former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (Dep. of Defense, WDCpix)
The Return of the Neocons
Bush Hawks Aggressively Working to Rewrite Accepted Iraq War History
By James Risen
06/19/2008
| 28 Comments
Ever since the Rumsfeld era at the Pentagon ended abruptly in the aftermath of the Democratic victory in the 2006 mid-term elections, the civilian hawks who ruled the Defense Dept. during the early years of the Iraq war have remained largely silent. They have not engaged publicly even as their culpability for the Iraq war's myriad failures has congealed into accepted wisdom.
But for the Pentagon troika most identified with Iraq – former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith -- silence has not equaled happiness. It certainly has not meant acceptance of their fate at the hands of the many journalists, former generals and assorted ex-members of the Bush administration who have taken to the cable talk fests and the nation’s media outlets to reject and denounce them. Nor does it mean they walk the aisles at Barnes & Noble with equanimity while scanning shelves filled with books that lay the fault for George W. Bush’s failed presidency at their doorstep.
This anti-Pentagon historical narrative is straightforward and seems well established: Wolfowitz and Feith ran a neoconservative frat house while an arrogant, fiddling Rumsfeld roared against anyone who dared try to bring him the truth.
Neoconservatives -- a loose association of pundits, politicians and analysts who put a right-wing spin on American exceptionalism and coupled that with an embrace of the doctrine of pre-emptive war -- began pushing for regime change in Iraq in the 1990s. Wolfowitz and Feith brought this desire to oust Saddam Hussein with them when they joined the Bush administration.
After 9/11, neoconservatives inside and outside the administration argued for war; Washington must act because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and might share them with terrorists. Inside the government, Rumsfeld, not a neoconservative himself, embraced and advanced these arguments, following the lead of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Perhaps Rumsfeld also sensed that the war in Afghanistan had been too quick and remote to serve as a true demonstration of U.S. power in the Middle East.
And so, during the critical 18 months between the Sept. 11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith were united at the forefront of the administration's march to war.
Five years later, 4,000 young Americans have died. No Pentagon leaders have been so thoroughly repudiated since the days of Robert McNamara and the Vietnam War.
When the Iraq war was young, and they were at the height of their power, few men in America seemed less concerned by or more disdainful of their public critics. The image created by a compilation of Rumsfeld’s most famous quotations, words that will surely appear in the first paragraphs of his obituary -- “stuff happens,” "democracy is messy," “You go to war with the Army you have” -- is of a man too busy and important to do anything other than casually mock the little people getting in his way.
Perhaps being out of power makes one more susceptible to the slings and arrows; perhaps at night they wake with visions of a future in which some young filmmaker comes to them with a request to remake “The Fog of War.” For whatever reason, it is clear that the incoming fire from the left, right and center has finally gotten to be too much. Feith, in particular, is now willing to reveal how much it all has hurt.
“You wind up having the first, second and third drafts of history shaped by the first set of leaks,” Feith lamented. “You can imagine, from my point of view, that is grim to see.”
Now, the Rumsfeld team is starting to fight back. Rumsfeld recently announced that he is writing his memoirs, while Feith’s account, “War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism,” came out this spring.
In a series of lengthy interviews over several weeks, Feith explicitly stated that his objective in writing his book was to start the process of altering the accepted history of the Iraq war, to adjust the Rumsfeld team’s place in history. He wants to change the narrative -- before it is too late.
Feith sees his book as nothing less than the opening salvo in what he and many of his allies hope will be a major and prolonged campaign by Bush administration hawks to develop a new school of revisionist history of the early 21st century, in which they will be heroes, rather than the villains. They see this fight for historical dominance as the last battle of the war in Iraq.
How far this devolves into the “stabbed in the back” school of history remains to be seen. But the outlines are already clear.
Feith argues that the Pentagon team’s historical standing has been victimized by its unilateral disarmament in the leak and access wars of the Bush administration, even as their foes at the State Dept. and the Central Intelligence Agency whispered to the press about the evil men at the Pentagon. Rumsfeld so hated leaks and leakers, Feith says, that the Pentagon team allowed themselves to be Swiftboated by the forces under Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and CIA Director George Tenet.
