Missing the Point

Over the weekend, Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Kinsley (registration required - use the BugMeNot logon) did an excellent job of totally missing the point of the Downing Street Memo. He leads with the most mind-boggling opener: that it took 200 angry emails before he even bothered to read the memo in the first place. Hmm.

Kinsley tries to downplay the memo as "a report on a meeting of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and some aides on July 23, 2002." Well, it wasn't exactly just "some aides." The document is actually minutes taken during a high level meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top aides, specifically the Defense Secretary, the Foreign Secretary, the Attorney-General, Blair's right-hand man Jonathan Powell, the head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove ("C"), and Dearlove's eventual successor at MI6, John Scarlett, among others.

Kinsley tries to dismiss the meeting in Washington, where it was learned that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" and where "military action was now seen as inevitable," as much ado about nothing. Kinsley seems to believe that "the head of British foreign intelligence (identified, John Le Carre-style, simply as 'C')" flew to Washington and met with a bunch of vice deputy assistant flunkies who were just gossiping about politics around by the water cooler. Of course, this is the crux of the matter. Just as there are minutes of the Downing Street meeting, somewhere there are minutes of C's meeting in Washington that will identify the people he met with and what they talked about. And there are minutes of the meeting between the British Defence Secretary and the people he met with when he concluded that "spikes of activity" had already begun. And there are minutes of the meeting with the Foreign Secretary and Colin Powell that were held the week after the Downing Street meeting. Congress should demand these minutes and no one should rest until the Bush administration produces them.

But Kinsley characterizes the liberal blogosphere's obsession with the Downing Street Memo as just "a paranoid theory" that we are "promoting...to the very edge of national respectability," then devotes the last few paragraphs of his column to circumstantially proving the memo correct. Hey, there's nothing here that we didn't already know.

And, silly me, I thought we reached "the very edge of national respectability" when that whole WMD thing didn't pan out, or when those few bad apples at Abu Ghraib were outted.

Political Animal Kevin Drum sums it all up: "Shorter Kinsley: the DSM is just rumormongering....but it's probably true....no smoking gun, though....but I wouldn't be surprised....they were just talking about how things would "play out"....but the Wall Street Journal was pushing for war....but....but....but...."

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