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Conspiracy TheoriesIf you liked The Da Vinci Code, you'll love the Downing Street memo.

By Christopher HitchensPosted Tuesday, June 21, 2005, at 12:42 PM ET

A few weeks ago, at an airport in Europe, I saw Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code staring at me across the bookstore bins. I had seen it many times before and averted my gaze, but I was facing a long delay, and I suddenly thought: May as well get it over with.

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Well, of course I knew it would be bad. I just didn't know that it would be that bad. Never mind for now the breathless and witless style, or the mashed-paper characters, or the lazy, puerile reliance on incredible coincidence to flog the lame plot along. What if it was all true? What if the Nazarene had had issue, in fleshly form, with an androgynous disciple? The Catholic Church would look foolish but, then, it already looks foolish enough on the basis of the official story. "Opus Dei," according to Brown, is a sinister cult organization. Excuse me, but I already knew this, so to speak, independently.

Over the past month, I have hardly been able to open my e-mail without a flood of similarly portentous tripe concerning the "Downing Street memo(s)." This time, it is not the interior of a Templar Church but the style of a clerk in the British Foreign Office that furnishes "the key to all mythologies." A former CIA hand named Ray McGovern has challenged me to debate about the "smoking gun" contained in the Downing Street palimpsests, and I have agreed, in principle. Other correspondents have helpfully added other "smoking guns" as e-mail attachments. A man named Morgan Reynolds, a former chief economist at the Bush Labor Department and now an instructor at Texas A&M, has proof that the World Trade Center was laid low by a "controlled demolition" and not by the hijacked planes. This is a refreshing change from the Gore Vidal view that the Bush administration knowingly grounded all military aircraft in order to give the al-Qaida teams a clear shot. But perhaps both those theories are congruent: One wouldn't want to exclude any options if one were a Republican seeking to incinerate the downtown business HQ of capitalist globalization.

I am not one of those who uses the term "conspiracy theory" as an automatic sneer of dismissal. Conspiracies do occur. I spent a lot of my life at one point trying to show that William Casey of the Reagan-era CIA had made a private deal with the Iranian hostage-takers in 1979, inducing them to keep their prisoners until the Carter administration had been defeated, and I still firmly believe that something of the sort (which eventually culminated in the Iran-Contra underworld) was at least attempted. So do many senior members of both parties in Washington, with whom I am still in touch.

But the main Downing Street document does not introduce us to any hidden or arcane or occult knowledge. As Fred Kaplan wrote in Slate last week, it explains no mystery. As protagonist Jim Dixon observes in another context in Lucky Jim, it is remarkable for "its niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems." On a visit to Washington in the prelude to the Iraq war, some senior British officials formed the strong and correct impression that the Bush administration was bent upon an intervention. Their junior note-taker committed the literary and political solecism of saying that intelligence findings and "facts" were being "fixed" around this policy.

Well, if that doesn't prove it, I don't know what does. We apparently have an administration that can, on the word of a British clerk, "fix" not just findings but also "facts." Never mind for now that the English employ the word "fix" in a slightly different way—a better term might have been "organized."

We have been here before. In an interview with Sam Tanenhaus for Vanity Fair more than two years ago, Paul Wolfowitz allowed that, though there were many reasons to seek the removal of Saddam Hussein, the legal minimum basis for it was to be sought, inside the U.S. government bureaucracy and at the United Nations, in the unenforced resolutions concerning WMD. At the time, this mild observation was also hailed as a full confession of perfidy.

I am now forced to wonder: Who is there who does not know that the Bush administration decided after September 2001 to change the balance of power in the region and to enforce the Iraq Liberation Act, passed unanimously by the Senate in 1998, which made it overt American policy to change the government of Iraq? This was a fairly open conspiracy, and an open secret. Given that everyone from Hans Blix to Jacques Chirac believed that Saddam was hiding weapons from inspectors, it made legal sense to advance this case under the banner of international law and to treat Saddam "as if" (and how else?) his strategy of concealment and deception were prima facie proof. The British attorney general—who has no jurisdiction in these 50 states—was worried that "regime change" alone would not be a sufficient legal basis. One appreciates his concern. But the existence of the Saddam regime was itself a defiance of all known international laws, and we had before us the consequences of previous failures to act, in Bosnia and Rwanda, where action would have been another word for "regime change."

Many in the British Foreign Office, like many in the American State Department and the CIA, felt more comfortable with the status quo as they knew it (which might explain the hapless references elsewhere in the memos to Iraq's "Sunni majority"). But theirs is only one opinion among many. How odd that the American left, when it is not busy swallowing the unpunctuated words of the CIA, follows this with another helping of wisdom from the most reactionary institution of the British state.

If such a "left" is not careful, it will end up consoling itself in futile bitterness and resentment in the way that the Old Right used to do: by brooding on the hellish manner in which FDR told the Japanese to "bring it on" at Pearl Harbor. (The anti-war right of today, led by Pat Buchanan, was raised and nurtured on this very fantasy, as were Gore Vidal and the other Charles Lindbergh fans.) I am in favor of taking such theories at face value, as a thought experiment, to see how they pan out. It is clear that Roosevelt hoped that the Japanese empire would make a mistake and furnish a pretext for war: The plain evidence of this hope is what keeps the conspiracy theory alive. I myself rather doubt that he would have wanted to start such a war with the loss of the Pacific Fleet, but still, he did think a confrontation was inevitable, as indeed it was. And William Casey may have seen the chance for a double coup: taking credit for the release of the Iranian hostages and discrediting Jimmy Carter into the bargain. But if it had all come out at the time, and been proven, would this change my attitude to Japanese imperialism or to Iranian hostage-taking theocracy? Certainly not. The demand would be to impeach those responsible in Washington and to form a national bipartisan alliance to fight even harder against our enemies, and in defense of our friends.

