Infomaniac: WeBlog

How we went to war

There's been a simmering discussion of the case for going to war in Iraq, sparked by the release of the secret British government memo saying the Bush administration had already decided to go to war months earlier and was going to find a way to do it by tweaking the intelligence. Bloggers have been complaining the memo hasn't gotten much press in this country since it was published in The Times on May 1. (Note this is a different memo than the similar secret British Attorney General memo I linked to last month.)
Now there's The Secret Way to War, a long thorough analysis in the New York Review of Books, on the memo (including the text, at the end). It says:

The memo, which records the minutes of a meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair's senior foreign policy and security officials, shows that even as President Bush told Americans in October 2002 that he "hope[d] the use of force will not become necessary" - that such a decision depended on whether or not the Iraqis complied with his demands to rid themselves of their weapons of mass destruction - the President had in fact already definitively decided, at least three months before, to choose this "last resort" of going "into battle" with Iraq.
...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.
...Though this seems on its face to be a disquisition on religion and faith, it is of course an argument about power, and its influence on truth. Power, the argument runs, can shape truth: power, in the end, can determine reality, or at least the reality that most people accept...

That point seems to be a theme in a lot of the discussions I've been linking to lately...

(Added later:) There's a whole Website, DowningStreetMemo.com devoted to this topic.

posted by liz at 11:15 AM