"This was the head of MI6. How much authority do you want the man to have? He has just been to Washington, he has just talked to George Tenet. He said the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. That translates in clearer terms as the intelligence was being cooked to match what the administration wanted it to say to justify invading Iraq. Fixed means the same here as it does there."[4]

Who -- in Kinsley's phrase -- has got to be kidding?

There is, of course, the further point, not a minor one, that pretty much everything Sir Richard says in his little summary turns out to be true. America and Britain did go to war to remove Saddam. Military action was justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. The U.S. did have no idea what to do in "the aftermath after military action." And the intelligence and facts were fixed around the policy.

Of course, according to the rules under which Kinsley, and much of the rest of the American press, profess to be playing, one cannot say this; after all, this is the case that the Downing Street memo, all by itself, must be shown to prove. But the requirement is purely artificial. Though, scandalously, the country has had no properly constituted investigation, congressional or otherwise, empowered to look into policymakers' use of intelligence before the Iraq war -- indeed, such investigations as there have been have explicitly excluded precisely this central issue [5] -- an avalanche of other proof has shown how the administration "fixed the facts" around its policy of invading Iraq.

It is plain by now that the intelligence the CIA and other U.S. agencies produced on Iraq and its weapons programs was poor, and was built on shockingly shallow information. It is also plain that Bush administration officials, far from pressing the agencies for the best, most reliable intelligence, instead relentlessly and blatantly exaggerated the slender intelligence that the government did possess, in order to make its case for war. Though thus far the administration has managed to block a true investigation of this misuse of intelligence by policymakers, and the Republican-controlled Congress has gone along, many examples of it are already known to the public.

One could cite President Bush's insistence on telling the world that "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," when the CIA had explicitly warned him that it could not confirm this information. One could point to the administration's doctoring of the declassified version of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq given to Congress in October 2002, in which all of the considerable qualifiers included in the original report were removed. One could quote the repeated references by Vice President Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and other officials to "reconstituted nuclear weapons" and a "smoking gun becoming a mushroom cloud," when the administration had little or no real evidence to prove Iraq had an ongoing nuclear program.

The fact is that the administration blatantly exaggerated the intelligence it was given to convince the country to go to war -- "rolling out the new product," as White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card called the coming public relations campaign in August 2002 -- and then, after the fall of Baghdad, when the weapons of mass destruction refused to turn up, the President and other administration officials blamed the CIA and other agencies for supplying intelligence that was "misleading." Having politicized the intelligence before the war, administration officials turned around and blamed the intelligence agencies for misleading them -- with the very intelligence that they themselves had politicized.

That the Republican Congress -- and notably the Senate Intelligence Committee -- has failed to fully investigate this is not news; as I wrote in my article, the committee first separated the question of "policymakers' use of intelligence" from the question of the performance of the intelligence agencies themselves, then helpfully postponed its investigation of the first question -- the critical question -- until after the election; now the promised report has been abandoned altogether. Still, the administration's "fixing of the facts and intelligence around the policy" has been quite well documented in other public sources.[6] Indeed, one catches glimpses of it even in the severely circumscribed reports that Congress and the administration have allowed to be produced.[7] That is, if anyone still needs to be convinced; as Kinsley writes in his original column, "we know now that was true and a half. Fixing intelligence and facts to fit a desired policy is the Bush II governing style, especially concerning the war in Iraq."

If Kinsley is convinced that it is "true and a half" that the Bush "governing style, especially concerning the war in Iraq," is to "fix intelligence and facts to fit a desired policy," then what exactly was the evidence that convinced him? On this point he is silent. Presumably he has gained this conviction after reading various accounts of the decision-making leading up to the war, notably Bob Woodward's and Richard Clarke's; after examining certain documents, such as those I have cited; and after watching the progress of events during the last several years. Presumably the Downing Street memo would bolster these conclusions by shoring up the various secondhand and other sources with the actual recorded words of "actual decision-makers" who are discussing the decisions themselves during the months preceding the war. By insisting on applying an artificially and narrowly legalistic standard to the Downing Street memo, Kinsley discards as "worthless" a higher order of historical evidence than has yet been made public. To reduce serious analysis to a legalistic game in this way impoverishes the attempt to chronicle the real history of a war in which Americans, and Iraqis, are still dying. It means, in effect, deliberately blindfolding ourselves.

We come by information incrementally, and give it sense by placing it in a context we have already constructed; that is why Kinsley's "test" for whether or not the Downing Street memo is "worthless" is so misguided. Those who do look at the memo's account of the cabinet meeting with some honesty -- and I urge readers to go to the memo itself; it is barely three pages long and the New York Review of Books has published it in full [8] -- will find it confirms a precise historical narrative of the run-up to the war. It is clearly written and, notwithstanding the comments of Kinsley and others, unambiguous.

What is most deadening and in the end saddening about Kinsley's letter and earlier article is the attitude they exemplify toward history; we see here a deliberate impoverishment, a turning of inquiry and, at bottom, of curiosity into a dull and sterile game of black and white, played by rules that fail to reflect what anyone actually believes. Such rules dovetail perfectly with the grim and gray shutting down of information elsewhere in the Republic, as evidenced most prominently by the Republican-controlled Congress, which, having endorsed a war in the name of destroying weapons that turned out not to exist, has responded by forbidding any thorough investigation into precisely how such a strange set of events could come to pass. Kinsley, like many others in the American press, wants to judge the memo's "worth" on whether or not it contains, as he says, "documentary proof that President Bush had firmly decided to go to war against Iraq by July 2002." As I have written, such "documentary proof" -- if we are talking about firm and incontrovertible evidence of what was in Mr. Bush's mind at the time -- is destined to prove elusive; the President can always claim, all appearances and outward evidence to the contrary, that he "hadn't made up his mind." And so he has claimed.

The fact is that this is not what is most important about the memo and about the documents that have accompanied it. What the memo clearly shows is that the decision to "go to the United Nations" was in large part a response to the British concern that "the legal case for war" was "thin," in the words of British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. In other words, securing the blessing of the United Nations Security Council was thought to be the only way to give the war a legal clothing. It is worth quoting this passage in full, for Straw puts the matter with admirable concision: