The memo released last week by the British government, detailing a meeting between President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair less than two months before the invasion of Iraq, is important for two reasons. One, it shows that despite public statements to the contrary at the time and repeated assertions since then, the President, as many already assumed, had decided to go to war with Iraq well before our bombs ever hit the ground there.

According to the memo, which was written by Blair's top foreign affairs advisor, Bush stated he was ready to go without a second UN resolution, he would go without arms inspectors discovering weapons of mass destruction, he would even go without allies, if need be, and he even set a date to begin the invasion -- March 10, 2003. This memo, mind you, was written five days before then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's vaunted speech to the UN and a mere six weeks after its inspectors first set down in Iraq, yet in the midst of all this uncertainty (or at least the public facade thereof), the mood expressed in the meeting was one of supreme confidence, according to both the memo and the Times write-up.

Both leaders expected "a quick victory," a "complicated, but manageable" transition to Iraqi governance, and no infighting amongst the Sunni and Shiite populations, the documents state. The men also "candidly expressed their doubts that chemical, biological or nuclear weapons would be found in Iraq in the coming weeks," the Times says, despite eventually using that precise reason as one of the key justifications for invading the country.

And while this delusion and negligence are interesting in their own right for what they say about our leaders, a second reason the memo is important is for what it reveals they intended to do about the above. Faced with an expected absence of illicit weapons and a date for the invasion's commencement, the pair realized they needed "a legitimate legal trigger" for invasion, several of which were bandied about in the meeting to solve their paradoxical situation.

There was the President's desire to "bring out a defector who could give a public presentation about Saddam's WMD." (Ahmad Chalabi, anyone? The man who "for years... had been America's staunchest Iraqi ally and... had helped the Bush Administration make its case against Saddam, in part by disseminating the notion that the Baathist regime had maintained stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, and was poised to become a nuclear power," despite it all being "crap," as former UN weapons inspector liaison Scott Ritter notes in this old piece in the New Yorker.) 

There was his suggestion that Saddam could possibly be assassinated. (Perhaps it's just my background in Latin America that's getting in the way here, but when has this idea ever A) worked or B) been worth it in the long run? I'm thinking of Allende in Chile, Noriega in Panama, Aristide in Haiti, and the repeated vaudevillian attempts to kill Castro (exploding cigars?), to name a few, that have surfaced over the years, with alleged US ties and of dubious accomplishment.)

And there was the laughably audacious suggestion (not to mention embarrassing and unbelievably inappropriate) that we could paint a US surveillance plane in UN colors and fly it over Iraq to try and draw fire. "If Saddam fired on them," the President is quoted as saying, "he would be in breach."

Brilliant.

If this cornucopia of stellar ideas amidst a slew of other ignored documents -- State department assessments, CIA reports, and other similar offerings from the war colleges mentioned here the past two years, for example, with far more complex and realistic counsel -- doesn't reinstill confidence in you with our elected leader's competence, don't worry, you're not alone. Which reveals one final reason this memo holds so important.

Besides being the latest in an ever-growing litany of proof against the Administration, this memo and the unrelenting mess that has resulted from the way the war has been handled the past three years, have prompted defections from some of its staunchest supporters that are worth noting. There's George Packer, the liberal war hawk reporter from the New Yorker (no, that's not oxymoronic, I promise), who details his disillusion and disdain for Iraq's state of affairs in his latest book, The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq.

As noted in last month's review in Foreign Affairs, Packer writes that the preparations for the war were "rushed...dishonest, unforgivably partisan, and destructive of alliances," but that invasion was still worth undertaking. Why? "I wanted Iraqis to be let out of prison," he writes, "I wanted to see a homicidal dictator removed from power before he committed murder again; I wanted to see if an open society stood a chance of taking root in the heart of the Arab world."

Yet through numerous interviews conducted in the intervening time, Packer realized that his initial hope and support had been misguided. Through the disarray that ensued in trying to establish a new form of government, the refusal by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney to alter their strategy or hear dissenting points of view, and the President's overriding lack of interest, a war that was once "winnable," in Packer's words, wound up a partial (and potentially complete) failure. "The Iraq War was always winnable," he writes. "It still is. For this very reason, the recklessness of its authors is all the harder to forgive."

