# Downing Street Memo The Downing Street Memo is a leaked British government document — the minutes of a secret July 23, 2002 meeting of [[Tony Blair]]'s war cabinet — that became one of the most damning pieces of evidence that the [[Iraq War]] was a decision in search of a justification. ## "Fixed Around the Policy" Published by the *Sunday Times* in May 2005, the minutes recorded the head of British intelligence (MI6), back from Washington, reporting that military action against Iraq was now seen as inevitable and that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." In other words, eight months before the invasion, the [[George W. Bush]] administration had already decided on war and was assembling the [[Weapons of Mass Destruction]] case to fit that decision — the inverse of how intelligence is supposed to work. ## Why It Matters The memo is the documentary smoking gun of the vault's [[Iraq WMD Intelligence Failure]] and [[Manufactured Consent]] arcs. It reframes the WMD episode not as an honest mistake but as a rationale reverse-engineered to sell a predetermined war — corroborating, from inside an allied government, what critics had alleged all along. Curiously underplayed by the American press at the time, it remains a touchstone for the argument that the public was deliberately misled into the [[Iraq War]]. *See also: [[Iraqi History Hub]], [[Iraq War]], [[Tony Blair]], [[Iraq WMD Intelligence Failure]]*