The New York Review of Books

Writing about the Iraq war and the Downing Street memo in the July 14th issue, Mark Danner commented on a recent column by Michael Kinsley, “No Smoking Gun.”¹ Mr. Kinsley has now responded. His letter and Mark Danner’s reply appear below.

To the Editors:

It’s easy to appreciate the frustration of “Downing Street Memo” enthusiasts like Mark Danner. They think they have documentary proof that President Bush had firmly decided to go to war against Iraq by July 2002. Yet some people say the memo isn’t newsworthy because the charge is not true, while others say the memo isn’t newsworthy because the charge is so obviously true. A smoking gun is sitting there on the table, but he’s going to get away with murder because everyone—for different reasons—won’t pick it up.

And I think Danner is right to resent the whole “smoking gun” business—an artifact of Watergate—which comes close to establishing the old Chico Marx joke, “Who are you gonna believe: me or your own two eyes,” as a serious standard of proof. Not every villain is going to tape record his villiany. George W. Bush, as I noted in the column that Danner objects to, is especially good at insisting that reality is what he would like it to be, and the smoking-gun standard helps him to get away with this.

But the DSM is worthless if it is not a smoking gun—not because I need a smoking gun to be persuaded (a “cynical and impotent attitude,” Danner says), but precisely because people who don’t require a smoking gun are already persuaded. And the document is just not that smoking gun. It basically says that the conventional wisdom in Washington in July 2002 was that Bush had made up his mind and war was certain. “What,” Danner asks, “could be said to establish ‘truth’—to ‘prove it’?” I suggested in the column that it would have been nice if the memo had made clear that the people saying facts were fixed and war was certain were actual administration decision-makers. Danner asks, Who else could the head of British intelligence, reporting on the mood and gossip of “Washington,” be talking about if not “actual decision-makers”? He has got to be kidding.

In short, the DSM will not persuade anyone who is not already persuaded. That doesn’t make it wrong. But that does make the memo fairly worthless.

Michael Kinsley

Los Angeles Times

Mark Danner replies:

For more than two years the United States has been fighting a war in Iraq that was launched in the cause of destroying weapons that turned out not to exist. One might have thought such a strange and unprecedented historical event—which has thus far cost the lives of nearly eighteen hundred young Americans, and counting—might attract the strong and sustained interest of a free press. It has—in Great Britain. In the United States when it comes to this central issue of our politics we have in general been treated to the vaguely depressing spectacle of a great many very intelligent people struggling very hard to make themselves stupid. Such has been the general plot line of the press reception of the so-called Downing Street memo and the other government documents associated with it, which tell much about how the Iraq war actually began.² I’m afraid the admirable Michael Kinsley, in dismissing the memo as “worthless” (he later promotes it to “fairly worthless”), once again rather exemplifies this trend.

Though leaders in the United Kingdom and the United States have tried hard to cast the memo as something exotic and recondite—”people…take bits out here of this memo or that memo, or something someone’s supposed to have said at the time,” as Prime Minister Tony Blair put it in Washington last month³—in fact the document is nothing more than the record of a meeting Blair had with his highest officials at 10 Downing Street on July 23, 2002. Despite Blair’s dismissal of the memo, no one, including him, has suggested that the minutes of the meeting—the equivalent of a National Security Council meeting in the United States—are anything but genuine. The Downing Street memo is an actual record of what Britain’s highest officials were saying, in private, about the coming Iraq war eight months before the war started.

The meeting began—as indeed most National Security Council meetings begin—with a summary of the current intelligence. Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, Britain’s equivalent of the CIA, had just returned from high-level consultations in the United States. To begin the discussion, then, Sir Richard “reported on his recent talks in Washington.” Here once again, in its entirety, is the report Sir Richard gave to his prime minister and his colleagues:

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 UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

Mr. Kinsley contends that here Sir Richard is reporting on “the mood and gossip of ‘Washington’”—as opposed, he says, to the views of “actual administration decision-makers.” I am unsure whom Kinsley thinks the head of British intelligence sees when he takes a secret trip to Washington to consult with his country’s most important ally about a coming war. We know Sir Richard met with Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, his opposite number, who, as a cabinet member who briefs the President personally every morning, would presumably be considered an “actual administration decision-maker.” We can assume that the other calls that the head of British intelligence paid during his “talks in Washington” were at a comparably high level.

