IVINS on DSM: Don’t Ignore Downing Street

I hope this is not too insider baseball, but I am genuinely astonished by what the bloggers call “mainstream media.” (In my youth, it was quaintly called “the Establishment press.”)

Like many of you, during the entire lead-up to the war with Iraq, I thought the whole thing was a set-up.

I raise this point not to prove how smart we are, but to emphasize that I followed the debate closely ….unconsciously searched for evidence that reinforced what I already thought. …. I read some of the European press and most of the liberal publications in this country. I read the Times, the Post, the Wall Street Journal and several Texas papers every day. It’s my job.

But when I read the first Downing Street Memo, my eyes bugged out and my jaw fell open. I could not believe what I was reading. It was news to me, and as I have tried to indicate, I’m no slouch at keeping up.  

It was always weird that the White House kept saying it knew Saddam Hussein had WMD, but it would never tell the U.N. inspectors where. Yes, I suspected all that, but I was not the head of British intelligence in the summer of 2002, for pity’s sake.

Good Lord, who does he think we are? Does this man actually think we are out here cheering every time another American is killed?

Mr. Friedman, real, actual, honest-to-God American liberals are out here in the heartland, and we know the kids who are dying in Iraq. They are from our hometowns. We know their parents. That’s why we hate this war. That’s why we tried to tell everybody else it was a ghastly idea.

We are not sitting here gloating because it is the horrible mess we said it would be. We’re in agony. There is nothing pleasurable about being a Cassandra.  

The second aggravation is that the very prestigious papers that are now dismissing the Downing Street Memos have already themselves admitted that their pre-war coverage was — I don’t know, you pick the adjective. Slack? Inadequate? Less than rigorous? Wrong? And now they’re saying, oh hell, this isn’t news, we knew it all along.

I don’t know if these memos represent an impeachable offense — although I must say, I don’t want to bring up the Clinton comparison again. But they strike me as a hell of lot worse than anything Richard Nixon ever contemplated. He used the government for petty political vindictiveness. Heck, I’d settle for that again, over what we’re looking at now.

The irony of Deep Throat surfacing after all these years in the midst of this memo mess is almost too precious. Does the Washington Post have any hungry young reporters on Metro anymore? I’d say, start with: Who did Dearlove meet with besides George Tenet?