Fred Kaplan on DSM

Let's Go to the Memo - What's really in the Downing Street memos? By Fred Kaplan

As thorough a breakdown of the matter as there may be, but still concludes that there's no "there" there:

Some who have read the memo shrug. Even former Slate Editor Michael Kinsley wonders what's new here. After all, we've read over and over that Bush was hellbent on war even earlier than this. The point has been made in Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack, Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies, and Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty, as well as in articles by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker and Walter Pincus in the Washington Post.

True, but let's get serious. When the scholars write the big tomes on this sordid saga, they'll want to base their findings on primary-source documents?and here is one, flashing right before us. The Downing Street Memo will be a key footnote in the history books; it should have made front-page headlines in the daily broadsheets of history's first draft.

I'm not sure this really represents a significant knock on Kinsley's column since Kaplan basically says "Well, now we have the hard proof documentation that supports what everyone really knew even though the administration was being coy about the chances of war."

Part two of Kaplan's take goes over the "fixing" quote and makes a significant new addition to the discussion:

What of the second half of the key quote from the Downing Street Memo of July 23?that Bush wanted war, justified by WMD and terrorism, but "the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy"? It's worth noting that "fixed around" is not synonymous with "fixed." To say that Bush and his aides "fixed" intelligence?as some Web sites claim the memo shows?would mean that they distorted or falsified it. To say "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" means that they were viewing, sifting, and interpreting intelligence in a way that would strengthen the case for their policy, for going to war.

Either way?"fixed" or "fixed around"?Bush and his aides had decided to let policy shape intelligence, not the other way around; they were explicitly politicizing intelligence.

But that doesn't necessarily mean they thought their claims were false. Murray Kempton, the late great New York newspaper columnist, once strolled out of a federal courtroom where some mobster was on trial and chortled to a colleague, "They're framing a guilty man in there." Something similar was probably happening with the Bush administration's case for war in Iraq. They just knew Saddam had WMD, and if the facts didn't quite prove he did, they would underscore and embellish the tidbits that came close. The problem was, their man wasn't guilty, at least on the charges of indictment.

This is the part that really seals the deal for me with the antiwar critics, this sentence right here: "They just knew Saddam had WMD, and if the facts didn't quite prove he did, they would underscore and embellish the tidbits that came close."

Underscore and embellish ... isn't that exactly what the critics are doing with this very memo?