Danner vs Kinsley

Writer, journalist and academic Mark Danner correspondents with Los Angeles Times editorial and opinion editor Michael Kinsley. It’s a most informative discussion about the role of the mainstream media in our age, Iraq and the Downing Street Memo. Kinsley calls the memo “fairly worthless” and “will not persuade anyone who is not already persuaded” about Blair and Bush deceptions. Danner disagrees:

“Kinsley, like many others in the American press, wants to judge the memo’s ‘worth’ on whether or not it contains, as he says, ‘documentary proof that President Bush had firmly decided to go to war against Iraq by July 2002.’ As I have written, such ‘documentary proof’ – if we are talking about firm and incontrovertible evidence of what was in Mr. Bush’s mind at the time – is destined to prove elusive; the President can always claim, all appearances and outward evidence to the contrary, that he ‘hadn’t made up his mind.’ And so he has claimed.

The implications of the Memo, however, reveal a much wider truth. We await a Canberra Memo in years to come, the proof that John Howard’s government committed to the Iraq adventure months before saying so publicly.