Another Day, Another Impeachable Offense

Ho-hum. While your big American Mainstream Media was sleeping, Faithful Reader(s), the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times of London was uncovering a three-year-old memo containing the minutes of a July 2002 meeting of the Blair Cabinet. As Salon's Joe Conason reports:

"...Those in attendance included the defense secretary, the foreign secretary, the attorney general, the intelligence chief and Blair's closest personal aides.

"The minutes of that meeting, set down in a memorandum by foreign policy advisor Matthew Rycroft, were circulated to all who were present. Dated July 23, 2002, the Rycroft memo begins with the following admonishment: 'This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents...'

"What the minutes clearly show is that Bush and Blair secretly agreed to wage war for 'regime change' nearly a year before the invasion -- and months before they asked the United Nations Security Council to support renewed weapons inspections as an alternative to armed conflict (my italics). The minutes also reveal the lingering doubts over the legal and moral justifications for war within the Blair government.

"But for Americans, the most important lines in the July 23 minutes are those attributed to Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, who in spy jargon is to be referred to only as 'C.' The minutes indicate that Sir Richard had discovered certain harsh realities during a visit to the United States that summer:

"'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 U.N. route ... There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.'

"At the same meeting, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw confirmed Sir Richard's assessment:

"'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.'"

It will not shock you to hear that this little bombshell caused enough of a stir earlier in the week in Great Britain, where it was front-page, "our-top-story" stuff all over the media, that for a brief moment there was actually some question as to whether it might keep Blair from being re-elected. In the event, he kept his job (albeit with a smaller majority), but the fact that so many British subjects not only understood the import of this memo, but cared about its implications for their government and their country, only supports my contention that the average Brit's IQ is at least twenty points higher than the average American's. (I figure it's either the bangers or the mash.)

Now, when I walked into a studio in Santa Monica on Friday morning, having just heard a friend of mine discuss this development on a nationally sydicated radio show during my drive in, I repeated it for my colleagues, wonderful people all and none-too-slow on the uptake. I was stunned to see it sink with barely a ripple; the general reaction was a collective shrug ("I didn't vote for president" was the only verbal response I got, from a twentysomething recently transplanted to L.A. from the upper Midwest).

Why, I wondered in concert with Joe Conason, doesn't anybody care about this in America?

Because in case you hadn't heard, this stuff is kerosene poured on an already blazing fire in the U.K., folks. Blair may have kept his job, but only because there was no serious alternative. Last week New Yorker editor David Remnick wrote a skeptical profile in that magazine on Blair and his re-election efforts, entitled "The Masochistic Campaign," and if Remnick has captured the P.M. at all, the man's on thin ice with his constituents and he knows it. When pressed to explain his continued fealty to the invasion of Iraq on grounds of destroying Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction - despite nearly universal agreement at this point that those weapons did not exist - Blair sticks nervously but stubbornly to his guns like an evangelical at a convention of evolutionary biologists. Saddam had W.M.D. before we attacked, he repeats doggedly, and then somehow, incredibly, managed to get rid of them by the time we got there. (One imagines Blair seeing David Copperfield disappear the Statue of Liberty on T.V., as happened some years back, and then calling Michael Bloomberg anxiously to offer Britain's full assistance in tracking it down.)

As Blair admits, in his mind September 11 changed everything; whereas before bin Laden's attacks he would have erred, as he says, on the side of non-action, he now feels compelled to err on the side of action. This seems an incisive insight as well into the mindset of the Bush administration, if we shall be charitable and grant their sincerity in the matter. As Blair puts it to Remnick, in the wake of the attacks the issue became simple: regimes which may present threats can no longer be permitted to stand, and since Saddam Hussein had been long known to represent at least a potential threat - and, crucially, was believed, according to what we now know was highly selective and frequently erroneous intelligence, to be in violation of United Nations resolutions - Blair had no choice but to line up behind Bush and go into Iraq. Under the stress of the aftermath of 9/11, the logic, paranoid and self-serving though it was, made sense to both leaders.

And thus they failed us. What the new revelation of the Downing Street memo makes unmistakably clear is not only that the decision to invade Iraq was made long before the tanks rolled into Baghdad - a fact well known to those of us familiar with Paul Wolfowitz's 1996 Project for a New American Century article laying out a thorough invasion blueprint lacking only the pretext so thoughtfully provided by Osama bin Laden - but that Bush and his representatives lied publicly, repeatedly, knowingly, about that decision. They intentionally misled the American public and the world, in order to invade a country which posed no threat, because the dictator they had installed there twenty years before had long since ceased to do what they told him to. (And, of course, because he had "tried to kill Dubya's dad.")

And now most Americans, and virtually all American media organizations, perhaps eager to forget their own complicity at the time, are ignoring the story. We don't like being reminded that we're not always the good guys. We don't like that at all. We don't like it so much, we're willing to turn two blind eyes to the worst president since Herbert Hoover, just so we won't have to look ourselves in the mirror and face what we see there.

But straw boaters off to the Brits, who at least have the decency to act properly ashamed of what their government did in their name. Would that we might show as much character as a nation.

Politics