More on Downing Street Memo/Minutes
From an analysis article in the Philadelphia Inquirer (account required); here are the highlights:

Americans are probably more conversant about Angelina Jolie than about the contents of the so-called Downing Street memo, which was leaked in London seven weeks ago to the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times. But if the war chaos continues (80 U.S. troops and 700 Iraqis died last month), the awareness gap may narrow - because the memo states that as Washington was preparing for war, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." This is one of the few pieces of hard evidence that supports critics who contend that Bush hyped a nonexistent threat - Hussein's purported weapons of mass destruction - as his justification for waging war. Liberal Internet blogs, and roughly 90 House Democrats, have sought publicity for the memo, and last Tuesday, for the first time, the Washington press asked Bush about it. He didn't dispute its authenticity. He didn't address the observation that his intelligence was being "fixed." He did deny that he had opted for war in the summer of 2002, saying "there's nothing farther from the truth." [...] But this document - actually, the minutes of a meeting attended by Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top security aides - is viewed seriously by a range of U.S. policy experts. Michael O'Hanlon, an Iraq specialist at the Brookings Institution, said Thursday that "the memo is right" and "hard to dispute." Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel who is now a war analyst at Boston University, said: "The memo is significant because it was written by our closest ally, and when it comes to writing minutes on foreign policy and security matters, the British are professionals. We can conclude that the memo means precisely what it says. It says that Bush had already made the decision for war even while he was insisting publicly, and for many months thereafter, that war was the last resort. "This is no longer a suspicion or accusation. The memo is an authoritative piece of information, at the highest level." [...] There was further discussion about the "intelligence and facts." The memo recorded concerns expressed by Foreign Secretary Jack Straw: "It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing had not been decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea, or Iran." Straw therefore suggested, according to the memo, that Bush needed "help with the legal justification for the use of force." Blair's idea was that Bush should go to the United Nations; this was a "political strategy to give the military plan the space to work." But the problem was that "the NSC [Bush's National Security Council] had no patience with the U.N. route." Subsequently, Blair was instrumental in persuading Bush to go to the United Nations. But, in the view of many Iraq experts, the memo shows that Bush went to the United Nations not as a means to avoid war (his public stance) but as a way to gain more political support for the war he intended to wage. Indeed, after the United Nations balked at passing a second war resolution, Bush went ahead anyway. The memo's reference to "fixed" intelligence is noteworthy. It's not a new issue. It has long been clear that Bush's depiction of Hussein as a grave menace was overstated. Among many examples: Bush said, on Oct. 7, 2002, that Hussein intended to use unmanned aerial vehicles "for missions targeting the United States," a distance of 6,000 miles. It later turned out that the UAVs had a range of 300 miles. But the Bush camp is working hard to deny the memo's fixed-intelligence passage - a sign that the White House is sensitive about the issue. Last weekend, GOP chairman Mehlman stated: "That [memo] has been discredited. Whether it's the 9/11 Commission, whether it's the Senate, whoever's looked at this has said there was no effort [by Bush's war planners] to change the intelligence at all." Mehlman's claim is undercut by the facts. The 9/11 Commission never looked at the administration's behavior; commission vice chairman Lee Hamilton said last year, "[Under the law] we were to focus our attention on 9/11 and those events, and not on the war in Iraq." And while a 2004 Senate panel did criticize the prewar intelligence as "a series of failures," it didn't look at whether the Bush team had misused the material. That task was postponed until after the election; today, in the words of Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, it's still "on the back burner."

The Inquirer also had an alternative take on the memo, wondering why it hadn't received the airplay that many in the "liberal blogosphere" (such as me) believe it deserves:

I've read the memo many times now. A few observations: First, I am surprised it hasn't gotten more coverage. It's interesting stuff, though far less momentous than overheated partisans think. (Irony alert: People hyping the memo overvalue parts of it that fit a preconceived narrative in which they are emotionally invested, while ignoring nuances, caveats and context. Sound like any President you know?) As for the "craven media," the memo reveals nothing that any attentive citizen who has followed the exhaustive coverage of the war in this paper, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Newsweek or the Atlantic Monthly did not know long ago. Any claim that the serious American press has ignored any salient point in the memo is just poppycock. For example, by summer 2002 it was no secret to any attentive American citizens that their leaders were spoiling for war with Iraq. The Inquirer's electronic database for summer 2002 shows 60-plus articles discussing the race toward war. Here's why antiwar citizens are so desperate for the memo to make a dent: The plain fact is that an amazing percentage of Americans just don't care about the facts on the Iraq war. They don't care that the WMD case collapsed like the house of cards it was, that the dark talk about mushroom clouds and Saddam-Osama links was hoohah. [...] Some claim the memo confirms that Bush's "freedom on the march" rhetoric was an ex-post-facto justification, cooked up after the WMD rationale tanked. The reverse is more likely. Post 9/11, WMD and terror became the easiest way to sell the public on a grand strategy that had been on this White House's to-do list all along. But doesn't the memo prove the President lied? Not really. He clearly sold the war on false pretenses. But he likely believed his own bull. He did what he does in so many realms: Made policy with his gut, then heard only what he wanted to hear. Dangerous incompetence? Yes. Impeachable crimes? Don't see it. George W. Bush's punishment should have been for voters to fire him last year. Didn't happen. The Downing Street memo, interesting as it is, can't change that.