Say Anything Blog

In October 2002, a memorandum outlining the worst-case scenarios for postwar Iraq was circulated among the top members of the Bush administration. Among its 30 or so warnings were the following:

• “US could fail to find WMD on the ground.”

• “Post-Saddam stabilization and reconstruction efforts by the United States could take not two to four years, but eight to ten years.”

• “The United States could become so absorbed in its Iraq effort that we pay inadequate attention to other serious problems—including other proliferation and terrorism problems.”

• “Syria and Iran could help our enemies in Iraq. . . . Iraq could experience ethnic strife among Kurds, Sunnis, and Shia.”

The provenance of this remarkable memo? If you guessed the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency or anyone else who today might claim to have been unhappy with the administration’s drift toward war, you guessed wrong. Rather, the memo was the handiwork of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who drafted it with the assistance of his key military and civilian advisers. One of them, former Undersecretary for Policy Douglas J. Feith, has now given us “War and Decision,” the best account to date of how the administration debated, decided, organized and executed its military responses to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The above quote is taken from Mr. Brett Stephens’ WSJ review of Douglas Feith’s book, “War and Decision”.  The review, only 12 paragraphs and well worth reading, can be found here.  Mr. Feith’s website for the book, with pages of footnotes, endnotes, declassified memos and maps, is here.

...So far, most of the books written on the subject—from Bob Woodward’s “State of Denial” to Tom Ricks’s “Fiasco”—have painted a picture of an incompetent and paranoid administration fixated on all the wrong enemies for all the wrong reasons. These books, in turn, have sometimes relied heavily on a series of self-serving leaks, distortions and outright fabrications, many of them emanating from the administration’s internal opponents, particularly at the State Department and the CIA.

Mr. Feith’s book does not lack for criticism of how the administration handled itself or even, at times, of how he handled himself. But as the memo cited above illustrates, most of the received wisdom about the dynamics of the first Bush term—pitting “warmongering neocons” and democracy fantasists such as Mr. Feith against more sober-minded realists such as then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage—is bunk, and demonstrably so.

Consider the notion that Mr. Rumsfeld was the author of the administration’s policies on terrorist detainees. On the contrary, writes Mr. Feith, the secretary warned against turning the U.S. military into “the world’s jailer,” deliberately limited the holding capacity of prison facilities at Guantanamo, defended the application of the Geneva Convention for Taliban detainees and argued that the U.S. “should not be holding anyone we did not absolutely need to hold.”

...Equally bogus is the idea that the neocons pushed the case for war as part of a utopian scheme to “impose democracy.” In fact, a White House memo from October 2002 shows that democracy ranked last on an eight-point list of U.S. goals for Iraq, and even there the modest objective was to “[encourage] the building of democratic institutions.” By contrast, the primary goals were, first, an Iraq that “does not threaten its neighbors” and, second, one that “renounces support for, and sponsorship of, international terrorism.” The WMD issue ranked fourth.

Finally, there is the myth that administration officials such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz cherry-picked and “politicized” intelligence to build their case for war—a myth that persists despite two bipartisan commissions concluding that nothing of the sort happened.

What is true is that intelligence was often politicized internally, mainly by CIA bureaucrats with their own policy axes to grind. One such policy ax, widely shared at the State Department, was that exiled Iraqi leaders (known as “externals") had no credibility with the “internals”—Iraqis on the inside. This notion, which seems to have been motivated mainly by an institutional loathing of exiled Iraqi leader Ahmed Chalabi, was finally debunked when Iraqis elected a government that consisted mainly of so-called externals, including Mr. Chalabi.

Again, those who would pontificate on the deliberations of the Bush administration regarding Iraq, would do well to at least consider soberly what Feith has to say and the documents he uses to support his contentions.  Anything less would be flagrantly dishonest.

No doubt, some critics, such as the author of the convoluted title of this post, will try to summarily dismiss Feith’s book, disparaging the author without bothering to read and objectively weigh what he says.  Those on the “progressive” Left are well renown for aiming their barbs at dissonant messengers while ignoring the “inconvenient truth” presented.

Here’s one more quote, from reporter Eli lake’s NY Sun review to whet the appetite:

As Americans turned on the Iraq war, anti-war forces tried to portray the war as not only a mistake, but the result of a neoconservative coup. . . . In his new memoir, “War and Decision”, Mr. Feith does an admirable job in dispelling this hokum.

I haven’t yet finished Feith’s book, but at less than halfway through it, I am already convinced that no student of the history of the Bush administration and our engagement with Iraq, should be without this book… not if he expected to be taken seriously.