Journalist Michael Smith of Downing Street memo fame offers his take on what is significant in the British government’s formerly secret documents on the run-up to war: The real news in the Downing Street memos.

American media coverage of the Downing Street memo has largely focused on the assertion by Sir Richard Dearlove, head of British foreign intelligence, that war was seen as inevitable in Washington, where “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

But another part of the memo is arguably more important. It quotes British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon as saying that “the U.S. had already begun ‘spikes of activity’ to put pressure on the regime.” This we now realize was Plan B.

Put simply, U.S. aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone were dropping a lot more bombs in the hope of provoking a reaction that would give the allies an excuse to carry out a full-scale bombing campaign, an air war, the first stage of the conflict.

British government figures for the number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq in 2002 show that although virtually none were used in March and April, an average of 10 tons a month were dropped between May and August.

But these initial “spikes of activity” didn’t have the desired effect. The Iraqis didn’t retaliate. They didn’t provide the excuse Bush and Blair needed. So at the end of August, the allies dramatically intensified the bombing into what was effectively the initial air war.

The number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq by allied aircraft shot up to 54.6 tons in September alone, with the increased rates continuing into 2003.

In other words, Bush and Blair began their war not in March 2003, as everyone believed, but at the end of August 2002, six weeks before Congress approved military action against Iraq.

Here are some more interesting (usual disclaimer) items on the Downing Street memo. Some are new; others are older items I’d previously overlooked.

First up, from today’s LA Times: New memos detail early plans for invading Iraq (login required; cypherpunk98/cypherpunk works for now). The article gives details from six additional documents obtained by the Sunday Times; they describe internal British government discussions of U.S. plans for war dating to March, 2002.

More dots filled in; I’d recommend Craig read it to see if he can still connect them in a way that looks like anything other than an early decision for war. But I suspect he may have reached the point where it’s easier not to pay attention; evidence that disconfirms deeply held beliefs can be a real pain in the ass, what with the need to keep erasing the picture you’ve previously formed so you can redraw the lines in a more convoluted fashion.

Eric Boehlert in Slate, who’s been doing a better job than most at keeping up on this story, had a piece yesterday that provides more details on the slow pace of media coverage: AP dropped the ball on the Downing memo (one-day pass required). Among the things he links to are this article from the ombudsman at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune: Downing Street memo’s route to paper, which discusses, among other things, how that newspaper came to publish a strikingly backboned editorial back on Memorial Day that talked about the memo, and tied it in with a larger point about the Iraq war being — like Vietnam — a “mistake” in which young people were being sent to die in “a war that should never have happened.”

Finally, I can’t believe I missed this back when it first appeared, but on May 19 (!) Juan Cole had an article in Salon that put the Downing Street memo in context, citing the events that took place in the run-up to war and showing how they fit in perfectly with the memo’s revelations: The lies that led to war.

A key observation:

The Bush administration, and some credulous or loyal members of the press, have long tried to blame U.S. intelligence services for exaggerating the Iraq threat and thus misleading the president into going to war. That position was always weak, and it is now revealed as laughable. President Bush was not misled by shoddy intelligence. Rather, he insisted on getting the intelligence that would support the war on which he had already decided.

I think that’s the heart of my disagreement with Craig these days: he persists in giving Bush the benefit of the doubt on this question, pointing to things like the reports of the Senate Intelligence Committee and Bush’s WMD commission as proving it was bad intelligence, not Bush’s bad judgment, that put us in the position we’re in today in Iraq. Bush was forced to go to war by Saddam’s failure to comply with resolution 1441, the argument goes, and by the UN’s failure to hold Saddam accountable.

As Cole says, that position was weak at the time the war began. It was obvious (at least to me) what was going on from the way Bush disengaged from the UN process just when it seemed most clearly to be working (where “working” is defined as “reducing the threat represented by Saddam’s WMD to a negligible level, at a minute fraction of the cost of going to war”).

