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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

or,
That Pesky Downing Street Memo,
or,
The Insignificance of You and Me,
or,
To Hell With Truth


Secret Way to War

By Mark Danner
The New York Review of Books and TomDispatch
Posted May 17, 2005.
The 'smoking gun' memo makes it crystal clear that George Bush was 
hell-bent on attacking Iraq at least eight months before the invasion.


It's a long article. Here are the final graphs:

In the end, the Downing Street memo, and Americans' lack of interest in 
what it shows, has to do with a certain attitude about facts, or rather 
about where the line should be drawn between facts and political opinion. 
It calls to mind an interesting observation that an unnamed "senior 
advisor" to President Bush made to a New York Times Magazine reporter last 
fall:

    The aide said that guys like me [i.e., reporters and commentators] 
were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as 
people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of 
discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment 
principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world 
really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, 
we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- 
judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, 
which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're 
history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what 
we do.'

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 -- a critical 
point, for the administration has been singularly effective in its 
recognition that what is most politically important is not what readers of 
The New York Times believe but what most Americans are willing to believe. 
The last century's most innovative authority on power and truth, Joseph 
Goebbels, made the same point but rather more directly:

    There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For 
intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the 
stronger, and this will always be 'the man in the street.' Arguments must 
therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and 
instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely 
subordinate to tactics and psychology.

I thought of this quotation when I first read the Downing Street 
memorandum; but I had first looked it up several months earlier, on Dec. 
14, 2004, after I had seen the images of the newly reelected President 
George W. Bush awarding the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor 
the United States can bestow, to George Tenet, the former director of 
central intelligence; L. Paul Bremer, the former head of the Coalition 
Provisional Authority in Iraq; and Gen. (ret.) Tommy Franks, the commander 
who had led American forces during the first phase of the Iraq war. Tenet, 
of course, would be known to history as the intelligence director who had 
failed to detect and prevent the attacks of Sept. 11 and the man who had 
assured President Bush that the case for Saddam's possession of weapons of 
mass destruction was "a slam dunk." Franks had allowed the looting of 
Baghdad and had generally done little to prepare for what would come after 
the taking of Baghdad. ("There was little discussion in Washington," as "C" 
told the prime minister on July 23, "of the aftermath after military 
action.") Bremer had dissolved the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police and 
thereby created 400,000 or so available recruits for the insurgency. One 
might debate their ultimate responsibility for these grave errors, but it 
is difficult to argue that these officials merited the highest recognition 
the country could offer.

Of course truth, as the master propagandist said, is "unimportant and 
entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology." He of course would have 
instantly grasped the psychological tactic embodied in that White House 
ceremony, which was one more effort to reassure Americans that the war the 
administration launched against Iraq has been a success and was worth 
fighting. That barely four Americans in ten are still willing to believe 
this suggests that as time goes on and the gap grows between what Americans 
see and what they are told, membership in the "reality-based community" may 
grow along with it. We will see. Still, for those interested in the 
question of how our leaders persuaded the country to become embroiled in a 
counterinsurgency war in Iraq, the Downing Street memorandum offers one 
more confirmation of the truth. For those, that is, who want to hear.

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/22009/