A Peephole to the War Room: British Documents Shed Light on Bush Team's State of Mind

From Todd S. Purdum at The New York Times:

The disclosure of British government memorandums portraying the Bush administration as bent on war with Iraq by the summer of 2002, and insufficiently prepared for post-invasion problems, has caused a political stir on both sides of the Atlantic, in part because opponents of President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair see the documents as proof that both men misled their countries into war.

But the documents are not quite so shocking. Three years ago, the near-unanimous conventional wisdom in Washington held that Mr. Bush was determined to topple Saddam Hussein by any means necessary. Plenty of people--chief among them Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state--were also warning in public and private that the Pentagon was ill prepared for prolonged occupation.

What no one knew then for certain (though some lonely voiced did predict it) is that American forces would none none of the lethal chemical or biological weapons that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair said made Iraq so dangerous, or that the anti-American insurgency would be so durable and deadly. That is why the British memos' foresight--read with benefit of hindsight--rings so bittersweet for those who tried in vain to avert the war, and remain aghast at its human and material cost.

Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, plans to hold an informational forum about the memos (without Republican participation) on Thursday. Blogs are awash in discussions of the memos, and full of criticism of the mainstream American media for not paying them more mind.

It is amazing how the American corporate media--even a media outlet as respected as the New York Times--can finally come out with a story accepting the existence of the Downing Street Memos, while at the same time, downplaying the contents of those memos as if saying they are no big deal. What is shocking about these memos is that they provide proof the Bush administration had every intention of going to war in Iraq and that the Bush White House was twisting the intelligence and facts to market their war to the American public. President Bush was not adapting his policy in relation to the intelligence findings. Bush was adapting the intelligence findings in relation to his policy of war. He was fixing his intelligence so that the American public would support his war in Iraq. There was nothing that Saddam could do--suffice to putting a bullet into his head--that would stop Bush from invading Iraq.

The New York Times claims that these memos are not so shocking--that there was plenty of evidence in the news reports that Bush had made up his mind in going to war. What the Times does not realize is that these memos were developed by British intelligence and presented to Prime Minister Tony Blair. Blair knew that Bush was twisting the intelligence to market the war to the American public. Blair knew that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction (British intelligence couldn't be as bad as American intelligence. In fact, American intelligence also knew that Saddam didn't have WMDs. Unfortunately, those American intelligence findings were ignored by the Bush White House). In the latest memo published by the Washington Post and The Times of London on July 21, 2002, Blair knew that the post-war occupation of Iraq would be protracted and costly. He ignored it. British Prime Minister Tony Blair ignored his own country's intelligence. He never challenged Bush on the reasons to go to war in Iraq. He could have refused to commit British troops to the invasion, citing his own country's intelligence findings and raising concerns about a costly occupation. He didn't refuse. Instead, British Prime Minister Tony Blair went happily along with Bush's invasion plan, accepting the White House PR for war, over his own country's intelligence service. In short, Tony Blair became a puppet to George Bush. The New York Times claims that these memos are not shocking in that plenty of invasion details were leaked to the corporate media. But what the Times does not realize is that these memos provide a detailed look into the marketing and PR planning the top politicians in both Washington and London were using to market this war, while ignoring the possible devastating consequences that war would bring to both the United States and Great Britain. Those consequences were ignored by both President Bush and Prime Minister Blair.

We are now reaping what Bush and Blair have sowed.