This will set off another shit storm on the left flank of the blogosphere:
A memorandum written by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s cabinet office in late July 2002 explicitly states that the Bush administration had made “no political decisions” to invade Iraq, but that American military planning for the possibility was advanced. The memo also said American planning, in the eyes of Mr. Blair’s aides, was “virtually silent” on the problems of a postwar occupation.
“A postwar occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise,” warned the memorandum, prepared July 21 for a meeting with Mr. Blair a few days later. It also appeared to take as a given the presence of illicit weapons in Iraq – an assumption that later proved almost entirely wrong – and warned that merely removing Saddam Hussein from power would not guarantee that those weapons could be secured.
A transcript of the memorandum was posted Sunday on the Web site of The Sunday Times of London, after The Washington Post, citing one of the British paper’s own correspondents as a source, published excerpts. No image of the original was included, The Times said, to protect its source; a note on the Web site said the last page was missing.
Officials at the British Foreign Office in London, while insisting on anonymity, said in response to queries from The New York Times that they would not dispute the authenticity of the document. A spokesman for the White House, David Almacy, said that while he could not comment on its authenticity, it “was written eight months before the war began. There was significant postwar planning in the time that elapsed.”
A British official in Washington said the British government never commented on internal documents made public in the press. But he said that “of course there was concern” in the government before the war about the need for “a full and consistent postconflict plan.”
The publication of the memorandum is significant because a previously leaked document, now known as the Downing Street Memo, appeared to suggest that a decision to go to war may have been made that summer. In Washington last week, Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair denied that they made any decision in 2002, and suggested that the memorandum was being misinterpreted.
Rather than focus on the damning elements of this new memo, that the administration did not spend enough time planning for the post-war occupation, I fully expect that the Times and David Sanger will get pilloried for not savaging the administration and aiding and abetting a ‘cover-up.’
James Emerson
Outstanding!
We have clashing memos!
Now maybe we can have a debate over whether “fixing the facts around the policy” is intellectually more credible than “no political decisions” having been made…
Now that Jacko’s innocence has left the M$M with nothing to gossip about until the next infotainment paradigm raises it empty little head, maybe…just for once…we can get some real news about a real issue…
KC
John, there will be some of that. However, I think I’ve seen plenty of people on the left look at the lack of preparation for this war as something bad too. And, I don’t think I’ve seen anybody accuse the press of covering up for the administration with respect to the Downing Street Memo, though I have seen people question why the press hasn’t covered the Downing Street Memo. I think most comentators on the left have either concluded that it was because 1) it doesn’t contain any real significant new news (Marshal, Drum) or 2) after the Newsweek flap etc. the press has been cowed from doing controversial reporting on the administration (Atrios, Kos, etc.).
Anderson
I’m perplexed about the “clashing memos” claim.
The July 21 memo was in preparation for a meeting with Blair, and at that time, the word was that there was no definite political decision by the U.S. for war.
On July 23, according to Walter Pincus’s account of the meeting, “British officials who had just returned from Washington said Bush and his aides believed war was inevitable and were determined to use intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and his relations with terrorists to justify invasion of Iraq.”
So the implication is that the just-returned officials’ input didn’t go into the July 21 memo.
Bob
Well, what is it? Had they made the decision or didn’t they make the decision?
I think we’re beyond the point where any rational human would actually believe that Bush hadn’t been planning this war. Follow the troop movements, supply shipments, etc. Look at the way Bush handled the UN inspectors, getting them out before they could confirm what we now know, that there were no WMDs. The decision was made back in the 1990s before BushCo got back into the White House.
I’m also curious about the phrase “political decision” to go to war. How does that differ from making a decision to go to war?
Once you’ve bought into a war, it’s hard to back out. Hard to admit you’ve been a fool with thousands of lives and billions of dollars.
AlanDownunder
There’s a bunch more Downing Street memos from March 2002 here
Al Maviva
The actual sentence in question reads along the lines of “though open to averting war the Americans had already prepared war plans for an invasion of Iraq.”
I don’t see the controversy, and with the amount of taxes we pay, I’d bloody well hope we had some war plans prepared for Iraq. Any military that doesn’t have war plans sitting on the shelf for invading (or defending against) just about anybody, isn’t worth a damn. That’s even more true when the country in question poses a credible threat to those around it. Hell, with the money we pay for defense, I’d expect us to have defense plans against the usual suspects – nukes from the Norks, bio weapons from the Syrians, as well as muggers from Mauritania and huge chocolate bombes from Willy Freakin’ Wonka. We pay staff officers a lot of stuff to make war plans in peace time.
Rick
Al,
Stop making sense! This is no longer the blog for that kind of behavior.
