New York Times Misrepresents Downing Street Memo

In today’s New York Times, David Sanger tries to discredit the Downing Street Memo. His lede:

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.

Sanger presumes that “political decisions” refers to the actual decision to go to war. Based on that presumption, he concludes that the memo shows the Bush administration hadn’t decided whether or not to invade Iraq.
This is both sloppy journalism, and factually incorrect. The other instances where “political” is used in the memo suggest the memo’s author had a very different sense of the word in mind, one related to the shaping of public opinion and the construction of a legal edifice that would justify Britain’s participation in the U.S. attack.