I can certainly sympathize with Michigan Democrat Rep. John Conyers and various of his sympathizers, who sponsored a forum last week in the House to discuss the notorious Downing Street memo and to promote the idea that Congress should conduct an official inquiry into whether President Bush intentionally misled the nation into the Iraq war. It seems reasonably clear – and it seemed so to many of us at the time – that the administration had decided on the war by summer 2002, when the memo was apparently written.
A wealth of circumstantial evidence suggests that many in the government jiggered the intelligence to make Saddam Hussein appear more of a threat than he ever was, and that plenty of people, perhaps including the president himself, knew full well that the threat was artificially exaggerated. Even given the human capacity for self-deception, which is large and contains multitudes, the case is pretty firm that the government used a fair amount of deception to sell a war that was decidedly an act of aggression rather than being remotely connected to self-defense.
Despite the fact the public opinion polls show most Americans now believe the Iraq was not worth it, these have been fairly frustrating times for critics of the war. The administration steadfastly refuses to admit to any possible mistake (let alone outright deception), even in the most recent presidential speech, when it should have been apparent that administration credibility is under fire and a bit more candor might have beefed it up. (Perhaps you should discount my observations since I have over time found it a real chore to listen to a speech from the Bushlet. Even when he is doing the right thing, like expressing his profound sympathy for those who have fallen in the noble cause and their families, he just sounds so transparently insincere to my jaundiced ear that I can hardly believe the insincerity doesn’t scream through to everybody. At this time, however, my opinion seems to be a minority one.) Administration loyalists for the most part remain steadfast in chanting the mantra "The world is better off without Saddam," and act as if this is all that is needed to appease the restless.
Seeking a Magic Bullet
It would certainly be nice if the Downing Street memo turned out to be the smoking gun that made more Americans sit up, get angry about the deception, demand that all the facts be brought into the open, and maybe even decide to impeach the SOB. I’m not one of those who thinks the impeachment of Clinton was solely about a sexual indiscretion – there was lying under oath and several other more substantive charges, and Clinton was disbarred. But if impeachment is the tool we use to bring presidents to heel when they abuse their power, it seems incongruous to use it against the generally petty and self-serving transgressions of a Clinton and to keep it in the sheath when abuse of power leads to a war.
Alas, as I have now had occasion to write for newspapers on three occasions, the first time during Watergate, while the language of the impeachment clause sounds pretty legalistic, impeachment is a quintessentially political process. "High crimes and misdemeanors" is not a strictly defined legal term but a term of art that means, roughly translated, "We’re sick of your machinations, buster, sick and tired enough that we’ll even live with the bozo you imposed on us as vice president."
Personally, I would have preferred that we had impeached a president every 20 years or so – with or without actually convicting them and tossing them out – just to keep in practice and to keep them looking over their shoulders. I don’t know whether the fact that the country seems to have taken that advice from an obscure pundit it never heard of is a sign of renewed vitality in the body politic or of irreparable imperial decline. But it’s hardly cause for wringing hands, and talk of impeaching President Bush is more than welcome.
But impeachment is a political act, and while discontent with President Bush is growing and he seems to be well on his way to a delightful case of second term blues, I doubt that the political support for impeachment is there yet. It seems unlikely (though one should keep hope alive) that it will be before his term comes to a more or less natural end. Also unfortunately, it doesn’t seem likely that the Downing Street memo will prove to be the magic bullet that firms up universal disillusionment.
Important Information
The Downing Street memo is certainly important, and I do wish more mainstream Americans newspapers and media Web sites had printed it in full and allowed their readers to digest and decide for themselves just how significant or probative it is. I have not abandoned hope that more will do so, and it is a source of deep satisfaction that it is now readily available all over the Internet. It is having an effect. The Times of London itself, which first published it on May 1, recently ran a somewhat self-congratulatory piece detailing some of the responses.
The Times notes, in a June 12 piece, that "more than a month later it still features in the daily top 10 most popular stories on our Web site, with 330,000 people estimated to have logged on to read it." It goes on: "at least two Web sites, AfterDowningStreet.org and DowningStreetMemo.com, have been set up to draw public attention to the leaked minutes. The former received more than 1.6m hits on a single day."