Cordially…
James Emerson
Anderson – John’s post suggested that there was a discrepancy between the different memos he referred to. In fact, if you reread and compare the highlighted portions there really is no other reasonable interpretation of his post.
But as pointed out by Bob, there is no doubt that Bush had planned this war from early on, and according to Secretary O’neil, war with Iraq was on Bush’s mind from around his first day in office.
The public was made aware of the decision for war just weeks before Election 2002, and that was calculated to reap significant political advantage as the nation rallied around its “wartime” president and his party. There seems to be little doubt about that.
Kimmitt
Can’t I be equally enraged by both the mendacity and the incompetence outlined by this memo?
Sojourner
So it makes sense to have plans to start a war while having no plans for what to do after the war has been “won”?
Hmmm.
KC
Sojourner, are you a patriot?
Bruce Moomaw
As Brad Delong and “Slate” both point out, David Sanger’s NY Times article completely — and I mean completely — misreads the DS Memo. (Unlike, by the way, the Times of London itself — which has now printed the Memo in toto, and whose headline on the Memo a few days ago correctly read: “Ministers Were Told of need for Gulf War ‘Excuse’ “.)
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/06/david_sanger_of.html (which also reprints the Memo in toto):
“Sanger presumes that ‘political decisions’ refers to the actual decision to go to war…. [H]e concludes that the memo shows the Bush administration hadn’t [then] decided whether or not to invade Iraq. This is both sloppy journalism, and factually incorrect…. ‘[P]olitical” [as] used in the memo… [has] a very different sense… the shaping of public opinion and the construction of a legal edifice that would justify Britain’s participation in the U.S. attack…”
Indeed, in both Paragraphs 6 and 21, the Memo says that the White House is actually champing at the bit to invade Iraq as soon as Nov. 2002, but “we judge that a military campaign is unlikely to start until January 2003, if only because of the time it will take to reach consensus in Washington… As this paper makes clear, even this timescale would present problems.”
Those problems, it says, are that the US was eager to invade Iraq without any of the justifications required by international law — namely, solid evidence that Saddam still had a WMD program:
“When the Prime Minster discussed Iraq with President Bush at Crwaford in April he said that the UK would support military action to bring about regime change, provided that certain conditions were met…[including that] the options for action to eliminate Iraq’s WMD through the UN weapons inspectors had been exhausted. We need now to reinforce this message and to encourage the US Government to place its military planning within a political framework…This is particularly important for the UK because it is necessary to create the conditions in which we could legally support military action…
“US views of international law vary from that of the UK and the international community. Regime change per se is not a proper basis for military action under international law….In the absence of UN authorisation, there will be problems in securing the support of NATO and EU partners…
“This means that we need to influence US consideration of the military plans before President Bush is briefed on 4 August [2002], through contacts between the Prime Minister and the President and at other levels.”
In fact, the Memo states that the elimination of Saddam’s WMDs was actually SECOND on the Bush Administration’s list of priorities. Paragraph 5:
“US military planning unambiguously takes as its objective the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime, followed by elimination of Iraqi WMD. It is, however, by no means certain, in the view of UK officials, that one would necessarily follow from the other. Even if regime change is a necessary condition for controlling Iraqi WMD, it is certainly not a sufficient one.” So that explains why the Pentagon made no serious attempt — either before or after our graound invasion — to guard Saddam’s supposed huge WMD depots from being raided and their contents transferred elsewhere.
Of course, virtually everyone thought before the war that Saddam really did have biological and chemical weapons. It’s vital to keep in mind the real nature of the Iraq War Scandal: because of the White House’s loony confidence that we could occupy and reform Iraq extremely quickly, easily and cheaply, it was willing to trump up evidence that Saddam still had a program going to develop nuclear weapons — which are still tremendously more dangerous than biological weapons (and will be at least for several more decades, while chemical weapons are barely more dangerous than regular conventional-explosive weapons). The result of Bush’s idiotic overconfidence, and the lie about Saddam’s weapons program which it motivated, is that our military is now stuck in Iraq and totally unable to do anything militarily, of any sort, about the world’s GENUINELY dangerous nuclear states: Iran, North Korea and Pakistan. Even if we do, by some miracle, succeed in pacifying and democratizing Iraq, it may well be remembered as the biggest pyrrhic victory in human history.
Bruce Moomaw
“The result of Bush’s idiotic overconfidence, and the lie about Saddam’s weapons program which it motivated…”
That’s “Saddam’s NUCLEAR weapons program”.
p.lukasiak
Sanger should be pilloried, because (as others have noted) he has completely misrepresented the use of the word “political” — and did so without providing the full sentence, or the proper context.
