"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."

The original idea of "the UN route," as set out by the foreign secretary and prime minister, was to issue an ultimatum to Saddam that he allow into Iraq a new team of UN inspectors and then, when he refused the ultimatum, to use his refusal as a justification to invade the country under Security Council mandate. It "would make a big difference politically and legally," as Prime Minister Tony Blair observes in the meeting, "if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors." What the memo made clear, as I wrote, is that "the inspectors were introduced not as a means to avoid war, as President Bush repeatedly assured Americans, but as a means to make war possible."

On these matters Mr. Kinsley says nothing, either in his original article or in his letter, because he is concerned only with a single question: Does the memo offer "documentary proof that President Bush had firmly decided to go to war against Iraq by July 2002"? Having decided that the memo falls short of passing this stern test, he deems the document "worthless." Like many in the American press, he is so obsessed with finding the "smoking gun" that he pretty much manages to miss the point of what is in front of him.

In the event, of course, Saddam Hussein did not, as was hoped, reject the inspectors out of hand. He admitted them, and President Bush and Prime Minister Blair found themselves forced to demand their withdrawal -- against the wishes of the Security Council and before they had completed their task -- in order to begin the invasion of Iraq. The UN route, as it turned out, was messy; it meant arguing publicly with Hans Blix and other UN officials, fighting for and ultimately failing to secure a second Security Council resolution that would have blessed an invasion of Iraq, and finally withdrawing the inspectors when they had examined barely one hundred of the six hundred or so suspect sites -- leaving the inspections to be concluded only after the fall of Baghdad, when the American Iraqi Survey Group finally ascertained what the UN team might have concluded before the war: that Saddam had destroyed his weapons of mass destruction long before.

Of course, in retrospect, the plot line would have been much "cleaner" if Saddam had obliged the British and the Americans by refusing to allow in the inspectors in the first place, as Prime Minister Tony Blair had hoped he would. President Bush had clearly hoped the same thing; indeed, in absent moments, he apparently goes on hoping it. Several months after the fall of Baghdad, sitting beside UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in the Oval Office, the President offered this version of his pre-war policy toward Saddam Hussein:

"We gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power."[9]

It seems unlikely that President Bush had failed to notice that Saddam had admitted the inspectors into his country. More plausibly, the President is simply making a slip of the tongue of the sort anyone could make -- a slip prompted by a bit of wish fulfillment, with the President substituting what he and Tony Blair had wished would happen for what actually, in the event, did happen.

History is rich in this sort of thing, of course; understanding "what actually happened" is an ongoing task, demanding a constant reformulation of what we believe based on what we know. What is most dispiriting about the reception of the Downing Street memo and the other documents associated with it is the general willingness of reporters and commentators in this country to perform a complicated and willful act of shutting down their own minds and obliterating their own curiosity. Michael Smith, the London Times reporter, described the strange attitude of his American colleagues:

"There was a feeling of, ‘Well, we said that way back when.' Then of course as the pressure mounted from the outside, there was a defensive attitude. ‘We have said this before, if you the reader didn't listen, well, what can we do.' ...[But] it is one thing for the New York Times or the Washington Post to say that we were being told that the intelligence was being fixed by sources inside the CIA or Pentagon or the NSC and quite another to have documentary confirmation in the form of the minutes of a key meeting with the Prime Minister's office. ...This was the equivalent of an NSC meeting.... They say the evidence against Saddam Hussein is thin, the Brits think regime change is illegal under international law so we are going to have to go to the UN to get an ultimatum, not as a way of averting war but as an excuse to make the war legal.... Not reportable, are you kidding me?"

A good deal of this "defensive attitude," certainly, as Smith implies, derives from the shortcomings of American reporting during the run-up to the war, when newspapers and broadcast stations showed very little skepticism about administration claims of Saddam's supposedly threatening arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.[10] Though in the months since, the country's most influential newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, in an unprecedented step, have explicitly apologized for their pre-war reporting, it is less clear that individual reporters feel that they made any mistakes, and many bristle at any implication that they did. The Downing Street memo serves, among other things, as a not very subtle reminder that much of the press was duped by the government in a rather premeditated and quite successful way. No one likes to be reminded of this, certainly not reporters and the institutions they work for; claiming the memo is "not reportable," in Smith's words, not only avoids revisiting a painful passage in American journalism but does so by asserting that the story "had already been covered" -- that is, that it had never been missed in the first place. When it comes to the war, much of American journalism has little more institutional interest in reexamining the past than the Bush administration itself.

We must be grateful that the American polity is broader and more complex than the American press. Kinsley claims that the Downing Street memo "will not persuade anyone who is not already persuaded. That doesn't make it wrong. But it does make the memo fairly worthless." But it is Kinsley who is quite demonstrably wrong on this question. Whether or not the memo will "persuade anyone who is not already persuaded" is of course an empirical question and I know myself a number of people who have been so persuaded. And the fact that more than half of all Americans now believe the President and his administration intentionally "misled the American public before the war" seems a rather strong suggestion that, as a matter of persuasion and of politics, the Downing Street memo is very far from worthless.[11]

The number of Americans who hold this view is likely to continue to grow. These are simply people who have begun to notice the widening gap between what they are told and what they see -- a gap that, when it comes to the Iraq war, is becoming harder and harder to ignore. I would not call these people, in Kinsley's phrase, "Downing Street memo enthusiasts." Better to adopt a denigrating phrase from a Bush administration adviser and dub them members of the "reality-based community."[12] Their ranks are growing, and it may be that in the coming days some in the press will leave off the increasingly hard work of avoiding recent history and come and join them.