The editorial board of the Des Moines Register became the first US newspaper to call for an independent investigation into the Downing Street memo, top secret minutes from a July, 2002, meeting between British prime minister Tony Blair and senior members of his Cabinet who said they believed the US had determined to attack Iraq more than a half-year before Washington has said a decision was made.

The Register editorial, which says that while the memo is “not quite” a smoking gun, “it should be enough for Congress finally to see its duty and launch a formal, independent inquiry,” follows a letter sent to president Bush by Democratic Congressional representatives calling for an explanation of and investigation into statements made in the meeting.

Ironically, the first subject of any US investigation may be the British prime minister: a report in the May 21 London Sunday Times says that Congressional Democrats may send a delegation to London to inquire into the matter.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan has said the administration see “no need” to respond to the letter from Democrats because the statements in the memo are “flat out wrong.”

The British government does not dispute the accuracy of the memo, in which Foreign Minister Jack Straw and British intelligence chief Sir Richard Dearlove both say that president Bush “had made up his mind to take military action” to remove Saddam Hussein.

Sir Richard added that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,” while Mr. Straw said that the case for war against Iraq was “thin” and that Iraq’s “WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.”

Mr. Straw had an additional opportunity to denounce the memo in questions at a joint appearance with US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice following a May 17 meeting, but neither he nor Ms. Rice chose to do so. In fact, both Mr. Straw and Ms. Rice affected initially not to know to which memo the questioner referred.

Ms. Rice is mentioned in the memo as well; Sir Richard said that the NSC (National Security Council), then headed by Ms. Rice prior to her taking on the role of America’s chief diplomat, “had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record.” Her reluctance to approach the UN in 2002 may explain her enthusiastic support now for the nomination of diplomacy-challenged John Bolton as America’s ambassador to the that organization.

Until a few days ago, US newspapers had been noticeably absent from any discussion of the memo —which was published, accompanied by a lengthy contextual story, by the Sunday Times three weeks ago during the final days of the UK election campaigns — and its implications.

The New York Times mentioned the memo without comment in a May 2 story on the British elections, and followed up with a description of its contents in a story by Douglas Jehl published online on May 19.

Although Mr. Jehl painted concerns about the memo as partisan, saying that Bush administration critics “are portraying it as evidence that Mr. Bush was intent on war with Iraq earlier than the White House has acknowledged,” the statements in it regarding Washington’s intentions, and the British government’s tacit admission that the memo is accurate, may stir doubts among even non-political Americans.

Newspaper chain Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau was the first major US news organization to devote serious attention to the memo. A May 6 story by Warren Strobel and John Walcott quotes a former senior Bush administration official as saying that Sir Richard’s summation “an absolutely accurate description of what transpired” during the intelligence chief’s meetings with US intelligence and security officials prior to the Downing Street meeting.

On May 13, the Washington Post published a Walter Pincus story on the memo, but, as BTC News White House writer Eric Brewer notes, the Post later apologized through their ombudsman both for burying the story on page A-18 and for coming so late to their coverage of the memo.

The Post will publish a longer followup story on the memo, again by Mr. Pincus, but this time on the front page of the paper’s Sunday edition.

Mr. Pincus has complained in the past that his coverage of doubts about the Bush administration’s case for war during the year prior to the invasion of Iraq was often buried in the paper’s interior. In his Sunday story, he uses the memo as an opportunity to revisit, in light of the memo and US reports on pre-war intelligence, some of the more questionable US assertions prior to the invasion.

That strategy is one other papers might wish to pursue as well, particularly the New York Times, with their self-acknowledged shoddy coverage of the runup to the invasion and the immediate aftermath of it.

The Bush administration have succeeded in ignoring or sidetracking other major stories reflecting poorly on their credibility, but the coincident appearances of a front-page Washington Post story and a scathing editorial in another newspaper far removed from the centers of US politics, the Register, suggest that the memo may yet gain enough traction, among both partisan critics and administration supporters concerned that the administration may have lied to them, to create serious problems for the administration and Republicans, perhaps even impacting upon the 2006 Congressional elections.

Although Mr. Blair and his Labour Party survived the revelations, returning him as prime minister but with a greatly reduced majority, the memo may well prove his undoing if not the party’s. And according to the British newspaper, The Independent, further Iraq-related revelations are expected later this year upon publication of a book by the former British ambassador to the US, Sir Christopher Meyer, who famously wrote to Mr. Blair after a March, 2002, meeting between the prime minister, Mr. Bush and other senior officials at the president’s Texas ranch that “We backed regime change but the plan had to be clever and failure was not an option.”

Even the most ardent foe of the invasion will have to admit that the plan for regime change was in fact clever; it’s only what happened in the months before and the years after those few weeks in March and April of 2003 that continue to plague the administrations here and in Britain.

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