If you read the memo in context, it is clear that the only decision that had not been made was the timing of the war and its strategy. The paragraph in which the phrase occurs at no point discusses the possibility that war will not be necessary — the “political decision” in question is whether to pursue a “Running Start” war or a “Generated Start” war.
And when read within the context of all of the memos and minutes that have been released, the proper context becomes even more obvious — including one that flat out states that going to the UN was valuable as a means of “wrongfooting” Iraq, rather than disarming him.
The most important piece of information found in this memo is that the British Government fully understood months before inspections took place that UNMOVIC would require six months to do its job fully —
The wingnuts (including Sanger) apparently think its news that “everyone thought Saddam had WMDs”. Sanger never mentions two important facts, however — that the intelligence was “thinly sourced”, and that well before the invasion was undertaken, it was obvious that the intelligence regarding the existence of WMDs was worthless. Its one thing to plan for a possible war, based on “thin intelligence” of the existence of WMDs, its another thing to pursue a war after finding out that not one shred of intelligence with regard to WMDs could be confirmed despite unrestricted access to the entire nation of Iraq.
One final note — its pretty obvious that these memos have been leaked by someone affiliated with Lord Goldsmith’s office of Attorney General — all of these memos are concerned with the legal issues involved in the war, and make it clear that the war was illegal absent specific UN authorization. There may well be actual “exculpatory” memos and documents in which a peaceful resolution of the situation with Iraq is considered an option to which Lord Goldsmith’s office did not have access — but as of right now, the record is damning, and makes it clear that the decision to go to war was made by the spring of 2002 — and the only decisions being made were questions of timing and “political” strategies.
wooden floor
You needed a memo to tell you we had no adequate post-invasion occupation planning ? Since when has this been a matter of dispute?
p.lukasiak
You needed a memo to tell you we had no adequate post-invasion occupation planning ? Since when has this been a matter of dispute?
since the people who brought us the Iraq fiasco won’t admit that they completely ignored the “reality based” assessments of post-War Iraq, and screwed everything up as a result….
When right-wingers stop making excuses for this stupid war that was based on lies, we’ll stop reminding you how stupid the whole thing was, okay?
Avedon
I really do think that a lot of people on the right are taking for granted that the word “political” in this document isn’t really there. But I can assure you that it really does mean political, not military. It’s pretty clear from this that the decision to go to war was already made and that a recommendation is being made to build the political framework for the invasion.
Compuglobalhypermeganet
all of these memos are concerned with the legal issues involved in the war, and make it clear that the war was illegal absent specific UN authorization.
OK, so just to make it clear, the scorecard reads:
A Democrat (Clinton) attacks Iraq without UN approval because of their unproven WMD threat = LEGAL.
A Republican (Bush) attacks Iraq without UN approval because of their unproven WMD threat = ILLEGAL.
…but this is not a purely partisan argument, right? Riiiiiight.
Anderson
Did anyone SAY that Clinton’s attack was legal?
One so tires of these people whose mental acuity extends just so far as to compare/contrast with the Lord of All Evil, aka Bill Clinton. Sigh.
Anyway, for once, I find my reading of a situation backed up.
Hesiod at TAS can read dates, too.
Anderson
We all (?) know that Bush was planning to hit Iraq within hours of the WTC’s collapse. One thing that gets overlooked is this gem from the 9/11 Report’s endnotes:
HH
“Hesiod at TAS can read dates, too.”
It’s actually still debatable as to whether he can read, full stop.
Bruce Moomaw
Apparently the guy who can’t read is Compuglobalhypermeganet. The Memo doesn’t say that ATTACKING Iraq without UN permission, to flatten his possible WMDs (which the UN, of course, had already outlawed) — as Clinton did — is illegal; it says that attacking Iraq for the purpose of REGIME CHANGE is illegal:
“US views of international law vary from that of the UK and the international community. Regime change per se is not a proper basis for military action under international law…”
Not that the question of whether we were justified in attacking Iraq without UN approval is anywhere near being the most important revelation in the Memo. That revelation is that we now have absolutely solid proof that the US was determined to invade Iraq whether it nes necessary to destroy Saddam’s WMDs or not, and for that matter whether he actually HAD WMDs (and especially nuclear ones) or not: “When the Prime Minster discussed Iraq with President Bush at Crawford in April he said that the UK would support military action to bring about regime change, provided that certain conditions were met…[including that] the options for action to eliminate Iraq’s WMD through the UN weapons inspectors had been exhausted.” The US, of course, had no interest in trying to do the latter, because our main goal was simply to get rid of Saddam: “US military planning unambiguously takes as its objective the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime, followed by elimination of Iraqi WMD. It is, however, by no means certain, in the view of UK officials, that one would necessarily follow from the other. Even if regime change is a necessary condition for controlling Iraqi WMD, it is certainly not a sufficient one.” To repeat what I said earlier, that explains why the Pentagon made no serious attempt — either before or after our ground invasion — to guard Saddam’s supposed huge WMD depots from being raided and their contents transferred elsewhere. All we had to do was get rid of the Ogre of Baghdad, and — poof! — the worldwide War Against Megaterrorism would be won. As Brad Delong keeps saying, thank God Saddam DIDN’T really have any WMDs — because if he had, they would now be safely in the hands of You Know Who.
