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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
History will hold Bush and Blair accountable for their lies in the run-up to the Iraq war, even if the D.C. press corps just finds them funny.
Jun 10, 2005 | On Tuesday, more than a month after the "Downing Street memo" first appeared on Britain's front pages, a Reuters correspondent asked George W. Bush and Tony Blair to explain the secret document that says the Bush administration had decided by July 2002 to invade Iraq -- and that the intelligence on Saddam Hussein's arsenal was then being "fixed" to bolster an otherwise exceedingly "thin" justification for war.
While the president and the prime minister airily attempted to dismiss the explosive memo -- just as many mainstream and conservative journalists in the United States did at first -- they have a lot more explaining to do. History will hold them accountable even if the press does not. For unlike previous indications of Bush's duplicity in promoting the war, this document provides historical evidence of a kind that usually remains hidden in a vault for years or even decades.
The Downing Street memo meets a higher standard of proof than gossip from one of Bob Woodward's unnamed sources or the memoirs of a disgruntled former official like Paul O'Neill. It is the official classified record of a crucial meeting of the British government's security cabinet on July 23, 2002 -- including the prime minister, the attorney general, the foreign secretary, the defense secretary and the chief of MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service. It details their worried discussion of their American ally's premature and absolute determination to wage a war that the president publicly claimed he hoped to avoid, and of the difficulty they would have in justifying that war.
Stodgy and fearful, the Washington press corps seemed unable to process this revelatory document, concocting various excuses to ignore it or relegate it to the back pages. Until Tuesday, it seemed likely to fade into the archives, despite the best efforts of dissident politicians and bloggers.
So the president may have been surprised when Steve Holland of Reuters asked this question: "On Iraq, the so-called Downing Street memo from July 2002 says intelligence and facts were being 'fixed around' the policy of removing Saddam through military action. Is this an accurate reflection of what happened? Could both of you respond?"
Like the eager poodle that will be his permanent caricature, Blair leaped to answer first. His response is worth parsing carefully, especially because neither he nor Bush took any follow-up questions on the subject.
"Well, I can respond to that very easily," Blair said. "No, the facts were not being fixed in any shape or form at all."
He didn't deny the authenticity of the memo, nor did he try to claim that the obvious meaning of the phrase "fixed around" is different in London than in Washington. He also didn't try to explain why the memo so clearly quoted Sir Richard Dearlove, head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, making comments precisely to that effect. And he didn't explain why, if the memo was wrong, neither he nor anyone on his staff corrected its contents when it was circulated to all those present after the meeting.
Did Blair mean to suggest that Dearlove -- identified in the memo only by his traditional codename "C" -- had reported inaccurately on what he had learned from his CIA counterparts in Washington? If so, how would Blair know that? Or did Blair mean to imply that Matthew Rycroft -- his foreign policy aide who took the meeting notes and later wrote the memo -- misquoted Dearlove?
Blair moved on swiftly without further clarification, as if he and his government bore no responsibility for the memo's contents -- and he was lucky that nobody asked what he thought he was talking about.
"And let me remind you that that memorandum was written before we then went to the United Nations," he continued blithely. "Now, no one knows more intimately the discussions that we were conducting as two countries at the time than me. And the fact is, we decided to go to the United Nations and went through that process, which resulted in the November 2002 United Nations resolution to give a final chance to Saddam Hussein to comply with international law. He didn't do so. And that was the reason why we had to take military action."
The credibility of Blair's remarks can be judged only in context of the Downing Street memo and other documents leaked in Britain, all of which show that "going to the U.N." was merely a pretext for military action -- which he had committed his country to support months earlier.
Yes, the Downing Street memo was written before the United States and the United Kingdom brought Iraq before the U.N. Security Council. But as Blair well knows, the decision to return to the United Nations had nothing to do with Bush's ultimate goal. The question debated among his advisors and with the British was what route they would take to get to Baghdad -- and how to manage world opinion along the way.