Weak then, but indeed, laughable now. With each new piece of documentation that comes out, the picture gets clearer. The British government’s private communications from that time provide detailed, repeated confirmation of Bush’s early decision for war.

Crystal ball time. As this evidence grows stronger, the Bush team’s defenders will retreat to their ultimate fallback position: Sure Saddam didn’t actually have WMD. Sure the UN effort wasn’t made in a good faith search for an alternative to war. But Bush knew Saddam was a threat, and that one day, sooner or later, he was going to do something very bad to the United States. So he decided to stop him. Whether Bush actually reached that decision in 1998 or 2000 or 2001 or 2002 (or when he actually says he reached it, in 2003) is unimportant. What is important is that it was his decision, he made it, and we’re better off because of it.

Which is something like a belief in Creationism: It’s unfalsifiable. It’s based on a hypothetical prediction of what would have happened if we hadn’t removed Saddam by force, and no matter how bad the actual debacle of the Iraq war becomes, Bush and his supporters will always be able to imagine something worse.

Imaginary thinking is what they’re good at. It’s reality that they — and their supporters — have a hard time getting their heads around.

I found this interview with British historian Frederick Taylor, author of a new book on the firebombing of Dresden, really interesting: Dresden bombing is to be regretted enormously.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Some critics have accused you of writing a justification of the bombing of the city of Dresden. Is this accusation misplaced?

Taylor: Yes it is. Some people mistake the attempt at rational analysis of a historical event for a celebration of it. My book attempts to be distanced and rational and where possible I try to separate the myths and legends from the realities. I personally find the attack on Dresden horrific. It was overdone, it was excessive and is to be regretted enormously. But there is no reason to pretend that it was completely irrational on the part of the Allies. Dresden had war industries and was a major transportation hub. As soon as you start explaining the reasons for the attack, though, people think you are justifying it.

So, it’s now going on five days since the big Newsweek-Koran story became big, and there has certainly been a great deal written about it, especially by poltiically conservative webloggers, if my smallish sample is any indication. But at least in that sample, I haven’t seen anything that sounds more intelligent to me than these two items, both of which appeared way back on Monday: From Tim Burke of Easily Distracted: “Demonstrably false”. And from Juan Cole of Informed Comment: Guantanamo Controversies: The Bible and the Koran.

This won’t be news to those with a functioning bullshit detector (since they’ll know this already), and those who lack one aren’t likely to benefit much either (since they’ll probably persist in ignoring the evidence now, just as they’ve done all along), but here’s some pretty ironclad proof that Bush was not misled by bad intelligence on Iraq WMD, but instead cooked the intelligence books intentionally to justify an a priori decision to invade. From London’s Sunday Times: The secret Downing Street memo.

Some interesting quotes from the memo, which summarized a Prime Minister’s meeting on Iraq held July 23, 2002:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

And later:

The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun “spikes of activity” to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.

The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. 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.

Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst turned Administration gadfly, has a suitably snarky take on the memo: Proof Bush fixed the facts.

There will be a socialization class in room 700 for citizens cited for deviations 23-A and 96-A per subchapter six of the Permanent Emergency Code…

Something worth a good deal of thought, I think, is how we of the First World plan on coping with the upcoming end of our collective petrochemical binge. See, for example, this Rolling Stone article by James Howard Kunstler: The long emergency.

From Davids Medienkritik comes this collection of stereotypical depictions of Americans, as presented in Germany’s Stern magazine: USA: The Divided Land.

My favorite image is this one:

The caption translates as: “‘If you forget about the liberal crazies on the east and west coasts, we live in a really nice country.’ —Ronald Wilhelm, President of the lawn bowling club, Sun City, Florida.”

I like that image for a personal reason: Thirty-one years ago, when I was 12, my dad was transitioning between wives #2 and #3, and simultaneously being re-deployed to Washington D.C. by his overlords in the military-industrial complex. As part of the attendant reshuffling I was sent to live with my grandparents in Sun City Center, FL, and I spent most of the next 6 months as that retirement community’s youngest citizen, unofficial mascot, and general pain in the ass. Also, I did a lot of lawn bowling, and I did it on that very field. Seeing that image brings back memories of my childhood.

