“THE
DOWNING STREET MEMO” COMPELS A REVISIT TO IRAQ INVASION
(4
June 2005)
In May 2005,
the secret “Downing Street Memo” on the run-up to Iraq came to
public light. It summarized a meeting of Tony Blair and his
leadership team that took place on 23 July 2002. The memo
appeared to tear away the last veil hiding the truth about the
Bush administration’s early intentions toward Iraq.
One of Blair’s
team reported on his summer 2002 talks in Washington as follows:
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.
This concise
revelation of the Bush administration’s intentions in mid-2002 prompted
Congressman John Conyers to try to start an impeachment
proceeding.
It prompted me
to remember—
(1) --what an
observer in September 2002 predicted that Bush would do about
Iraq;
(2) --what
Saddam Hussein had to say about the invasion once it started.
***
(1) On 29
September 2002, some six months before our bombs burst over
Baghdad, an observer of the current scene said,
“Bush will not invade
Iraq.”
This observer
believed that Bush’s belligerent rhetoric of that fall just
followed Karl Rove’s strategy for winning the upcoming November
elections for Republicans. It would trap Democrats into
supporting Bush militancy and wrap the flag around the president
and his party. After a successful Republican result in November,
the observer predicted, Bush would not invade Iraq but change the
subject!
This statement
stands out as a flagrant example of the incredible ignorance
abroad in America at that moment about the well-laid and
long-gestating plans of the neoconservatives, dominant in the
White House, to use military power to reshape the geopolitical
world—with regime change in Iraq as the centerpiece. "The Downing
Street Memo," written two months before, shows in retrospect how
poorly this observer and lots of other Americans understood Bush’s
real intention.
As the naïve
author of the statement, I may have been less informed than many
about the already-established dominance in the Bush administration
of the ideological blueprint driving us inexorably toward
preemptive war. (The Project for the New American Century
laid out the strategic argument for anyone
to read and interpret.) But I was surely accompanied by millions
of Americans who, one way or another, thought that our options for
identifying and fighting our 9-11 enemies did not begin or end
with a preemptive strike against Saddam. (The same lack of
informed understanding allowed Bush to mislead 45 percent of
Americans into believing that Iraq played a major role in the 9-11
attack.)
The Bush
administration has pulled off an amazing array of political
feats. The most amazing is its success in avoiding political
disaster for taking us to war under false pretenses and with
intentions far exceeding that of getting our 9-11 enemies. Give
it credit for accurately gauging how far it could go in twisting
truth to persuade the American public to go along with its global
plans. So far, "The Downing Street Memo" has sparked little
muckraking in the American press. And Conyers’s impeachment
maneuver is looking quixotic.
***
(2) On 24
March 2003, Saddam Hussein addressed Iraqis in the wake of the
bombing of Baghdad. “The enemy,” Saddam told Iraqis, “is
working on making [the war] short, and we, with the will of God,
are working on making it long and heavy, so that the enemy will
sink in the mud until he chokes, is beaten and will be cursed.”
It is now more
than two years later. Surely, Americans cannot forget the irony
of our Commander-in-Chief flying just days after the fall of
Saddam onto the carrier Abraham Lincoln, dressed up like a
military pilot, to declare victory. I think he referred to hard
work still to do. But he did not warn that 1,700 plus of our
finest would be dead in two years defending the actions just
completed. He did not warn that American troops in 2005 would be
floundering in the “mud” of an incipient Iraqi civil war. He did
not warn that our Iraq adventure would arouse the curses of
millions of Muslims worldwide. (Nor did he mention how the
years of war ahead would hurt the federal budget.)
In "The Downing
Street Memo," the UK’s man in Washington got it just right when he
reported that Washington was having little discussion of the
aftermath of invasion. English understatement!
In a weird way,
Saddam, like Bush in his saber-rattling mode of fall 2002, was
telling it as it would be. Saddam’s blueprint for dealing with
the American invasion remains operative to this day. The Sunnis
have lived up to their fallen leader’s predictions, with lots of
help from extremist friends from elsewhere in the Middle East . The daily
deaths in Iraq at the hands of suicide bombers numb us with their
frequency and magnitude. The American body count continues to
grow. Quietly, the disillusionment of families of American
soldiers grows too but remains muted by the machinery of official
propaganda and a compliant press.
***
"The Downing
Street Memo" shows how badly I misread the run-up to war— that
embarrasses me. The memo also shows that our
leaders took the American people for a ride that they never would
have taken if they could have grasped the whole of what was going
on at the time.
The
conventional argument now, heard from liberals and neocons alike,
is that we cannot cut and run. I doubt if anyone in authority is
seriously testing the validity of that argument. Two criteria could
be brought to bear that might lead to interesting findings. One
would be an estimate of the new deaths of Iraqis and Americans
(and assorted others) that will occur in the next year under the
present strategy. Another would be an estimate of the change of
attitude toward America that would occur throughout the world if,
near term, we announced and pursued a strategic military pullback.
The neocon
vision of a militarized world dominated by an independently acting
US superpower retains its privileged position in this
administration—despite its failures in Iraq. And inertia
grips us now. Americans seem to have normalized the insanity of
prolonged conflict, brought to us by ideological zeal and undiluted
by realistic assessment of war’s consequences. Only a new
military draft—or perhaps a major collapse of our debt-ridden and
war-weary economy--would bring people to the streets and polls to
start an alternative movement.
By the time of
the presidential election in 2008, perhaps the people will be so
tired of what neoconservatives will have wrought that a political
swing will occur. But that is a long way off.
Meanwhile, the Republican message-control machine will continue to
turn black into white for millions of gullible Americans.
Anyway, after
my previous embarrassment, I wouldn't trust anything now appearing
in my crystal ball.
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Ursinus Past: 