Of course, none of Sir Richard’s colleagues, including his prime minister, demand to know who his sources were. And yet they go forward with the meeting, taking Sir Richard’s central points—that war is inevitable, that intelligence is being fixed to prepare for it and for a “justification” based on “the conjunction of terrorism and WMD,” and that the United States will resist going “the UN route”—as the point of departure, setting off a discussion (the true heart of the memo) of the need to persuade the United States to “go the UN route” to give some clothing of legality to a war the legal case for which, as the foreign secretary says, is quite “thin.” Why is it, one might ask, that the prime minister and the highest security officials of Great Britain do not demand that Sir Richard reveal his sources—why is it, in other words, that these officials are so much more credulous than Michael Kinsley?

Could it be because the prime minister and other officials think Sir Richard on his return from Washington is bringing from officials at the highest levels of the American government (“actual administration decision-makers”) information of the highest reliability—information, no doubt, that echoes what the cabinet ministers themselves have been hearing from their own Washington opposite numbers?

Indeed, if, as Mr. Kinsley contends, what Sir Richard tells his prime minister and his colleagues represents not the views of “actual administration decision-makers” but the “mood and gossip of ‘Washington,’” then does it not seem rather odd that the highest officials of Great Britain, America’s closest ally, would rely on it to make their own most vital decisions of national security? Does it not seem rather more plausible to believe what Prime Minister Blair and his ministers all seem to believe: that what Sir Richard says in his report represents the definitive views of “actual administration decision-makers” and not the speculations of journalists or cab drivers? As Michael Smith, the London Times reporter—and strong Iraq war supporter—who first published this document, said when asked about the authority and sources of Sir Richard Dearlove,

This was the head of MI6. How much authority do you want the man to have? He has just been to Washington, he has just talked to George Tenet. He said the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. That translates in clearer terms as the intelligence was being cooked to match what the administration wanted it to say to justify invading Iraq. Fixed means the same here as it does there.⁴

Who—in Kinsley’s phrase—has got to be kidding?

There is, of course, the further point, not a minor one, that pretty much everything Sir Richard says in his little summary turns out to be true. America and Britain did go to war to remove Saddam. Military action was justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. The US did have no idea what to do in “the aftermath after military action.” And the intelligence and facts were fixed around the policy.

Of course, according to the rules under which Kinsley, and much of the rest of the American press, profess to be playing, one cannot say this; after all, this is the case that the Downing Street memo, all by itself, must be shown to prove. But the requirement is purely artificial. Though, scandalously, the country has had no properly constituted investigation, congressional or otherwise, empowered to look into policymakers’ use of intelligence before the Iraq war—indeed, such investigations as there have been have explicitly excluded precisely this central issue⁵—an avalanche of other proof has shown how the ad-ministration “fixed the facts” around its policy of invading Iraq.

It is plain by now that the intelligence the CIA and other US agencies produced on Iraq and its weapons programs was poor, and was built on shockingly shallow information. It is also plain that Bush administration officials, far from pressing the agencies for the best, most reliable intelligence, instead relentlessly and blatantly exaggerated the slender intelligence that the government did possess, in order to make its case for war. Though thus far the administration has managed to block a true investigation of this misuse of intelligence by policymakers, and the Republican-controlled Congress has gone along, many examples of it are already known to the public.

One could cite President Bush’s insistence on telling the world that “Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” when the CIA had explicitly warned him that it could not confirm this information. One could point to the administration’s doctoring of the declassified version of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq given to Congress in October 2002, in which all of the considerable qualifiers included in the original report were removed. One could quote the repeated references by Vice President Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and other officials to “reconstituted nuclear weapons” and a “smoking gun becoming a mushroom cloud,” when the administration had little or no real evidence to prove Iraq had an ongoing nuclear program.