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Hmm....

Memo to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi: You might want to hold off on finalizing those impeachment papers long enough to take a look at a certain briefing memo from Tony Blair's cabinet, dated July 2002. No, not that memo, this one (emphasis mine):


A memorandum written by Prime Minister Tony Blair's cabinet office in late July 2002 explicitly states that the Bush administration had made "no political decisions" to invade Iraq, but that American military planning for the possibility was advanced.
...
The publication of the memorandum is significant because a previously leaked document, now known as the Downing Street Memo, appeared to suggest that a decision to go to war may have been made that summer. In Washington last week, Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair denied that they made any decision in 2002, and suggested that the memorandum was being misinterpreted.

"No, the facts were not being fixed in any shape or form at all," Mr. Blair said, adding that "no one knows more intimately the discussions that we were conducting as two countries at the time than me."


The memo also observes that the U.S. had done little in the way of post-war planning at the time the memo was penned, although more work was done in this regard during the following eight months that led up to the conflict.

No doubt, the ABB crowd will be able to find fodder for the grist mill in this document as well (to mix a metaphor), but it does seem to undercut what we were told was the most damning aspect of the DSM -- that the decision to go to war was already a done deal by mid-summer.