The fix was in?

Good, balanced article from Fred Kaplan at Slate on the now-infamous “Downing Street Memo” and its significance:

The “killer quote” in the original Sunday Times story is this passage from the July 23 ministers’ meeting:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. 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.

“C” is the code name for Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, the British foreign intelligence service. His “recent talks in Washington” would almost certainly have been with his counterpart, George Tenet, then-director of the CIA. Tenet would have told him about the “perceptible shift in attitude.” What accounts for it? “Bush wants to remove Saddam through military action.”

This is about as solid as the evidence gets on these matters: By mid-summer 2002—at a time when Bush was still assuring the American public that he regarded war as a “last resort”—the president had in fact put it on his front burners.

But, sez Kaplan:

In other respects, though, the memo doesn’t make as strong a case against Bush as some have claimed. Read in conjunction with the six other British documents, the case weakens further. The memos do not show, for instance, that Bush simply invented the notion that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or that Saddam posed a threat to the region. In fact, the memos reveal quite clearly that the top leaders in the U.S. and British governments genuinely believed their claims.

For instance, at one point during the July 23 meeting, the British ministers are discussing some of the risks of going to war. Saddam might “use his WMD on Kuwait,” one official cautions. “Or on Israel,” adds the defense secretary.

An Iraq “options paper,” dated March 8, 2002, states: “Despite sanctions, Iraq continues to develop WMD” (though it adds that intelligence on the matter is “poor”).
The July 21 Cabinet Office report published by the Sunday Times last weekend—titled “Iraq: Conditions for Military Action”—raises an intriguing strategic concern: that a post-Saddam government might still want weapons of mass destruction. “Even if regime change is a necessary condition for controlling Iraqi WMD,” the memo warns, “it is certainly not a sufficient one.” The “options paper” makes the same point: “Even a representative [Iraqi] government could seek to acquire WMD … as long as Iran and Israel retain their WMD.”

In a personal message to Blair, dated March 22, 2002, political director Peter Ricketts writes that, although Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs “have not, as far as we know, been stepped up,” they “are extremely worrying.” What has changed, he emphasizes, “is not so much the pace of Saddam Hussein’s WMD programmes but our tolerance of them post-11 September.”

The implicit point of these passages is this: These top officials genuinely believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction—and that they constituted a threat. They believed that the international community had to be sold on the matter. But not all sales pitches are consciously deceptive. The salesmen in this case turned out to be wrong; their goods were bunk. But they seemed to believe in their product at the time.

And what about the oft-repeated claim that the intelligence was being “fixed” around the prior decision to go to war?

It’s worth noting that “fixed around” is not synonymous with “fixed.” To say that Bush and his aides “fixed” intelligence—as some Web sites claim the memo shows—would mean that they distorted or falsified it. To say “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” means that they were viewing, sifting, and interpreting intelligence in a way that would strengthen the case for their policy, for going to war.

Either way—”fixed” or “fixed around”—Bush and his aides had decided to let policy shape intelligence, not the other way around; they were explicitly politicizing intelligence.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean they thought their claims were false. Murray Kempton, the late great New York newspaper columnist, once strolled out of a federal courtroom where some mobster was on trial and chortled to a colleague, “They’re framing a guilty man in there.” Something similar was probably happening with the Bush administration’s case for war in Iraq. They just knew Saddam had WMD, and if the facts didn’t quite prove he did, they would underscore and embellish the tidbits that came close. The problem was, their man wasn’t guilty, at least on the charges of indictment. (For more on this view of intelligence errors, click here.)

This pretty well jibes with what I’ve long thought: the administration was determined to go to war with Saddam, in part because they sincerely beleived he posessesed WMD (even though that turned out not to be the case). And it appears that there was conscious manipulation (“viewing, sifting, and interpreting”) of the evidence to make the case for the preordained outcome. However, what I never thought was that the administration made up the stuff about WMD out of whole cloth. In other words they had some justification for believing that there were WMD, even if it turned out there weren’t.

P.S. Which is not to say that I think the war itself was justified.