The United States went to war in Iraq to eliminate the threat from Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction—which turned out not to exist. As the war drags on, the strange case of the weapons that were not there remains a matter of bitter debate, for it underscores the fact that the goals and the motivations of the Bush administration officials who argued for war are still largely obscure. Yet in fact there exists crucial and little-publicized evidence that lets us understand the secretive, even deceptive, way that the the US launched a war of choice in the Middle East in March 2003.
At the beginning of May 2005, just before the British elections, the London Times published the "Downing Street Memo," the leaked secret minutes of a July 2002 meeting of senior British intelligence, foreign policy, and security officials. The memo made clear that eight months before the invasion of Iraq, President Bush had already decided on war. The British officials who attended the meeting were told that the "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," that the US wanted to avoid consulting the UN, and that few plans were being made for the aftermath of war.
Largely ignored in the US press for weeks afterward, The New York Review of Books published the memo in its entirety with an extensive commentary by award-winning journalist Mark Danner. Danner explains how the memo clarifies the broader—and largely concealed—history of the events leading up to the Iraq war. He shows that the Bush and Blair administrations advocated the resumption of UN weapons inspections as a means not to avoid war but to ensure it. Most importantly, Danner argues that in the face of the memo's clear evidence of deception, the press, public, and Congress still have not held the administration responsible.
The Secret Way to War, with a preface by by Frank Rich, includes Mark Danner's strongly argued analysis of the Downing Street Memo as well as the complete text of the memo and seven other leaked British documents. Collectively, the documents show the members of Tony Blair's government and their counterparts in Washington struggling to find legal and political rationales and strategies for regime change in Iraq.
"Danner...covers the British document in great and fascinating detail." --TomDispatch.com
From the Publisher
The British government documents collected in this book, and Mark Danner's analysis of them, are crucial for understanding the events and decisions that led to the invasion of Iraq. Their publication will sustain and inform the public debate about the Bush administration's justifications for war.
For more information about Mark Danner, please visit his website at http://www.markdanner.com
Mark Danner is a writer, journalist and educator who has written for more than two decades on foreign affairs and international conflict. He has covered Central America, Haiti, Balkans and Iraq, among many other stories, and has written extensively about the development of American foreign policy during the late Cold War and afterward, and about violations of human rights during that time. His books include Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War (2009), The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History (2006), Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror (2004), The Road to Illegitimacy: One Reporter's Travel's Through the 2000 Florida Vote Recount (2004) and The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War (1994). Danner was a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. He is also Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, and the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs, Politics, and Humanities at Bard College.
Mark David Danner was born at Utica, a small city in northern New York State, on November 10, 1958, the son of Dr. Robert Danner, a dentist, and Rosalyn Sitrin Danner, a high school Spanish teacher. Raised in Utica and in the Adirondack mountains, Danner attended John F. Hughes School and Utica Free Academy, where he served as co-editor of The Corridors, which was named, his senior year, the best student newspaper in New York State. He was graduated in June 1976.
Danner entered Harvard College in September 1976. After majoring, successively, in philosophy, English literature and religion, he took his degree in Modern Literatures and Aesthetics, an interdisciplinary honors concentration that combined comparative literature, philosophy and art history. He found himself particularly marked by an individual tutorial on the development of modern fiction with Frank Kermode, then visiting Harvard as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, and by a class in international relations taught by Stanley Hoffmann and Guido Goldman. After spending a year traveling in Europe, Danner was graduated from Harvard College, magna cum laude, in June 1981. In September 1981 Danner began work at the New York Review of Books as an editorial assistant to editor Robert B. Silvers. In 1984 he became senior editor at Harper's Magazine and, two years later, an editor at The New York Times Magazine, where he specialized in foreign affairs and politics and wrote pieces about nuclear weapons and about the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti. Danner joined The New Yorker's staff in April 1990, five months after the magazine published his three-part series on Haiti, "A Reporter At Large: Beyond the Mountains" -- and a few days after the articles were granted the 1990 National Magazine Award for Reporting.
At The New Yorker, Danner began contributing regular essays to the "Comment" section of the magazine, notably on the Gulf War. On December 6, 1993, for the second time in its history, The New Yorker devoted its entire issue to one article -- Danner's piece, "The Truth of El Mozote." That article, an investigation into the notorious massacre in a remote Salvadoran town, was granted an Overseas Press Club Award and a Latin American Studies Association award. In April 1994, Vintage published Danner's book, The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War. The New York Times Book Review recognized The Massacre at El Mozote as one of its "Notable Books of the Year."
