I'm truly surprised, and yet not surprised one bit, that the American mainstream media have largely ignored the Downing Street Secret Memo.

What Downing Street Secret Memo? you ask? The one written after British/US meetings long before the War on Iraq, that says this:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. 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 is the internal British government memo that blew up in the face of Tony Blair. It outlines how Bush had already decided to invade Iraq and that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Let's look at that again.

"The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

In other words, Bush and his cohorts "fixed" the facts to back up their policy intentions. In plain talk, they lied to us. But wait, there's more:

The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun "spikes of activity" to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.

Ramp up before the elections, to make all the politicos look tough, but start the mess afterwards.

The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors.

What? "WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran"? So obviously WMD was not the real justification. Maybe regime change and the humanitarian cause was the real reason to invade. Oh, wait....

The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: selfdefence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case.

And yet we had people in this country voting for Bush because they thought Saddam was going to bomb West Virginia. How did they get that idea?

Now we have over 1600 American soldiers killed in Iraq. Over 12,000 have been wounded, some very seriously. Why? Not terrorism -- Iraq was a military dictatorship, not an al-Qaeda host. Not self defense -- with his old tanks and archaic short-range missiles, Saddam couldn't attack us if he wanted to. Not regime change -- there was "no legal base" for that.

We always knew that Bush and especially Cheney were hell-bent on getting revenge on Saddam as soon as they got into the White House. Their own staffers have admitted that. But here's a high-level government document that clearly states that Bush had already decided to go to war long before the weapons inspections were anywhere near completed.

Mark Danner has a fascinating analysis in the New York Review of Books:

If the UN could be made to agree on an ultimatum that Saddam accept inspectors, and if Saddam then refused to accept them, the Americans and the British would be well on their way to having a legal justification to go to war (the attorney general's third alternative of UN Security Council authorization).

Thus, the idea of UN inspectors was introduced not as a means to avoid war, as President Bush repeatedly assured Americans, but as a means to make war possible. War had been decided on; the problem under discussion here was how to make, in the prime minister's words, "the political context ...right." The "political strategy"—at the center of which, as with the Americans, was weapons of mass destruction, for "it was the regime that was producing the WMD"—must be strong enough to give "the military plan the space to work." Which is to say, once the allies were victorious the war would justify itself. The demand that Iraq accept UN inspectors, especially if refused, could form the political bridge by which the allies could reach their goal: "regime change" through "military action."

So why haven't we seen any mention of the Down Street Secret Memo in the American press? Why does it live only in foreign news bureaus and some blogs?

In the United States, on the other hand, the Downing Street memorandum has attracted little attention. As I write, no American newspaper has published it and few writers have bothered to comment on it. The war continues, and Americans have grown weary of it; few seem much interested now in discussing how it began, and why their country came to fight a war in the cause of destroying weapons that turned out not to exist. For those who want answers, the Bush administration has followed a simple and heretofore largely successful policy: blame the intelligence agencies. Since "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" as early as July 2002 (as "C," the head of British intelligence, reported upon his return from Washington), it seems a matter of remarkable hubris, even for this administration, that its officials now explain their misjudgments in going to war by blaming them on "intelligence failures"—that is, on the intelligence that they themselves politicized. Still, for the most part, Congress has cooperated. Though the Senate Intelligence Committee investigated the failures of the CIA and other agencies before the war, a promised second report that was to take up the administration's political use of intelligence—which is, after all, the critical issue—was postponed until after the 2004 elections, then quietly abandoned.

When Clinton lied, it was over a blow job. Yet he was impeached, and the baying from the Republicans, especially adultery experts like Rep. Hyde, was incessant. But now, suddenly, the truth is not important. In fact, it doesn't exist. For the conservatives, neither do principles or party platforms. So of course Impeachment of President Bush is not a political possibility.

And you can bet that the next Republican President will pardon President Bush, so he can rest Nixon-like on his bloody laurels.

Meanwhile, North Korea gets ornery, Darfur genocide continues, China makes noises about Taiwan ... oh yeah, and Osama bin Laden is still out there, and al-Qaeda is still viable. And we can't do anything about it, because we're busy going broke occupying a country that will only fall apart if we try to leave.

With all these Americans and Iraqis dead, it's a wonder how these people who manipulated our country's blood and treasure and prestige into a war over -- what? ego? oil? Crusade? -- it's a wonder these people can look at themselves in the mirror at night.

About author

media girl also blogs at other places.