New Media Blogs Discuss Downing Street Memos

A discussion of the Downing Street Memos has kicked up briefly in the New Media blogosphere after Jay Rosen's post on Sunday.

I thought I'd drop a few signposts from my daily blog surfing from this morning [my Internet connection went down delaying this post.]

All of these following posts have interesting discussions going on in their comment sections.

Dan Gillmor weighs in by excerpting the following passage from Russ Baker's Why Bush Went to War -- "Bush wanted a war so that he could build the political capital necessary to achieve his domestic agenda and become, in his mind, 'a great president."

Jeff Jarvis says that the Downing Street Memos aren't a big deal because everyone knows "the truth is that WMDs were never the real justification" and that this is all just "a scandal of bad PR."

Gillmor updates his post in response to Jarvis "What Jeff fails to note is that Congress would never have backed the war so fecklessly had the phony WMD issue been off the table..."

Rosen updates his original post citing Jarvis and Gillmor and disagrees with Jarvis' take that it was just a case of bad PR by saying:

No. If you think reason-giving is PR you have already lost the battle for public choice in politics. It is a basic failure of national legitimacy to have your reason-giving go so awry as it did with this war. If you are a Bush supporter, my view is you should be doubly concerned because, as things stand, actions in Iraq you believe fully legitimate have seen their official rationale (that is, their reason-giving) fail.

Jarvis lists three reasons why he supports the Iraq war by giving suggestions for how Bush should've sold the war:
1.) A regime change/humanitarian mission;
2.) Spreading democracy in the Middle East;
3.) Fighting the war on terrorism in the hotbed of Middle East terrorism.

Jarvis also thinks that it was a bad idea for Bush to declare "Mission Accomplished" May 1st, 2003 -- he thinks Bush should've been more honest with the American people saying that it'll be a "long, hard, dangerous, costly war."

Rosen's response is "A representative democracy requires an elected commander-in-chief not only to have reasons, but to give reasons, publicly, for what he chooses to do."

I agree with Rosen & Gillmor.

This link provides more details as to why I don't support the military intervention in Iraq.

I have three additional insights that I'll add to Jarvis' perspective -- all three of these points can be attributed to debates and discussions that the US media has so far failed to adequately cover due to the lack of diverse perspectives coming from the Democrats in Congress and the White House.

1.) Jarvis conflates reason-giving for domestic legal purposes with reason-giving for the international legal purposes. None of the three reasons that Jarvis lists would be permissible under International Law. The US chose WMD because the UK actually respects International Law.

Quoting from the July 21, 2002 Cabinet Office Paper (aka the second set of Downing Street Memos):

US views of international law vary from that of the UK and the international community. Regime change per se is not a proper basis for military action under international law. But regime change could result from action that is otherwise lawful.

2.) International Law Professor Sean Murphy had the following to say about the rationale for going to war:

I think you have to look at a legal argument for invading another country at the time that you’re actually invading the other country. It has to stand or fall at that time, I think. Otherwise, we’ll get into a situation where we say, "Well we’re invading. We’re not quite sure what the basis is going to be. We’ll tell you after we get in there and figure it out." And then "Oh, by the way, we got in there, and we can’t find a basis." And it’s just not going to work that way. So you have to look at what was the basis in March of 2003 for the coalition to go in? Did they have a legal authorization to do it, or didn’t they? And as I’ve indicated, I don’t think they did.

3.) Finally, it is under this International Legal context that Human Rights Watch came out in early 2004 saying that "War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention"

I though that this was an interesting enough perspective to interview a lawyer at Human Rights Watch for The Echo Chamber Project last year. Reed Brody says the following:

If you’re going to upset the rules of international law, and go in -- invade a country without United Nations authorization in apparent violation of the traditional rules because you say, ‘There’s a humanitarian emergency. We’ve got to get in there.’ Then you do it when the humanitarian emergency is real. You don’t do it because a country is engaged in a lot of torture -- as bad -- as condemnable as that may be. You do it when you’re actually going in to save tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of lives.

The has been a debate about the moral and humanitarian justifications for the war in Iraq that has been taking place on the streets of America, but a debate the US media has failed cover beyond what the Congress or the Executive Branch has to say.