Downing the Downer DSM

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Downing Street Memo

Kurt Nimmo
Monday June 20th 2005

Forget the so-called Downing Street Memo. It will lead to a dark side street where right-wingers lay in wait, anxious to slash the tires and smash the windshield of truth. Because the DSM is so fragile and by its nature unverifiable, it is a perfect target for not only derision, but is also a weapon to be turned against those of us who know the truth: Bush long planned, with his duplicitous camarilla of Strausscon warlords, to invade not only Iraq but to turn the entire Muslim Middle East on its back and gut it mercilessly. Evidence of this abounds—from a flurry of white papers issued from the Strausscon think tanks to the Office of Special Plans and its documented effort to invent “intelligence” and pollute the public news stream with paranoid fantasies of a hobgoblin dictator and his imagined relationship with terrorists who are themselves largely chimerical and a hundred times larger than life.

Entering “Bush Iraq war planned” in the Google search engine returns page after page of news articles detailing the long-term plan of key Strausscons to invade Iraq—from the 1992 draft of the Pentagon’s Defense Planning Guidance (drafted by then-Defense Secretary Cheney and his cohorts Wolfowitz and Libby) to the “global Pax Americana” document (Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century) adopted by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Libby, and Bush’s younger brother Jeb (the document was conceived by the Project for the New American Century).

The pathetic DSM—so easily shot full of holes by the mere fact it is not original documentation but rather a copy (now admitted by the journalist Michael Smith)—pales in comparison to a number of other events, including the “powerful, steamrolling force” of the Strausscons pushing for invasion in late December, 2001, as Bob Woodward writes. “On Nov. 21, 2001, 72 days after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Bush directed Rumsfeld to begin planning for war with Iraq,” William Hamilton writes for the Washington Post. “Bush received his first detailed briefing on Iraq war plans five weeks later, on Dec. 28, when Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the head of the U.S. Central Command, visited Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Tex. Bush told reporters afterward that they had discussed Afghanistan.”

“On September13, 2001, during a meeting at Camp David with President Bush, Rumsfeld and others in the Bush administration, Wolfowitz said he discussed with President Bush the prospects of launching an attack against Iraq, for no apparent reason other than a ‘gut feeling’ Saddam Hussein was involved in the attacks, and there was a debate “about what place if any Iraq should have in a counter terrorist strategy,” writes Jason Leopold. “Wolfowitz said it was clear that because Saddam Hussein ‘praised’ the terrorist attacks on 9-11 that besides Afghanistan, Iraq went to the top of the list of countries the United States expected to launch an attack against in the near future.” Additionally, Leopold points out Rumsfeld as stating United States policy advocated regime change in Iraq since the 1990s and that was also a reason behind the push to invade Iraq. “If you go back and look at the debate in the Congress and the debate in the United Nations, what we said was the President said that this is a dangerous regime, the policy of the United States government has been regime change since the mid to late 1990s … and that regime has now been changed. That is a very good thing,” declared Rumsfeld (Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with WABC-TV, May 27, 2003).

As the journalist and former Bush ghost writer Mickey Herskowitz revealed, Bush was “thinking about invading Iraq in 1999.” According to Herskowitz, Bush in part based his thinking about a future invasion of Iraq “on a notion dating back to the Reagan White House—ascribed in part to now-vice president Dick Cheney, Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee under Reagan. ‘Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade,’” explains al-Jazeera.

Paul O’Neill, Bush’s former treasury secretary, provided the journalist Ron Suskind with “documents for a new book, The Price Of Loyalty, revealing that as early as the first three months of 2001 the Bush administration was examining military options for removing Saddam Hussein,” reports the Sunday Herald. “O’Neill is also quoted in the new book saying the President was determined to find a reason to go to war and he was surprised nobody on the National Security Council questioned why Iraq should be invaded.” O’Neill indicates that from “the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go. For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the US has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap.”

All of this—widely reported, even in the corporate press in the United States—makes the DSM look like an almost irrelevant scrap of paper by way of comparison. It is truly a big mistake for well-meaning people to place all their bets on the DSM because the right-wingers and the winger media are now vigilantly sharpening their long knives and planning to sink the whole farrago to the bottom of the sea, buried in Davy Jones’ locker along with Dan Rather’s career.

So, to paraphrase the Mexican bandito in John Huston’s classic Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the only sane response is to snarl: “We don’t need no stinkin’ Downing Street Memo.” Because we know the truth—although the truth will not set you free, not from this underhanded rabble of war criminals and their fulminating apologists. Unfortunately, the whole Bush saga—undoubtedly on the top ten of the most egregious series of premeditated official crimes in the history of the United States—will have to play itself out with devastating result, not only for the Iraqi people (and soon the Syrian and Iranian people) but for the bemused and somnolent American people as well.