It would be gratifying if the memo turned out to be the smoking gun that finally convinced most Americans that the Bush administration was so determined to go to war with Iraq – well before 9/11 if former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and others are to be believed – that it was willing, even eager, to fudge the intelligence, misinterpret events, spin tiny threads of casual connection into thick ropes of constant conspiracy – in short, misrepresent matters to the American people repeatedly – to justify what was not even a preemptive but a preventive war about which many Americans would have been more skeptical had they been more fully informed. (Of course, this would have also required mainstream American journalism to perform more like real journalists and less like government mouthpieces.) I hope it happens, but I suspect it’s unlikely.
Too Much Good Stuff
In a sense, the problem for critics of the war is not that there’s insufficient evidence of the mendacity of the Bush administration during the run-up to the war, but that there is too much, almost too much to be digested. Certainly Seymour Hersh’s stovepipe piece offered potentially incriminating evidence, as did Paul O’Neill’s book, Michael Scheuer’s book, not to mention Richard Clarke’s book, and so much more it is exhausting even to rehearse it in summary. Not that any of these sources are a lock to convince the skeptical, or without flaws, but they all present credible evidence of a pattern of deception (or misinterpretation if you want to be charitable) in the run-up to the war.
So far, however, although skepticism is increasing, none of the pieces of evidence has had the heft, publicity, or whatever it takes to affect public opinion in this quirky society to persuade a significant number of people who were not already prepared to believe that Bush was the devil incarnate on or about Nov. 7, 2000. Perhaps all the bits and pieces are having a cumulative effect that will tip over quite suddenly in the near future. Or perhaps not.
I seldom agree with Michael Kinsley on policy, but he is a shrewd observer and a good reader. His June 12 piece has some intelligent observations on why he is pleased to see so much discussion of the memo, but doesn’t think it is the smoking gun so many yearn to have.
Reasonable Doubt?
Kinsley correctly points out that the key passage is this one, which "summarizes recent talks in Washington" by the head of British intelligence, or "C," to the effect 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."
Kinsley observes that
"[E]ven 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. Even if ‘Washington’ meant administration decision-makers rather than the usual freelance chatterboxes, C was only saying that these people believed that war was how events would play out.
"Of course, if ‘intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,’ rather than vice versa, that is pretty good evidence of Bush’s intentions, as well as a scandal in its own right. And we know now that this was true. Fixing intelligence and facts to fit a desired policy is the Bush II governing style, especially concerning the Iraq war. 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 that ‘Washington’ had reached that conclusion."
I would point out also that "fix" is hardly a precise word. It probably is intended to mean what it seems to on its face – that intelligence was being adjusted to lend support to a policy lots of people in Washington and elsewhere believed was pretty close to a sure thing. But could it also be taken in the more benign meaning of "fix" – to repair, correct, perhaps even refine and make more accurate, or more defensible? I don’t think that’s the intended meaning, but as Kinsley notes, the prose is hardly crystalline.
In part, of course, that’s because this is a memo intended to summarize what was presumably a much longer presentation. Such summaries hardly ever do full justice to such presentations, and sometimes include words that are purposely ambivalent to express in shorthand the fact that facts could be interpreted in different ways. For all we know, "C" presented a lot more specifics and made it clear that his impressions were based on conversations with decision-makers rather than hangers-on. He might have given several examples of specific deceptive "fixes" of intelligence that didn’t make it into the summary memo. We may know more in the future, but we don’t know for sure now.
Preponderance
Few would be happier than I if the Downing Street memo turned out to be the tipping point that turned the public decidedly against the administration and its war. There is evidence that it is happening already based on most opinion polls, although poll results can depend on how questions are worded and events just prior to the poll being taken. The willingness of a couple of Republicans, notably North Carolina’s Walter Jones, being ready to demand something like an exit date and an exit strategy is a hopeful sign. But Bush is a scrapper, and however unpersuasive his speeches are to me, he may yet be persuasive to people who have a psychological investment in having supported the war early on.
All this is a political process, not a trial in a court of law. At this point, even hostile jurors might not be able to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Bush lied us into war. But the ultimate judgment – whether it comes in the next few weeks, next year, or after Bush has left office, however – will be based more on a preponderance of the evidence standard, a lower standard of proof in legal proceedings. It is part of the nature of complex events, especially those in which certain actions, motives, and rationales are deliberately kept secret, as is always the case when a government does something, that the full truth is unlikely to be known for a long time – and even then a judgment based on all facts may be less than fully adequate simply because of the passage of time.
I suspect the tide is turning, however. Will that be enough to insulate the country from being persuaded to support the next war?
