Digby on the Downing Street memo
And from a public relations standpoint, I’m sure most people felt it was nonsensical that they would have taken the risk of being shown as complete assholes in front of the entire world with all of their absolute pronouncements of Saddam’s arsenal if they hadn’t legitimately believed that he had one. More importantly, it would have been shockingly irresponsible after 9/11 to expose our intelligence services to the whole world as being completely unreliable if they knew for a fact that there was no real threat. But that’s what they did.
This memo shows that they knew he didn’t have that threatening arsenal and it appears they just didn’t care about the fallout. Clearly they believed they could say anything and get away with it. And they are right. Both Bush and Blair were re-elected despite the fact that they invaded a country to “disarm” it and found out that the country didn’t have any arms in the first place. That should have been a firing offense, but it wasn’t. Now we know they knew it all along.
Who knows if people would have voted differently if they knew that their leaders knew ahead of time that there was no serious threat of WMD? My suspicion has long been that a fair number of voters believed that in spite of all the hoopla about not finding WMD that their leaders must have known something for sure that they couldn’t tell us about. This memo proves that they were right. What they knew for sure was that the country they wanted to attack presented no threat.