Full circle, then: The outrage about the nondisclosures in the Downing Street memos has led Congressman Walter Jones of North Carolina to demand that we tell the al-Qaida forces in Iraq exactly when we intend to give up. Jones is the right-wing bigmouth who once wanted to rename French fries "freedom fries." He was a moral and political cretin when he did that and, not to my surprise, he has been unable to stop being a moral and political cretin since. He and his new friends are welcome to each other. They illustrate exactly how the credulous search for Da Vinci codes is the sign of feeble minds.

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Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

…There are two things that Hitchens doesn't address. First, what is important about the Downing Street memos et al is that they discredit the elaborate charade that the Republicans and their apologists have been trying to pull that "Bush was hoodwinked by bad intelligence into invading Iraq." As we now know, the only bad intelligence involved was Bush's, so can we please stop blaming George Tenet for everything? The WMD's were just a smokescreen for invading and occupying an oil rich nation, a smokescreen that was just as interchangeable as the current smokescreen of "promoting democracy in the Middle East". This was the President's decision, and nobody else's, and he should have to answer for the consequences, come what may. It is a classic case of the Bush Administration evading accountability when their policies go disastrously wrong. Nobody gets sacked, nobody gets reprimanded, everybody gets promotions and medals. Meanwhile, people are dying by the truckload.

Which brings me to the second point. If you are going to ignore the experts, throw away American ideals, and flip a bird to the rest of the world by invading a country that had done you no harm, you had better be right. You had better find weapons, or cheering crowds, or at the very least, leave the country in better shape than before you invaded it. But the Bush administration has managed the impossible---they have made Iraq a worse place to live and work than when Saddam Hussein ran the country. Anarchy, lack of basic services, malnutrition, and killing on a wide scale have made Iraq the most dangerous place on Earth. As for the War on Terror, Iraq has become a lightning rod for the anger of the world's Muslims, as well as a training ground for jihadists. Bush may dismiss other's concerns about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, but to much of the world, they have become emblems of the United States, stains on our reputation that may take generations to erase. To screw things up this badly costs us a billion dollars a week and an American life everyday. Bush doesn't even have the balls to pay for the war himself, leaving the burden of taxation to future generations.

…Remember, as an unrepentant Trotskyite, Hitch has plenty of experience excusing government crimes and parroting official propaganda. But that doesn't mean the rest of us should follow his example.

--Utek1

(To reply, click here)

Look, lefties, I will spell it out for you, once and for all, what you need to understand if you want to win the "Bush Lied - People Died" argument.

Everyone who cares on the right already believes that:

1) Many people in Bush's cabinet thought that a war to depose Saddam was preferable to either (a) propping up sanctions or (b) letting sanctions drop;

2) After 9/11, if not before, Bush became increasingly interested in deposing Saddam;

3) Bush honestly and reasonably believed that Saddam had chemical, biological, and missile weapons and programs, and that Saddam was seeking nunclear weapons;

4) By Summer 2002, when Bush gave Saddam the first in the series of ultimatums demanding that Saddam prove his disarmament or be invaded, Bush assumed that (a) Saddam would not prove his disarmament and (b) Saddam would be invaded.

5) Although Bush would have preferred that Saddam be deposed without war, he preferred war to leaving Saddam in place.

Ok, all of that is true, and the Downing Street Memo adds additional support for it. But so what? If you want to convince me and my ilk to be outraged, you need to tell us something we don't know - you either have to convince us that one of the 5 assumptions above are wrong, or that they're a lot more outrageous than we think they are…

--J_Mann

(To reply, click here)

…I have grown quite weary of the manner in which Hitchens defends the war. His recent column, "Conspiracy Theories," is a perfect example of his methods of obfuscation. He likens the Downing Street Memo to the Da Vinci Code. Of course, an intelligence memo does not ever amount to pulp fiction, unless it comes from the Pentagon's "Office for Special Plans." Pulp fiction serves to distract the reader from the realities of life. If his analogy is to hold up, the intelligence "fixed" by the Bush administration served exactly that purpose: to distract the American people from the lack of certainty and even outright deceit wafting from the Pentagon and the White House.

I know Hitchens has a great deal of sympathy for the Kurds of Iraq, and I do too. When I recently attended a talk given by Hitchens in Chicago, he stated -- almost plainly for Hitchens -- that his sympathy for the Kurds had a great deal to do with his endorsement of, as he put it, "a war of liberation in Iraq." Yet, he need not so effusively offer his assistance to the agenda of an administration that sanctions the torture of detainees and puts the brave men and women of the American Armed Forces in harm's way without even inkling as to how to get them out.

…The Iraqi people deserve more than a bunch of imported zealots crushing any semblance of freedom in the country. Still, I do not approve of Hitchens' obfuscatory attempt to endorse a neo-conservative ideology derived from the real politik ideology of his foulest nemesis, Henry Kissinger. Oh, Christopher, where have you gone?

--Cannariato

(To reply, click here)

(6/22)

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