posted June 15, 2005 01:12 AM              

E-Mail This
Printer-Friendly
Reprints

By TODD S. PURDUM
Published: June 14, 2005
WASHINGTON, June 13 - The disclosure of British government memorandums portraying the Bush administration as bent on war with Iraq by the summer of 2002, and insufficiently prepared for post-invasion problems, has caused a political stir on both sides of the Atlantic, in part because opponents of President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair see the documents as proof that both men misled their countries into war.

Skip to next paragraph

Words Before the Invasion

Forum: The Transition in Iraq

But the documents are not quite so shocking. Three years ago , the near-unanimous conventional wisdom in Washington held that Mr. Bush was determined to topple Saddam Hussein by any means necessary. Plenty of people - chief among them Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state - were also warning in public and private that the Pentagon was ill prepared for prolonged occupation.

What no one knew then for certain (though some lonely voices did predict it) is that American forces would find none of the lethal chemical or biological weapons that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair said made Iraq so dangerous, or that the anti-American insurgency would be so durable and deadly. That is why the British memos' foresight - read with the benefit of hindsight - rings so bittersweet for those who tried in vain to avert the war, and remain aghast at its human and material costs.

Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, plans to hold an informational forum about the memos (without Republican participation) on Thursday. Blogs are awash in discussions of the memos, and full of criticism of the mainstream American media for not paying them more mind.

In an interview on Monday, Mr. Conyers said that "it isn't that there wasn't any discussion" of the issues in the memos three years ago, "but it was all being put down, almost uniformly" by administration officials. Now, he added, "unless the British intelligence service can't take accurate notes of a meeting, it was very well understood that this was exactly what was going to happen."

The memos do shed new light on the thinking of senior British officials, and their view of American thinking, in the months before the invasion. At a minimum, they suggest that the Bush administration paid no less (and no more) heed to the concerns of its closest ally than it did to those of its own secretary of state.

But the memos are not the Dead Sea Scrolls. There has been ample evidence for many months, and even years, that top Bush administration figures saw war as inevitable by the summer of 2002. In the March 31, 2003, issue of The New Yorker, with the invasion just under way, Richard N. Haass, then the State Department's director of policy planning, said that in early July 2002 he asked Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, whether it made sense to put Iraq at the center of the agenda, with a global campaign against terrorism already under way. "And she said, essentially, that that decision's been made, don't waste your breath," he said then.

By July 2002, daily newspapers were filled with details of war plans, which had been seeping out since late spring, and internal administration disputes over whether the planning was adequate. In August, Vice President Dick Cheney made a bellicose speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, in which he warned that a return of United Nations weapons inspectors to Iraq "would provide no assurance whatsoever" of Mr. Hussein's compliance.

The so-called Downing Street memo, a summary of a prime minister's meeting on July 23, 2002, does not put forward specific proof that Mr. Bush had taken any particular action, only a general sense that "it seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided." It describes the impression of Britain's chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," but does not elaborate.

Rather, what the memo seems to emphasize is that the United States could build greater support for any military action - especially from Britain - by first confronting Iraq through the United Nations, the course it eventually took at the urging of Mr. Blair and Mr. Powell.

The latest memo published, first in The Washington Post and The Times of London over the weekend, is from July 21, 2002. It warned that "a post-war occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise," in which "Washington could look to us to share a disproportionate share of the burden."

For better or worse, the questions raised anew by the memos are not likely to go away.

Last summer, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a scathing, unanimous report that "most of the major key judgments" in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's illicit weapons were "either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting."

By prior agreement, the committee focused only on the role played by intelligence agencies, and reserved the question of how policy makers used intelligence for a future study, which is bogged down in internal disputes and competing priorities.

But Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the committee's ranking Democrat, said Monday in a statement, "The committee has an obligation to answer these questions, and the American people deserve answers. Only then can we provide a full and complete accounting of the mistakes leading up to the war in Iraq and what changes are necessary to fix them."