War was Inevitable

This month's edition of the NY Review of Books has an interesting article on what is being referred to as the "Downing Street Memo", which records the minutes of a meeting between the "principals" of the British government in the run-up to the war in Iraq. To the British, it appeared the decision to go to war was made long before Bush gave his assurances that war was not inevitable:

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.

To the British, it appeared that the decision to go to war had already been made, and that the Bush administration was merely hoping to justify such a decision sufficiently to the American people and the world in general so that the war would appear sufficiently legitimate. Which of course is what opponents of the war, including myself, have suspected all along. Of course this memo offers no inside account of the administration's efforts to produce war, but it's hard to imagine that our closest allies could, in their own secret meetings, be so egregiously mistaken about what was happening on our side of the pond.

The question that one simply cannot resist asking of course is "So what?" The news of this memo has received strikingly little coverage in the mainstream media, and even the liberal opposition to Bush has had little to say beyond some "I told you so"s and the expected denunciations. Even in someone such as myself, vehemently opposed to the war, this bit of news fails to arouse a strong reaction. As I stated, most opponents to the war already "knew" that this was the game plan of the Bush administration. Various inside accounts published by the likes of O'Neill and Woodward give us quite clearly a picture of an administration that had already made up it's mind to go to war, and seemed to seeking the minimum legal and moral justification for following through on that course. At this point it seems clear that even a fair majority of Americans believe the same thing. Certainly a clear majority now believe the war was not worth it.

The problem is simply that such knowledge really doesn't do anything for us at this point. A memo could come out tomorrow revealing that Bush had a secret vendetta against Hussein from the time he was governor of Texas, and it would hardly be a news item, simply because such a revelation is far removed from the most pressing topic of the time, which is how in the hell we're going to get Iraq to function as a country so we can get the hell out. Additionally, the news doesn't even have any political traction, as the time for accountability for the disastrous decision to go to war and the utter failure to plan adequately for its aftermath has long since passed. In truth, the recriminations and repurcussions of the process by which war was initiated have mostly played out in what we have before us; a violent and strife-ridden Iraq which is nowhere near ready to be the independent, democratic state the Bush administration hoped for. The run-up to war is gradually becoming an issue for historians, who hopefully will judge the actions of those in the administration far more harsly then the American people themselves have proven willing to be.