Here's the way I read the passage in question (parts in bold my additions) ... "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the [suspicion of a]conjunction of terrorism and WMD [which was considered justification enough by Bush]. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy [to add weight to the argument]."

Well, it's always fun to talk to a post-modernist, even an unwitting one. Trained as a literary scholar, I'd agree that language is inherently polysemous and admits of multiple, perhaps infinite readings if you're free enough with your interlineal glossing. As a medievalist, I can appreciate the latter as well--you can always tell which biblical passages were the most difficult for the rigidities of the medieval mind: they were the ones where the glossing outweighed the original, 10-to-1. The Song of Solomon gets about one line of genuine text per folio page in medieval Bibles.

But having lived through the period in question with some semblance of consciousness, I'd have to say this is nonsense. Your interlinear gymnastics try to force it into the alternative universe we're supposed to be inhabiting now, but that "but" won't go away and you only manage to blur the outlines slightly. It still says the case wasn't there, but they were determined to make the evidence support it even so, and that's the point.

Which was obvious at the time. I mean, simply obvious. The grand non-sequitur of shifting the topic to Iraq when we had hardly dealt with Afghanistan, and bin Laden was still at large--who was demanding that? Not the CIA, whose leaked memos at the time indicated a great skepticism of the enterprise. Yet later they were blamed for making Bush do it, even as Tenet received the Medal of Freedom for, well, certainly not making them invade Iraq, since that wasn't a mistake anyway, even though it was bad intel that made them do it... but something else I guess. Your own comment is a fractal iteration at the micro level of the pretzel logic obtaining throughout the whole enterprise.

The sense of the passage is plain. I note that, despite the thrust of this thread, even the Bushistas themselves have expended little effort trying to twist the document into saying the opposite of what it says--a rare thing for them. Mehlman claimed it had been "debunked" (and it can hardly have been "debunked" if what it said was that nothing untoward happened, yes?) but on redirect had to admit all he meant was that unrelated investigations had "cleared" Blair and Bush of the hyping intel charge in general. Which is b.s. in its own right but we don't have space for that argument here. Indeed, one of the commonest explanations for why the document has not made a bigger splash in the media is because its plain sense doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know--those of us who have not surrender all historical judgment to the kool-aid of context-free neo-con post-modernist thought.

Or to put another way, I'm accusing you of not really believing what you are saying. You seem intelligent enough, therefore I assume the real thought process is along the lines of "Of course they were bs-ing us into war, but that's what always happens and it was for our own good, therefore I must construct an argument to nullify this piece of information so that it doesn't threaten that worthy enterprise."

And that's what I really don't understand. Why not just make that argument? Why does your position, if it's valid, have to rest on  maintaining that what so obviously did happen didn't really happen? If you approve of the war, why don't you approve of what they plainly and obviously did to get us into it? I mean, do we have to be children and pretend to fool each other instead of facing facts like adults? Tell me the war was an overriding necessity and therefore any amount of mendacity was justified to make it happen. Others have let the mask slip. Jonah Goldberg for one. Try to convince me that the lying was justified. But don't try to convince me that 2 + 2 = 5. I don't believe it any more than you do.

I agree--the mainstream media needs to get with the program and be responsible in serving the American public's interest and stop perpetuating GOP spin, right wing PR nonsense, outright egregious lies and such rubbish and start properly investigating this story and holding these corrupt cronies responsible rather than buying into all this crap. The memo means exactly what we think it means. There is no misunderstanding. (That claim is a load of pure unadulterated bunk.) period.