I’m really glad that Jeanne of Body and Soul takes the time to think about these things, and comment on them publicly in the honest way she does: Lasciate ogni speranza.

Among the questions raised by the Bush team’s casual attitude toward human rights is this one, voiced by an ex-CIA official, quoted in Newsweek, then by Jeanne, and now by me:

“Where’s the off button?” says one retired CIA official. “They asked the White House for direction on how to dispose of these detainees back when they asked for [interrogation] guidance. The answer was, ‘We’ll worry about that later.’ Now we don’t know what to do with these guys. People keep saying, ‘We’re not going to shoot them’.”

Something to think about.

My mother’s family is from Maryland; a long line of us from that side of the family have lived and plied our trades along the shores of Chesapeake Bay. So even though I’ve lived my own life a continent away, I was interested by this: An anthropocentric, Hobbesian, pessimistic environmentalist looks at the Chesapeake Bay: An interview with author Howard Ernst.

Side note: I feel like I need a new topic icon for “environmental” topics, generally. This story could arguably have been filed under “Animals,” “USA,” “Science,” or “The World” (the topic I actually used), but it doesn’t really fall squarely into any of them.

A nice commentary by The New Republic’s Peter Beinert on what US conservatives’ reaction to the tsunami reveals about their view of the world: Distant shores.

To win over global hearts and minds, the United States must show Muslims, and others, that we are benevolent–that we want a better world for them; that we are not just in it for empire and oil. That means financial generosity–giving money for economic and social development rather than only military assistance. But it also means what might be called intellectual generosity–a genuine curiosity about the rest of the world, even when our safety is not directly threatened, even when the dramas aren’t primarily about us.

It is that curiosity that is so profoundly absent from Bush, who tries to see as little as possible of the countries he visits.

Beinert pretty much nails it. The campaign to convince the world of US benevolence is doomed, at least as long as the current team is responsible for US foreign policy, because the current team simply doesn’t do benevolence. Bush doesn’t care, and he doesn’t care who knows it.

A greet speech by journalist Bill Moyers, on the dangers of letting theology and ideology trump reason in our collective attitude toward the environment: Battlefield Earth.

One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington. Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.

A brief reading for the season, courtesy of Dickens, who I’m told undertook A Christmas Carol mainly for the money, being in desperate need of cash in the fall of 1843. But then, like all good obsessives, he got caught up in the venture, and the rest is history. Anyway:

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

‘Spirit, are they yours?’ Scrooge could say no more.

‘They are Man’s,’ said the Spirit, looking down upon them. ‘And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!’ cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. ‘Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse! And abide the end!’

Fun cartoon in the Schoolhouse Rock tradition: Pirates & Emperors.

Jeanne of Body and Soul does a sobering compare-and-contrast: Putin and Bush.

You know how callous Americans can be about tragedy in other parts of the world? Ho, hum; another 17 million dead in flooding in Bangladesh. Well, here’s the world holding up a mirror to that behavior: AP Photo/Peter Cosgrove.

From some web page in a language I can’t understand, a collection of really cool-looking aerial photographs: Link.

Update: Per commenter Daniel, these images are actually the work of French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand. Many more images, and different-sized versions, are available from Arthus-Bertrand’s Earth from above site.

Joshua Micah Marshall is tanned, rested, and ready to get back in the blogging swing of things after a brief hiatus. And he’s running quite the teaser today. After referring to the story in today’s Financial Times that purports to reveal important details about where the forged Niger yellowcake documents at the heart of the “16 words” scandal came from (By the time you read this…), he says this:

That’s what the FT says.

I hear something different.

In fact, I know something different.

My colleagues and I have reported on this matter extensively, spoken to key players involved in the drama, and put together a detailed picture of what happened. And that picture looks remarkably different from this account which is out today — specifically on the matter of the origins of those forged documents and who was involved.

