The Blair Memo

Joe Conason at Salon asks:

Are Americans so jaded about the deceptions perpetrated by our own government to lead us into war in Iraq that we are no longer interested in fresh and damning evidence of those lies? Or are the editors and producers who oversee the American news industry simply too timid to report that proof on the evening broadcasts and front pages?

There is a "smoking memo" that confirms the worst assumptions about the Bush administration's Iraq policy, but although that memo generated huge pre-election headlines in Britain, its existence has hardly been mentioned here.

On May 1, the Sunday Times of London published the confidential minutes of a meeting held almost three years ago at 10 Downing Street...

The minutes of that meeting, set down in a memorandum by foreign policy advisor Matthew Rycroft, were circulated to all who were present. Dated July 23, 2002, the Rycroft memo begins with the following admonishment: "This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents." ...

What the minutes clearly show is that Bush and Blair secretly agreed to wage war for "regime change" nearly a year before the invasion -- and months before they asked the United Nations Security Council to support renewed weapons inspections as an alternative to armed conflict. The minutes also reveal the lingering doubts over the legal and moral justifications for war within the Blair government.

...
Bush, determined to oust Saddam, planned to "justify" a preventive war by tying the terrorist threat to Iraq's WMD arsenal -- and manipulating the intelligence to fit his policy instead of determining the policy based on the facts.

That is precisely what happened, and precisely the opposite of what the president vowed to do. Not only did Bush and his top aides lie about their approach to the alleged threat posed by Iraq, but they continued to lie about that process in the war's aftermath.

And what of the aftermath of the war in Iraq? Evidently "little discussion" was devoted to that topic as the Bush administration prepared to sell the war, or so "C" reported to his colleagues in London. Iraqis and Americans, as well as their coalition partners, have been suffering the dismal results of that lack of planning ever since.

Despite much happy talk from Washington about the successes achieved in Iraq, recent polls show that Americans are more disenchanted than ever with the war. Nearly 60 percent now say the president made the wrong decision and that the outcome is not worth the price in lives and treasure. What would they say if the media dared to tell them the truth about how it all happened?

Why are we so shielded from these kinds of revelatory releases? Whether Americans are currently so jaded that we simply no longer care or whether the news media/political machine has prevented this material from being released is important, but it is hard to imagine that in America it would have led to the furor and questioning it warrants. It would have, rather, simply been another chink, but not an endgame piece of evidence- I doubt it would have built into an argument of significance. Why? Primarily, I think, because of how easy it is to distract the public from this topic - there have been numerous documents, memos, and memories which all say the exact same thing as this memo; it's nothing surprising. But yet, it does not make the impact it should- we are easy to manipulate, us Public- drown us in another runaway bride story, another Terri Schiavo case, and we've forgotten completely.

Godfish in a bowl with 7 second memories.