“It caused enormous damage to me personally,” Feith said. “I wasn’t in a position to contradict false and damaging things said about me.”
And yet, he added, top State and CIA officials were too cowardly to raise any objections to the war during White House meetings.
Feith does not view this as journalists did at the time -- which was that many in the Bush administration were reluctant to criticize Iraq policy out of fear of retribution from a powerful vice president and an intimidating secretary of defense. He sees hypocrites who went along with the war, who told the president to his face that they supported his policies, but then through bureaucratic petulance made sure that critical decisions were never made, that paralysis was the order of the day. Meanwhile, they sought to convince friends outside the administration that they were not really allied with the neoconservatives.
“What I find interesting is that they chose to not take on the strategic questions in the Situation Room when they had a chance,” says Feith. “If Powell or Tenet, or somebody like that, wanted more meetings, more debates, they could have had them.”
Instead, State and CIA sulked and pouted and refused to collaborate, effectively sabotaging post-war planning, Feith says. The best-laid plans for Iraq’s political reconstruction put forth by the Pentagon were left stillborn in a confused inter-agency process in the weeks leading up to the invasion, he argues; and no one, certainly not National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, ever tried to bring order out of the bureaucratic chaos.
Yet it is Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith who were left holding the bag for the failures in Iraq, while pretty much everyone else seems to have skated from the judgment of history, Feith seethes. “The now-standard story portrays the president and his supporters in the administration as militaristic and reckless, closed-minded and ideological, thoughtless at best and even dishonest – and hell bent on war with Iraq from the administration’s inception,” he writes in his book. It is a false narrative, he writes, that “has swept the field.”
Other top officials from Rumsfeld’s inner circle agree that the truth is far more complex and has yet to come out. “The pundits have it pretty much wrong about Rumsfeld,” said retired Air Force Gen. Richard Meyers, chairman of the joint chiefs during Rumsfeld’s tenure, who is now also writing his memoirs. “I think they have it 85 percent wrong. Not many people who have written about Rumsfeld have worked with him and been in the room. I don’t think anybody has captured it yet.”
Wolfowitz is pleased that the counter-offensive has begun, noting that he believes that Feith, through his book, finally, “explodes some of the myths that have become conventional wisdom.” Wolfowitz added, “it’s a beginning point,” for a serious discussion.
As the first out of the gate with a book, Feith is setting the tone for the Pentagon counter-campaign. He begins by recognizing the need to tackle big, damning issues head on. So he focuses on what he describes as the most damaging lie -- that the Pentagon team was trying to anoint Ahmed Chalabi as ruler of Iraq.
“I’m putting out a bold challenge – I have gone through the documents, senior level Pentagon documents, and I can’t find any documents supporting the extremely important conspiracy charge that we were plotting to anoint Chalabi,” said Feith. “It is frustrating to me to deal with these canards, because no senior person at the Pentagon was proposing that.”
As head of the largest Iraqi exile group operating in the West in the years before the invasion, Chalabi had gained prominence through his success at convincing key political leaders in Washington and London of the rightness of ousting Saddam. Yet he had also won powerful enemies, notably at the CIA, where officers who worked with Chalabi had concluded that he was a liar and a crook. During the run-up to the 2003 invasion, Chalabi's group, the Iraqi National Congress, began to force-feed Washington many Iraqi "defectors," who claimed to have information about Saddam's supposed weapons of mass destruction. His information found its way through the Pentagon right to the president, and was crucial in bolstering the public case for war.
But Chalabi's star began to fall when it turned out that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that his defectors had been feeding disinformation to the U.S. intelligence community. The Americans broke with him in 2004, when the CIA and the National Security Agency alleged that he had told Iran that the United States had broken their codes.
His relations with the Bush administration have run hot and cold since. But it is now clear that the men who ran the Pentagon at the time of the invasion are eager to disown Chalabi.