I cannot begin to describe how much I would like to say more than that. And at some later point in some later post I will do my best to explain the hows and whys of why I can’t. But, for the moment, I can’t.

So, my take on this is that he’s working on some big article for the actual media, as opposed to this silly bloggy hobby he dabbles in on the side, and we all have to wait for said real article to appear to learn the point of all this coy hinting.

If Marshall were a Bush supporter offering tidbits about the latest smoking-gun evidence that Iraq had WMDs or al Qaeda had close operational ties with Saddam, I’d be making exaggerated wanking motions right now. But he’s not. As far as my obsessive following of his commentary over the last year or so tells me, he doesn’t pull this sort of thing without having the actual goods to back it up. So I’m (tentatively) hopeful that that’s the case here. And I’m looking forward to having that view confirmed or disconfirmed in the days ahead.

Security expert Bruce Schneier has some really interesting analysis of the story about how our boy Ahmed Chalabi was caught telling the Iranians we had broken their intelligence code–because the Iranians used the compromised code to communicate the fact that he’d done so: Breaking Iranian codes.

There’s a giddy Pynchon-esque recursiveness to the story, and to the whole notion of compromising the other side’s secrets, but then pretending that you haven’t in order to keep the other side from knowing that you’ve done so. An excerpt:

If the Iranians knew that the U.S. knew, why didn’t they pretend not to know and feed the U.S. false information? Or maybe they’ve been doing that for years, and the U.S. finally figured out that the Iranians knew. Maybe the U.S. knew that the Iranians knew, and are using the fact to discredit Chalabi.

The really weird twist to this story is that the U.S. has already been accused of doing that to Iran. In 1992, Iran arrested Hans Buehler, a Crypto AG employee, on suspicion that Crypto AG had installed back doors in the encryption machines it sold to Iran — at the request of the NSA. He proclaimed his innocence through repeated interrogations, and was finally released nine months later in 1993 when Crypto AG paid a million dollars for his freedom — then promptly fired him and billed him for the release money. At this point Buehler started asking inconvenient questions about the relationship between Crypto AG and the NSA.

So maybe Chalabi’s information is from 1992, and the Iranians changed their encryption machines a decade ago.

Or maybe the NSA never broke the Iranian intelligence code, and this is all one huge bluff.

In this shadowy world of cat-and-mouse, it’s hard to be sure of anything.

Josh Micah Marshall is one of my favorite webloggers. Sometimes I almost forget that he’s also a real journalist with a PhD in history. Then something like this new article he’s written for The Atlantic Monthly comes along: Kerry Faces the World.

Wow. There are no pretty pictures, but the analysis is razor-sharp. Marshall looks at Kerry’s advisors, and attempts to divine what a Kerry administration’s foreign policy would look like. In the process, he thoroughly lays to rest the notion that there “wouldn’t be any difference” between Kerry’s and Bush’s approaches to the world.

An excerpt:

Democratic foreign-policy hands tend to be less ideologically driven than Republican ones. Their strengths lean toward technocratic expertise and procedural competence rather than theories and grand visions. This lack of partisan edge is best illustrated by the fact that two of Kerry’s top advisers served on Bush’s National Security Council staff as recently as last year (Beers as senior director for counterterrorism, and Flynt Leverett as senior director for Middle East initiatives). The team that advised candidate Bush in 1999 and 2000–the so-called “Vulcans”–was practically the mirror opposite of the Kerry team. Though all its members had served at least one stint in government, most had held political appointments rather than working for decades in the security bureaucracy, as Beers did. And whereas Kerry’s team is the embodiment of the nation’s professional national-security apparatus, key members of Bush’s team, such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, had spent entire careers trying to overthrow it.

There’s lots more, and it’s really, really good. All I can say is, my God; can I please have government by grownups again?

Scott Christiansen of the Pinhole Camera weblog has a new essay that attempts to answer the question: Are you safer now than you were a year ago? Christiansen’s conclusion: uh, no, not really.