'The Secret Way to War'

By Frank Rich

It's hard not to think of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Remains of the Day when reading Mark Danner on what will forever be known as the Downing Street memo. Ishiguro told the story of a butler, just beyond the periphery of tawdry events in high places in World War II England, who pieces together fragment by fragment the story of his lord's collaboration with the Germans. So Danner, standing at a remove from momentous sotto voce conversations among the British ruling class on the eve of another war, teases out the meaning of similar evidence at his disposal until finally we get a clear and damning larger picture of a plot to take both England and the United States into a war of choice in Iraq on false premises. But you can only take this analogy so far. Unlike Ishiguro's tragically limited narrator, Danner understands the implications of every piece of the story, and, in these pages,^[*] lays out the history of "the secret way to war" with devastating acuity.