That is easier said than done. Feith recognizes that the notion the Pentagon wanted Chalabi to rule Iraq is not only accepted as fact today, it was conventional wisdom within large swaths of the Bush administration during the run-up to the war. And the impression that Pentagon neoconservatives were pushing a huckster destroyed the Rumsfeld team's ability to gain acceptance of its post-war plans throughout the administration, he argues.
"The view that we were doing that was enormously important in influencing policy at the time," Feith said, "because the State Department and CIA opposed a series of specific measures that were designed to facilitate the political transition and general reconstruction of Iraq because they saw them all through their particular prism of antagonism to Chalabi. Every time we denied that we were trying to anoint Chalabi, people at State or CIA would say that was just part of the cover-up of our conspiracy.”
Feith adds that the Pentagon leadership was actually agnostic about Chalabi. “We didn’t think of ourselves as pro-Chalabi,” Feith insisted, “but we didn’t think of ourselves as anti-Chalabi, either.”
Rather than simply pushing to anoint Chalabi, Feith says his office developed a formal plan for political reorganization built around an entity to be known as the Iraq Interim Authority. The plan -- abandoned by the White House in the immediate aftermath of the invasion -- called for a temporary government that would include U.S. officials, leading Iraqi exiles and Iraqis who had remained in Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s rule. Chalabi was to be among the exiles playing a leading role, but Feith insists that no one in the Pentagon leadership ever sought to impose Chalabi as the leader.
He says that the Chalabi conspiracy charge can be disproven by the fact that the two men sent to run the post-war reconstruction – former general Jay Garner, followed by former ambassador L. Paul Bremer – were never given orders to anoint Chalabi. “If they were not told to favor Chalabi, then there couldn’t have been a conspiracy,” Feith said. “Then there was no drive shaft connecting the engine to the wheels.”
Both Garner and Bremer said in interviews that they were never given directions by the Pentagon to anoint Chalabi. Garner, briefly in charge of reconstruction in Iraq after the invasion, said, “I heard Rumsfeld say several times I have no candidate,” for ruler of Iraq. “I never saw any inclination he was pushing Chalabi.”
Garner observed that “Feith, I think, was a friend of Chalabi. And he took me through the positives and negatives of the exiles and candidates, but he never told me to appoint Chalabi. It never happened that he said, 'Make Ahmed the premier.' But he respected him. He told me that he, Perle (Richard Perle, former chairman of the Defense Policy Board for Rumsfeld) and Wolfowitz had met frequently with Chalabi in the past to discuss the freedom of Iraq.”
“For me, I don’t like Chalabi,” Garner volunteered. “He and I instantly disliked each other. He’s a crook, a man who can’t be trusted.”
Bremer added, “Nobody ever said to me the plan was for Chalabi to have the job. Nobody ever told me to put Chalabi in power.”
In an interview from Baghdad, Chalabi also insisted, “I know of no discussion at all between me and the Pentagon or any one in the U.S. government and anyone close to me, to install me in any capacity in Iraq.” He complained that “the adversaries of Feith and Wolfowitz seemed to fear that I would emerge as a leader in post-war Iraq, and so they had an ABC doctrine -- 'Anybody But Chalabi.'”
But while Feith sees this as solid evidence dispelling the Chalabi conspiracy charge, his legion of critics from the Bush administration remain unconvinced. They say these arguments – no orders to Garner and Bremer, no Pentagon documents supporting Chalabi’s ascension -- are only used by Feith as part of a legalistic effort to obscure what happened.
“Do you really think they would have written it down?” asked one former senior administration official.
The critics say that, to varying degrees, Wolfowitz and Feith at the Pentagon, Cheney at the White House, and Perle on the outside all promoted Chalabi before the war. But, they were unable to convince either Rumsfeld or, more important, Bush.
“Bush was very clear," said one former top administration official, critical of the neoconservatives, “he said, I will not put my thumb on the scales. He wasn’t going to favor one guy.”
And no matter how badly Wolfowitz, Feith and the others might have wanted Chalabi, they didn’t have the power to install him.