And, once again, the reason the Bushites reached this idiotic conclusion was their Never-Never Land confidence that we could occupy and reform Iraq very easily, quickly and cheaply — after which we would be quickly free to move on to deal with Iran and North Korea. (No doubt the grateful, flower-throwing Iraqi citizens themselves would guard the WMD depots for us.) Remember that line some of the Bush Neocons spouted before the war: “Men go to Baghdad. Real men go to Teheran and Damascus.” Looks like there’s a very serious shortage of Real Men in the Administration at this point.
In his own Washington Post article on the DSM, Walter Pincus was rude enough to remind us of Wolfowitz’s infamous Feb. 2003 Senate testimony on how incredibly easy the whole thing would be. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/11/AR2005061100723.html
):
“Testimony by then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz, one of the chief architects of Iraq policy, before a House subcommittee on Feb. 28,
2003, just weeks before the invasion, illustrated the optimistic view the administration had of postwar Iraq. He said containment of Hussein the previous 12 years had cost ‘slightly over $30 billion,’ adding, ‘I can’t imagine anyone here wanting to spend another $30 billion to be there for another 12 years.’ As of May, the Congressional Research Service estimated that Congress has approved $208 billion for the war in Iraq since 2003.” Wolfie was certainly right about us “not spending another $30 billion to be there for another 12 years”. If we do stay there for 12 years at the rate we’re currently spending, the cost will be $1.2 trillion.
So, to repeat, the significance of the DSM (obviously) lies not in whether we offended the UN’s questionable sensibilities; and it doesn’t (contrary to Cole) lie entirely in the fact that it proves beyond a doubt that the White House didn’t plan the war worth a damn. It lies in the fact that it proves that the White House deliberately trumped up the war (specifically, the evidence of Saddam’s nuclear program), and refused to give the UN inspection any real chance to eliminate or disprove the existence of Saddam’s biological and chemical weapons, for exactly the same reason they didn’t bother to plan the war — they were absolutely convinced it would be a “cakewalk” (to quote Kenneth Adelman), and that, if their deceptions to initiate the war were ever uncovered, they would be considered trivial — the world would thank them for their lies. The result, of course, is that the US military is now firmly stuck in Iraq and unable to do a thing about the REAL nuclear proliferators of the world, who are romping unrestricted.
Bob
By the way, has anyone seen Osama? How do we know that he’s not in the family compound in Saudi Arabia? Isn’t that where he kept the gold lame’ outfit he wore when he was giving us his pre-election recommendations?
buermann
Um, this memo is pre-meeting, the infamous dsm was post-meeting. This one just outlines what British perceptions of Washington’s stance were prior to talks between Bush/Blair. They presumably were thinking Bush might be serious with the “war is the last option” line until they got in the room with the guy.
“the administration did not spend enough time planning for the post-war occupation”
The administration had numerous groups working on post-war planning, c.f. David Phillips’ “Losing Iraq” – published around the same time as the memos were leaked, set up shortly after regime change legislation was passed by congress. They chose to throw years of planning in the garbage. I think the term for that is something like “criminal negligence”.
Compuglobalhypermeganet
Apparently the guy who can’t read is Compuglobalhypermeganet. The Memo doesn’t say that ATTACKING Iraq without UN permission, to flatten his possible WMDs (which the UN, of course, had already outlawed) — as Clinton did — is illegal; it says that attacking Iraq for the purpose of REGIME CHANGE is illegal:
“US views of international law vary from that of the UK and the international community. Regime change per se is not a proper basis for military action under international law…”
…nor is “because I had some intel saying Saddam had WMD,” I’m guessing, but that didn’t stop us in 1998.
Also, speaking of reading, maybe you should read the Iraqi Liberation Act before you absolve Clinton from attempts at regime change. Clinton attempted regime change first, and the left lined up to kiss his butt. Clinton attacked Iraq because of their WMD threat first, and the left lined up to kiss his butt.
But you just wait until a Republican tries the same thing!
Just don’t try to sell that ALL this isn’t just partisan nonsense. I’ve seen enough not to buy that.