Memory Lane & Downing Street

It's About The Future

I've been spending the last few days shuffling my feet, occasionally kicking up pockets of dust with my toe, and contemplating the Downing Street Memo. Ever the wordsmith, Yglesias threw down a simple post on the subject:

Isikoff and Hornball have an excellent rundown of various leaked memos and the insight they give us into the British government's understanding of the Iraq War, most notably "that Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program was 'effectively frozen' and that there was 'no recent evidence' of Iraqi ties to international terrorism—private conclusions that contradicted two key pillars of the Bush administration's public case for the invasion in March 2003."

There's a certain sentiment out there that "everyone knew" this stuff, but the reality is that everyone didn't know. Most people didn't -- and don't -- read the sort of publications where people were debating whether there weren't other, secret, better reasons for invading Iraq.

I agree that not everyone read all the wonky stuff about foreign policy and whatnot. Nevertheless, the stuff of the Downing Street Memo isn't new and most folk did know about it. Millions of us took to the streets in protest, got the word out online (check out my very first LRYC post), and generally made huge nuisances of ourselves in an attempt to hold the shabby and underhanded machinations of the White House to account. Once the military got into Iraq and discovered the absence of evidence that was indeed evidence of absence, the administration took to the Sunday morning talk circuit to plead their leaky case that "everyone" was duped by Hussein – another shabby and underhanded lie that ignored the millions of people throughout the world who had seen this coming miles away.

So yeah, there's a reasonable explanation for our lackadaisical attitude in the face of yet another piece of evidence that Bush is a warmonger. Over the last few days I've watch impartial journalists on MSNBC and CNN affect a posture of "…well, Duh!" with respect to the Downing Street Memo.

Why report it at all? The people who care about the truth already know it. Everyone else is simply going to have to be convinced by time – lots of time. As the occupation wears on and it no longer sounds right to say that American soldiers are sacrificing themselves for our freedom, as the "patchwork" of excuses for launching the war fade into memory, people will eventually begin to wake up. Hopefully.