More on the Madness of war memo

Yesterday we reported on an article in the Mirror UK about George W. Bush planning to bomb Arab TV station al-Jazeera in friendly Qatar. As we pointed out The Mirror is not the most reliable of sources but the report was both absurd and believable.

This certainly fits with what is known about Bush's erratic and vindictive personality. We will see if anyone else picks it up.

Well others have picked it up including The Washington Post. It appears that the memo is real and that Britain's attorney general has issued a media gag order.

Britain's attorney general yesterday told the Daily Mirror and other newspapers not to publish further details from a top-secret memo that detailed a meeting between President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair in which Bush expressed a desire to bomb an Arab TV station.

According to the Mirror, "the five-page memo -- stamped 'Top Secret' -- records a threat by Bush to unleash 'military action' against the TV station [al-Jazeera], which America accuses of being a mouthpiece for anti-US sentiments."

My gut feeling is that Bush did say it and that it was a very inappropriate joke. Josh Marshall agrees:

With my very limited sense of how George W. Bush operates in private, I think it does sound the like the sort of thing the president might joke about or say merely for effect, though I wouldn't say that shows him in such a great light either.

The only thing that strikes me as odd is that a diplomatic aide would memorialize this exchange between if it were merely a joking aside. Did the aide either think Bush was serious or perhaps found the discussion so disturbing that he chose to note it down?

The one thing that I think you can say with some surety is that this is yet one more example of the president's rapidly diminishing power, credibility and prestige. Six months, not to mention a year ago, I think there's little reason to believe a paper like the Post would have touched such a story and touch it in a way that entertains the possibility that President Bush actually had to be talked down by Tony Blair from bombing a news network whose editorial line he found too critical.

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al-Jazeera, Bush