

So cheers for the Downing Street Memo. But what does it say? It's a report on a meeting of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and some aides on July 23, 2002.

The key passage summarizes ‘‘recent talks in Washington'' by the head of British foreign intelligence (identified, John le Carre-style, as ‘‘C'').

C reported that ‘‘military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. ... There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.''

C's focus on the dog that didn't bark — the lack of discussion about the aftermath of war — was smart and prescient. But even on its face, the memo is not proof that Bush had decided on war. It states that war is ‘‘now seen as inevitable'' by ‘‘Washington.''

That is, people other than Bush had concluded, based on observation, that he was determined to go to war. There is no claim of even fourth-hand knowledge that he had actually declared this intention.

But C offered no specifics, or none that made it into the memo. Nor does the memo assert that actual decision-makers told him they were fixing the facts. Although the prose is not exactly crystalline, it seems to be saying only that ‘‘Washington'' had reached that conclusion. Of course, you don't need a secret memo to know this. Just look at what was in the newspapers on July 23, 2002, and the day before.

Left-wing Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer casually referred to the coming war as ‘‘much planned for.'' The New York Times reported Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's response to a story that ‘‘reported preliminary planning on ways the United States might attack Iraq to topple President Saddam Hussein.'' A Wall Street Journal Op-Ed declared that ‘‘the drums of war beat louder.''

Then there's poor Time magazine (cover date July 22 but actually published a week earlier), Unfortunately, Time went on to speculate that because of a weak economy, the war ‘‘may have to wait — some think forever,'' and concluded that ‘‘Washington is engaged more in psy-war than in war itself.''

Some people you have to hit over the head. Hey, you folks at Time, what about the Downing Street Memo?

— Michael Kinsey is opinion page editor for the L.A. Times