Perle, perhaps Chalabi’s most vocal and influential patron in Washington at the time of the invasion, said in an interview that he believes that the fact that Rumsfeld was never a Chalabi supporter was critical -- since that meant the Pentagon was not going to push him on Bush.
“Rumsfeld’s view was that the cream will rise to the surface,” recalled Perle. “He did not want to get into the business of picking leaders for Iraq, although I don’t think he ever thought that meant Iraq would be leaderless. But Rumsfeld never fought for Chalabi. The idea that he was the Pentagon’s boy is wrong. One person made decisions at the DOD, and that was Don Rumsfeld. Those people who kept saying the Pentagon’s policy was Chalabi didn’t understand how DOD worked.”
Asked whether he thought Feith and Wolfowitz would have installed Chalabi if they had been in charge, Perle said: “Early on, they would have supported a government-in-exile and the INC [the Iraqi National Congress, Chalabi’s group] would certainly have been at the center of it. And to do it right there would have had to have been a transparent process. …They certainly thought that Chalabi was, if not the most competent Iraqi, at least in the top two or three.”
But Chalabi was not installed, and a U.S. occupation, through Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority, was launched instead.
An anti-American insurgency followed, and now, five bloody years later, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith are just beginning their long struggle for historical redemption.
James Risen is an investigative reporter for The New York Times and the author of "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration." He won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, for his pieces about government surveillance programs.
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© 2007 The Washington Independent
Comments:
Posted 06/19/2008 07:42pm with
When trying to understand a situation, I think it’s generally a good rule of thumb to look at “what is” as “what was intended”. I don’t think that anything has happened during the Bush administration that wasn’t intended, and by the two people who controlled the entire show – Bush and Cheney. I have never believed that the plan was for Iraq to be a functioning, sovereign nation, autonomous of U.S. control. The insurgency was the excuse to keep troops in Iraq. It serves several of Bush’s and Cheney’s goals, chief among them a never ending war for the constant never ending re-election campaign (keep Americans in a chronic state of fear of terrorists) and a toe-hold in the Middle East for the eventual takeover of oil fields and reserves.
Is the mainstream media ever going to cover what’s happening honestly?
Posted 06/19/2008 09:26pm with
Lo and behold, no sooner do I leave this page than I see: “Deals With Iraq Are Set To Bring Oil Giants Back” – http://www.nytimes.com/glogin?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/world/middleeast/19iraq.html&OQ=_rQ3D2Q26orefQ3Dslogin&OP=60888373Q2F!gXE!ZzmJQ7BzznR!RQ5EQ5EY!Q5EQ3F!N2!gzQ7BDZ!Q5CQ7CZZDXX0Jn!N2Q7CQ7B0LQ7EfnQ5CD
Only five and a half years past the invasion, the true reason for the war, for the incompetence, for not having “a plan” post-invasion, comes to light: It was for the oil. Duh.
Posted 06/20/2008 12:09am with
I need to check my voluminous files on Chalabi for the specifics, but I distinctly remember that Chalabi’s men were given military training in an Eastern European country before the invasion, and that Chalabi was specially flown into Iraq just days after the invasion, even before Baghdad was taken.
Now, that’s mighty peculiar behavior unless the intent was for Chalabi to have a very high post in conjunction with Garner.
The fly in the ointment, as I remember, is that Chalabi’s men started looting so outrageously that this prospect was summarily dismissed.
Moreover, as I understand it, Chalabi was allowed to get his hands and retain the files of Saddam Hussein’s secret police. Has it been mentioned by the neocons that Chalabi was an important factor in the fatal de-Baathification of Iraq?
Among Chalabi’s supporters was none other then Dick Cheney, who met with him prior to the 2000 elections. Have the neocon revisionists mentioned this?
Honestly, their new “take” is insupported by evidence which I could dig out in half an hour’s time from my files.
Posted 06/20/2008 01:36am with
Looks like washing blood off your hands is a little tougher than you thought, eh Dougie?
