What does one call it
When a memoir complete with source documentation is at odds with the so called “first draft of history”?
The Real Plan of Attack
By BRET STEPHENS
The Wall Street JournalApril 8, 2008; Page D8
...
Much of what makes “War and Decision” so compelling is that it is, in effect, a revisionist history, never mind that Mr. Feith was at or near the center of the decade’s most important foreign-policy decisions. 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.”
I’d call what we’ve been being fed as “news” a lie, myself.
Hat Tip: Instapundit
War and Decision
By Douglas J. Feith
(Harper, 674 pages, $27.95)
Rob
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Hairy Polemic
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Bat One