Packer describes a situation where Rumsfeld and Cheney seem primarily to blame, as they were allowed to run away virtually unrestrained with their narrow, flawed ideas about the exercise -- "For Cheney and Rumsfeld, the war was about solving the Saddam problem rather than the Iraq problem, about bringing security rather than justice, about toppling a regime rather than building one," he writes -- but that the President's personal deficiencies compounded an already disastrous situation and helped lead to the chaos of today. (Quoting the FA review, "[Packer] points to Cheney as the evil genius behind the war (a belief that is now almost received wisdom) and suggests the condition that made Cheney's influence possible: Bush's chronic lack of curiosity even about matters dealing with the greatest gamble of his Presidency.")

Also among the defectors is Francis Fukuyama, the neoconservative political theorist, author, and essayist who sings his song of disenchantment in his latest, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy. In the book, Fukuyama describes how the war in Iraq represents a set of values -- faux neoconservative ones, he posits -- that he can no longer support.

For Fukuyama, neoconservativism is based on four key ideas, as described in the book's review in last week's New Yorker -- that American power can and should be used towards moral ends; that the character of a political regime does, in fact, matter; that various international laws and organizations are often unable to achieve "security or justice;" and that "ambitious social engineering projects" -- Great Society, New Deal-type stuff -- are also typically failures to be avoided. And the Iraq war, with all its neoconservative posturing and bluster, betrays these ideals.

Fukuyama claims that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are not neoconservative intellectuals as often portrayed, but rather "right-wing messianists, and their prosecution of the war has been disastrous for American interests." (Quote from review.) He continues,

"We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and against the international jihadist movement, that we need to win. But conceiving the larger struggle as a global war comparable to the world wars or the Cold War vastly overstates the scope of the problem, suggesting that we are taking on a large part of the Arab and Muslim worlds. Before the Iraq war, we were probably at war with no more than a few thousand people around the world who would consider martyring themselves and causing nihilistic damage to the United States.

"The scale of the problem has grown," he says, "because we have unleashed a maelstrom."

The final set of those distressed by the war in Iraq and its handling is the military itself, as detailed in the myriad interviews quoted in Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor's book, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation in Iraq. As noted in Steve Coll's column in this week's New Yorker, what is surprising in Cobra is the level of candor and openness these officers use in describing the war's "many errors of conception and execution."

Coll writes, "The Army and the Marines have paid an extraordinarily high price for the war's compounding blunders, and, presumably, the officers are speaking candidly now not just to settle scores but to avoid such bungling in the future." What's unfortunate, though, is that "as usual, this transparency and self-reflection does not extend to the White House. Bush and Cheney -- even with their approval ratings at historic lows and with Iraq veering toward open civil war -- and their staffs still apparently find it impossible to admit error."

They trot out the same speeches for the third anniversary of operations there that they've used over and over again the intervening years -- same misguided optimism, same unrealistic assessment of things on the ground, same "strategy for victory" and outlook for success. But if the above supporters for the war -- not to mention the glanced-upon public from the previous quote whose approvals for Iraq are at or near all-time lows -- can alter their perspectives in the face of insurmountable evidence, why can't its architects? As Coll writes,

"The President and the members of his war cabinet now routinely wave at the horizon and speak about the long arc of history's judgment—many years or decades must pass, they suggest, before the overthrow of Saddam and its impact on the Middle East can be properly evaluated. This is not only an evasion; it is bad historiography. Particularly in free societies, botched or unnecessary military invasions are almost always recognized as mistakes by the public and the professional military soon after they happen, and are rarely vindicated by time.

"This was true of the Boer War, Suez, and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and it will be true of Iraq. At best, when enough time has passed, and the human toll is not so palpable, we may come to think of the invasion, and its tragicomedy of missing weapons, as just another imperial folly, the way we now remember the Spanish-American War or the doomed British invasions of Afghanistan. But that will take a very long time, and it will never pass as vindication."

A well-known liberal hawk, a prominent neoconservative theorist, an increasing number of military officials and the public itself have done just that, all coming around of late to the realization that the war in Iraq has gone awry and that our leaders' "supreme confidence" in its planning and execution was horribly, horribly misguided. When, if ever, will we receive an indication that they've done so, as well?

Until next time, my friends...