Six years ago today, Matthew Rycroft, private secretary to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, wrote a secret memorandum to the U.K.’s ambassador to the U.S., David Manning. The memo contained the minutes of a meeting held that same morning between Blair and a few senior foreign policy advisers. It was exposed by the Sunday Times nearly three years later. Two paragraphs stood out.
Rycroft spoke about a trip that Sir Richard Dearlove had recently taken to Washington. Dearlove, the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service or MI6, is referred to officially as "C":
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. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
And there was this:
The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.
Many people who were attentive to the White House’s public statements saw hints that a decision already had been made to invade Iraq well before that secret memo was sent to its select group of addressees. There was the 2002 State of Union in late January and the West Point graduation speech in June.
But concerns raised by these speeches were tempered somewhat by the idea that Congress wouldn’t go along, that public support was soft, that the media would yank on the reins, and that the British weren’t on board. This all spurred most observers to believe that an invasion might encounter too many obstacles to go forward. Unless, that is, some definitive evidence could be delivered showing that Saddam Hussein had massive quantities of weapons of mass destruction and was close to building nuclear bombs.
Providing such evidence was exactly what the neoconservative war hounds had been intent on doing, as we now know, ever since September 11 – using the terrible events of that day to achieve what former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill had told us in Ron Suskind’s The Price of Loyalty and former counter-terrorism advisor Richard Clarke had written in Against All Enemies. That is, they proposed from their very first National Security Council meeting in February 2001 to invade Iraq, eight months before al Qaeda’s attacks. Even after September 11, however, getting the public and Congress to go along, as the Downing Street memo stated in the summer of 2002, required that the facts be "fixed around the policy." Fixed, as in exaggerated and concocted.
On May 1, 2005, Michael Smith at the Sunday Times revealed Rycroft’s memorandum. It was still April 30 in the U.S. when the news appeared, and a Diarist named smintheus picked up on it at Daily Kos, where he garnered comments from five Kossacks. The follow-up Diary the next morning drew more than 300 comments. By May 5, John Conyers, then the ranking Democratic Congressman on the Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee, who had first read of the Downing Street memo at Daily Kos, sent a letter to the White House signed by 89 of his colleagues asking for answers.
Soon, frustrated by the thin gruel of traditional media coverage, there was a blogswarm to Awaken the Media, formation of various Web sites, including After Downing Street, and the The Downing Street Memos, and a blogger grouping called the Big Brass Alliance.
For me and others who had for various reasons resisted calls for impeachment prior to 2005, the Downing Street Memo was a turning point. Here was the kind of evidence that we had hoped would someday come to light, evidence that - together with what Clarke and O’Neill had already provided, plus the Valerie Plame affair and the lack of WMDs in Iraq - directly called into question the administration’s claims that the decision to go to war was not made until February 2003. Here was strong evidence that the President had lied to Americans, broken his oath of office and violated national and international law. Not incontestable proof, but certainly grounds for inquiry.
On June 16, 2005, spurred by the revelations in the secret memo, John Conyers held an unofficial hearing with 35 other Democrats, hearing testimony from, among others, former Ambassador Joe Wilson and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern. It was there that the prospect of a Resolution of Inquiry into impeachment was first raised.
That, of course, was 37 months ago. Much vitriolic talk about impeachment has gone down since then. But very little of it has taken place in the halls of Congress despite considerable new information. Additional memos, like the one David Manning wrote on January 31, 2003, have come to light. Plus, it was learned that a classified version of a National Intelligence Estimate stated that Saddam Hussein was not an imminent threat. Just before the congressional vote on the authorization to use force in Iraq in October 2002, the Bush Administration released a declassified version for public consumption which conveniently deleted NIE's no-imminent-threat assessment.
This Friday, thanks to a long-term grassroots effort as well as the unwillingness to yield by a handful of Congressional Democrats, most notably Dennis Kucinich, impeachment will be on the table at a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee. This could and should have started in 2007. Only time will tell whether "better late than never" applies.
