Why the Downing Street Memo Will Not Have the Effect the American Left Wants It To

Earlier this month I wrote a post which gave Greg Palast's take on the Downing Street Memo. If you don't know what this memo is, go to this site. In brief, the memo describes Bush & Co.'s policy of invading Iraq and tells that "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" by the U.S. government. Our government. The one of, by, and for use - the people of this country. From the summaries I've read, the memo doesn't actually say anything new and merely regurgitates what lefties have been saying for the past two years. But this isn't Noam Chomsky saying these things or Janeane Garofalo ranting about them on Air America, this is an official government document of our ally, the United Kingdom - our primary partner in the Iraq incursion. Many on the Left feel that this is the Smoking Gun and that now is the time to start circling the White House like vultures. I agree on the first point but not on the second. If this country were a reasonable one, full of people willing to evaluate the arguments on both sides and all the evidence, then I'd take a holding pattern. Alas, this is not a reasonable country and I'm forced to continue waiting for 2008.

I've watched the CNN arm of the liberal media since the memo became public and have heard nary a word. I think it reasonable to posit that potential evidence of our president lying is newsworthy and something that the people of this fair land ought to hear. The statements at issue here are serious - very serious indeed - and go beyond oral sex with an intern. If the administration's rationale for going to war is this not a problem?

The use and abuse of intelligence for justifying war has a long history in our country, so the Downing Street Memo isn't sui generis. And there can be little doubt that there will be more such incidents as the history of our country unfolds in the decades to come. For the here and now, though, my worry is that this document will have little or no effect. Echidne wrote an entry today about the supposed Koran-flushing incident at Gitmo. The reporting of the incident by Newsweek set off a storm of anti-American riots in various Muslim countries and some barbarians stuck in the Middle Ages described as "Afghan Muslim clerics" are threatening to call for a jihad against us. Towards the end of her entry she writes, "I think that killing people for destroying a book is a good example of what is wrong with literalist religions in general." I agree with her but would take it further: I think that killing people for destroying a book is a good example of what is wrong with religions in general. There are no internal mechanisms to prevent completely stupid dogma from rearing its head. And this is why the Downing Street memo will have little or no effect.

People who have criminalizing abortion and treating homosexuals as sub-humans have a lot of sway these days and their replusive ideas are dogmatic coming as they do from another book that many people would do well to flush down a toilet, the Bible. Such people reduce their cognitive dissonance about such things as a president lying by adopting the ideas of Hobbes, namely, that, you stand by your leader regardless of how awful he or she may be. While I doubt that these people don't fear a lapse into a war of all against all, I suspect they fear that their ultimate mission of seeing the triumph of their dogma would be put into jeopardy. As Roger Waters noted, what God wants, God gets. (God help us all.) The Downing Street Memo will not sway evangelical types at all. Bush, after all, talks to their deity and it tells him to be anti-abortion and anti-gay. Bush also reads teleprompters which have the words "culture of life" on them at all times and, when he says these words, millions of cheer as if he'd just scored a touchdown for their favorite football team. If you point out to the these people that Bush sent many folks to their deaths as governor of Texas, they aren't moved. If you point out that Bush started a war despite knowing full well that every war in human history has resulted in civilian casualties, they don't care. Any inconsistencies can easily be swept aside with one of those God-works-in-mysterious-ways or by rationalizing how those people deserved it. Apparently their membership for the culture of life was rejected.

It's dogma. We lefties are trying to deal with people who cheer and nod their heads in agreement when Bush ridicules the "elite". Bush being a man whose father give him an oil company and a pass on going to Vietnam. Most of the people who cheer such comments know this. They know that Bush comes from a very wealthy family, they know that he's a member of the elite. It's just that they actively ignore this fact because Bush preaches the gospel. So what we on the Left have to deal with is a large group of people who are not persuaded by evidence. Like Bush, they carefully sift and winnow through the facts to find those that fit their policy, their dogma.