05/16/05

What the Downing Street memo confirms for the first time is that President Bush had decided, no later than July 2002, to 'remove Saddam, through military action,' that war with Iraq was 'inevitable' -- and that what remained was simply to establish and develop the modalities of justification; that is, to come up with a means of 'justifying' the war and 'fixing' the 'intelligence and facts ... around the policy.' The great value of the discussion recounted in the memo, then, is to show, for the governments of both countries, a clear hierarchy of decision-making. By July 2002 at the latest, war had been decided on; the question at issue now was how to justify it -- how to 'fix,' as it were, what Blair will later call 'the political context...

http://tinyurl.com/dou6v

from Mother Jones, by Mark Danner


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp