Downing Street: A Vast Left Wing Conspiracy

It seems that no one is making stronger arguments against the "Downing Street Memo(s) As Smoking Gun" notion these days than key liberals themselves. In this case, Michael Kinsley gets it absolutely right.

Although it is flattering to be thought personally responsible for allowing a proven war criminal to remain in office, in the end I don't buy the fuss. Nevertheless, I am enjoying it, as an encouraging sign of the left's revival. Developing a paranoid theory and promoting it to the very edge of national respectability takes ideological self-confidence. It takes a critical mass of citizens with extreme views and the time and energy to obsess about them. It takes a promotional infrastructure and the discipline to settle on a story line, disseminate it and stick to it. It takes, in short, what Hillary Clinton once called a vast conspiracy.

While Kinsley seems to be rejoicing that his guys are rallying around the flag on this one, he concedes that it's a rather silly flag to be rallying around. And unfortunately for the Democrats, such conspiracies always get exposed and their purveyors end up looking like interminable, partisan hacks. That Kinsley has a soft spot for those advancing this agenda should give you some sense for just how vacuous and desperate the Democrats have become.

But Kinsley nails the essential truth about the DSM: It's hardly a smoking gun. Not only is the memo based on third-hand information, unnamed participants and a word ("fixed") that is contextually open to about four different interpretations, it's not NEWS.

Of course, you don't need a secret memo to know this. Just look at what was in the newspapers on July 23, 2002, and the day before. Left-wing Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer casually referred to the coming war as "much planned for." The New York Times reported Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's response to a story that "reported preliminary planning on ways the United States might attack Iraq to topple President Saddam Hussein." Rumsfeld effectively confirmed the report by announcing an investigation of the leak.A Wall Street Journal Op-Ed declared that "the drums of war beat louder." A dispatch from Turkey in the New York Times even used the same word, "inevitable," to describe the thinking in Ankara about the thinking in Washington about the decision "to topple President Saddam Hussein of Iraq by force."Then there's poor Time magazine (cover date July 22 but actually published a week earlier), which had the whole story. "Sometime last spring the President ordered the Pentagon and the CIA to come up with a new plan to invade Iraq and topple its leader." Originally planned for the fall, the war was put off until "at least early next year" (which is when, in fact, it occurred).

We knew in the summer of 2002 that the Administration was making war plans. We knew that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were anathema to going to the UN. We knew that prior to the breakdown of diplomacy at the UN that Halliburton and Bechtel had been granted contracts and been written into the war plans. Of course the new party line we will be hearing from the moving-target crowd is that the second Downing Street Memo, released over the weekend, reveals the British assessment that relatively little planning had been done by the Americans with regard to the war's aftermath. Of course, this appears to be true given the way things have gone since the fall of Baghdad. And with each death in Iraq, it is worthy of our outrage.

However, it is a fundamentally disingenuous position to scream "gotcha" when documents suggest that Bush had ordered planning, granted contracts and made decisions "too early" in the process, at the same time that you are arguing that "not enough" was being done on the planning front. It seems to me to be an intellectually untenable position. If you want to take the Bush Administration to task in an intellectually honest fashion, you have to pick one or the other.

My frustration with the Administration is not that they "lied" or "mislead" the public, it's that they were incompetent in creating the best possible conditions for success in Iraq. They didn't get it done on the diplomatic front to assure a UN blessing and encourage broader participation. They also developed a rather haphazard plan for securing the peace. As a result, we have seen the costs in blood and treasure spiral unnecessarily high. We have given fodder to our enemies and critics worldwide by providing them with untold hours of video depicting mangled, bloodied bodies of women and children, not to mention creating the conditions where an Abu Ghraib could even take place. We've emboldened the Iranians and Syrians to interfere with nascent political development in Iraq. And the list goes on. While a lot of the post-war planning did go right, too much has gone wrong. Unnecessarily. And for that, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, and yes, even Colin Powell, should be held accountable. Only time will tell whether Iraq will become a success story or be viewed as "another Vietnam." But even if the history books label it a success, it will be one achieved with unnecessarily high costs. Maybe if the Democrats quit trying to drag the "Smirking Chimp's" presidency down by making conspiratorial charges, and focused their efforts on the things that are obvious to us all, they might actually regain some relevance.