During the mid-1990's Danner began reporting on the wars in the Balkans, writing a series of eleven extended articles for The New York Review of Books, which began with Danner's cover piece, "The US and the Yugoslav Catastrophe" and concluded with " Kosovo: The Meaning of Victory," (New York Review, July 15, 1999). The articles were recognized by the Overseas Press Club as the "Best Reporting From Abroad of 1998." Metropolitan Books will publish an adaptation of these pieces in a volume entitled, The Saddest Story: America, the Balkans and the Post-Cold War World. Danner also co-wrote and helped produce an hour-long television documentary for ABC News's Peter Jennings Reporting series: "While America Watched: The Bosnian Tragedy," which aired on March 30, 1994 (and which was awarded an Emmy and a duPont Golden Baton). He later co-wrote and helped produce a second documentary for the same series, "House on Fire: America's Haitian Crisis," about the run-up to the United States' occupation of Haiti, which aired on July 27, 1994.
Danner's writing has appeared in Aperture, Harper's Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, The Times Book Review, and on The Times Op-Ed page. His 16,000-word essay, "Marooned in the Cold War: America, the Alliance and the Quest for a Vanished World," which appeared in World Policy Journal (Fall 1997) provoked a prolonged exchange of letters and responses from Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, Congressman Lee Hamilton, and Ambassador George F. Kennan. Danner has appeared widely on television and radio discussing international affairs, including on Charlie Rose and The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour on PBS, CNN's PrimeNews , ABC's World News Now and C-Span's Morning Show, among many other programs.
In 1998, Danner began teaching at the University of California at Berkeley as a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Journalism and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Human Rights. In 2000, Danner was named Professor on the faculty of the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley. He currently spends half his year at Berkeley, where he teaches courses on political violence, crisis management in international affairs and writing about wars and politics. In fall 2002, he became founding director of Berkeley's Goldman Forum on the Press and Foreign Affairs, leading a series of debates and discussions on foreign affairs, journalism and politics. In 2002, Danner was named Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College in the Hudson Valley of New York State and in 2007 the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs, Politics and the Humanities. At Bard he teaches courses on literature, intellectual history, foreign affairs and politics.
Danner began writing about the war on terror soon after September 11, 2001 and later began speaking out extensively about the Iraq War, notably in a series of debates with Christopher Hitchens, Leon Wieseltier, Michael Ignatieff, David Frum, William Kristol and others. He reported on Iraq for The New York Review of Books and wrote a series of essays for The Review on the emerging torture scandal that came to be known as Abu Ghraib. In October 2004, he collected these essays and gathered them, together with a series of government documents and reports, into his book, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror. Torture and Truth was awarded the 2004 Madeline Dane Ross Prize from the Overseas Press Club for best book on current affairs. In May 2005 Danner wrote an essay for The New York Review accompanying the first American publication of the so-called "Downing Street Memo," the leaked minutes of a July 2002 meeting of high-level British officials discussing the coming Iraq War. The essay provoked a number of responses and led to two subsequent essays, all of which were collected, along with relevant documents and a preface by New York Times columnist Frank Rich, 2006 in The Secret Way to War: the Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History.
In March 2009, Danner published an essay in The New York Review, "US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites", which revealed the contents of a secret International Committee of the Red Cross report based on testimony from "high-value detainees" in the "War on Terror," who had been captured, held, and interrogated at secret US prisons--the so-called "black sites". Shortly thereafter, he published a second essay, "The Red Cross Report: What it Means" and released the full text of the report on the The New York Review website. Weeks later, in a move senior Administration officials claimed was prompted by the disclosure of the Red Cross material, President Obama ordered released four Justice Department memos in which the Bush administration purported "to legalize torture."
In October 2009, Danner published Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War, a large book whose title was inspired by the observation of a former Haitian president (overthrown in a military coup) that "political violence strips bare the social body, the better to place the stethoscope and track the life beneath the skin." The book contains political reporting on wars, revolutions and other forms of violence from around the world, including the aborted election in Haiti, the genocidal civil war in the Balkans, and the invasion, occupation and counterinsurgency in Iraq, along with much writing about the war on terror and the torture of detainees. Danner's work has been honored with a National Magazine Award, three Overseas Press Awards, and an Emmy. In June 1999, Danner was named a MacArthur Fellow. In 2006 he was awarded the Carey McWilliams Award from the American Political Science Association to honor that year's "major journalistic contribution to our understanding of politics." In 2008 he was named the Marian and Andrew Heiskell Visiting Critic at the American Academy in Rome. Danner speaks French and some Spanish. He serves on the board of the World Affairs Council of Northern California and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Pacific Council on International Policy, and the Century Association, and is a fellow of the Institute of the Humanities at New York University. Danner divides his time between San Francisco and New York.
This review is from: The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History (Paperback)
In its June 9, 2005, issue The New York Review of Books published an article entitled "The Secret Way to War" in which Mark Danner reviewed and interpreted the recently released secret memo summarizing the main points of a meeting between British Prime Minister Tony Blair, cabinet members, and senior government officials held at 10 Downing Street on July 23, 2002. The book reprints this article as well as critical letters by Knight Ridder Bureau Chief John Walcott and Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Kinsley with the author's response to each. The author adds an afterword and an appendix containing the full text of the Downing Street Memo and seven other British documents pertaining to it.
Danner makes three main points. First, it is clear that the Bush administration had decided to go to war with Iraq eight months before the actual March 19, 2003, attack. Second, from that point the Bush administration set out to "fix" the intelligence to build the strongest argument for war. Third, the Bush administration manipulated the weapons inspections to find a pretext for war even when claiming to use them as a way to avoid war.
Danner distinguishes between the possible reasons the Bush administration wanted to go to war with Iraq ("to remove the threat a hostile and unpredictable dictator was thought to pose . . . to the industrial world's oil supply; to foreclose the possibility of any collaboration between Saddam and al-Qaeda . . .; to do away with a regime hostile to Israel; [and/or] to begin a process of limited `democratization' in the countries of the Middle East") from the pretexts for going to war (self-defense, humanitarian intervention, or violation of UN Security Council resolutions demanding that Iraq cease its programs involving atomic, biological, and chemical weapons.)
Since Iraq clearly was not a threat to the United States and since this was not a case of humanitarian intervention, the US, with British cooperation, based its case on Iraq's nuclear weapons program. The two governments hoped that Saddam Hussein would resist inspections giving the Security Council grounds for authorizing military intervention. When Hussein surprised them by letting the inspectors in, and when the inspectors found nothing, the United States went to war before the inspectors could finish their job.
Most disturbing is Danner's comparison of Joseph Goebels to an unnamed senior advisor to President Bush. Goebels claimed there was no point in trying to convert intellectuals because they would always yield to "the man in the street." "Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology."
Speaking to a New York Times Magazine Reporter, the Bush advisor contrasted "the reality-based community" (people who believe that solutions emerge from the judicious study of discernable reality) with the way things work now. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. . .We're history's actors...and you [reality-based reporters]...will be left to just study what we do."
Danner concludes: "We live with the legacy of exaggerations and lies of the secret way to war: in the distortion of the public debate, the corruption of our politics, and the collapse of the one element essential to fighting a long and inconclusive conflict--the trust and support of the people."
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This review is from: The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History (Paperback)
If you have missed Mark Danner's articles on the Downing Street Memo in _The New York Review of Books_, here is your chance to learn a little more about the beginning of the war and how, in political thinking, the (wished for) effect can precede the (invented) cause. This book is particularly enlightening now, when the withdrawal of the American military from Iraq finally begins to be discussed. We are told that a withdrawal -- even a gradual and well-planned one - will eventually lead to terrorist attacks on America. Where is the proof? Mark Danner's book reveals the mechanisms of manipulation of public opinion behind this war: we are made to listen to Fear, not to Reason. To be sure, Reason makes mistakes, but Blind Fear's mistakes can be disastrous.
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Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Downing Street, President Bush, Saddam Hussein, Security Council, United Nations, Prime Minister, United States, Sir Richard, Knight Ridder, John Scarlett, White House, Gulf War, Great Britain, The New York Times, Michael Kinsley, Sir David Manning, George Tenet, Michael Smith, Iraqi National Congress, Colin Powell, London Sunday Times, North Korea, The New York Review, Jonathan Powell, Jack Straw
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