Posted 06/20/2008 03:55am with
we can anticipate ongoing efforts from the war people to justify their efforts to conduct a focused war in an effort to disguise the larger effort to conduct perpetual war. gooch has it right, if the war people continue in power we will have war. mcnamara, had the courage to aknowlege the war he managed in se asia was a mistake, was based on a flawed premise, the domino theory, and that the johnson adm and the pentagon lied about progress intne war. he also advised that no future war be declared without a robust moral debate. feith,s efforts lack any moral substance. it reminds me of kissinger trying to justify prolonging the war in viet nam. hopefully, more and more of our citizens will be able to see the neocons and their many supportersin the war industry as moral cretins. jbulette
Posted 06/20/2008 03:57am with
When, oh when, will liberal Jews (Pro-Israeli’s) like me and mainstream America wake up to the rule of neo-conservative, pro-Likkud, right wing, Israeli control of our government? These people are NOT Americans, but pro-Israeli right wing, fundamentalist monsters, like the fundamentalist Muslims and Christians. . When will liberal, progressive American and Israeli Jews, and all Americans from every race, color and creed, be free? These people are NOT Americans nor do they care about America. They live for Israel. If they were any other ethnic group, they would be suspect. Until we have stopped our fear of being called anti-Semitic, (the true ethnic group of Palestine and its indigenous peoples), and speak out against the neo-cons of the Christian and Jewish and Muslim and Christian Right wing, we will NEVER be a free nation. No other country on Earth has such control over our Government.
Posted 06/20/2008 10:01am with
It’s great to see that this debate is underway.
The long-term record is going to require some truly epic historian(s) with some unique approaches to their tradecraft.
I suspect the right analysis is going to require the understanding that multiple objectives were being worked simultaneously, some overtly, some not. Holistically I doubt whether any one historian will be able to capture this. Ultimately the debate should include the decision to militarize the North American space, and the utilization of the Counterintelligence Field Activity office of the Pentagon in domestic affairs/media. If someone can piece this together, including which journalist were(are) involved, this historical record will help with the framing of the “evildoers” as well as the “heroic.”
I think the pope is correct when he says that ultimately good will triumph in the end though he may want inquire more thoroughly into why Cardinal George has been upset recently.
Posted 06/20/2008 10:23am with
To dallasdem – I couldn’t agree with you more!!!!!!
Posted 06/20/2008 11:18am with
“They certainly thought that Chalabi was, if not the most competent Iraqi, at least in the top two or three.”
I’m sure they did, if by “competent” they mean the most competent charlatan and liar. I think it has to be repeated again and again that Chalabi’s singular accomplishment in life, prior to being seized upon by the neocons as their useful idiot par excellence, was being convicted of bank fraud to the tune of $500 million and sentenced to 20 years in a Jordanian prison. Chalabi was an international con artist, period. I’m sure that was precisely what they were looking for.
Another thing that gets me about the neocons, and the Bush administration in general, is the flip side of all the BS they trumped up about Iraqi WMD. Not only did they bend over backwards to try and frame Saddam Hussein, but they have consistently refused to acknowledge (and indeed, have actively tried to conceal and obfuscate) evidence implicating those who truly are responsible for the rise of Al Qaeda and the attacks on 9/11:
http://www.asecondlookatthesaudis.com
In light of the fact that we now find out a majority of the suicide bombers in Iraq have been Saudi Arabian, and that wealthy Saudis are now funding the resurgent Taliban, I fear the consequences of the neocon agenda have yet to fully develop.
Posted 06/20/2008 09:53pm with
Rummy, Feith, Wolfowitz, and all the other neocon warmongers should have their medical insurance taken away, then their houses foreclosed, then their pensions removed. After their wives divorce them, they should be taken to the Green Zone, made to put on a t shirt and jeans and forced to walk out of the Green Zone into the streets of Baghdad where they will have to survive,on their own mind you, for a year, without aid from any military body. If they makes it through that year, upon their return, before they loses what jobs they had – they will be told “funding” dried up, they should be made to testify about their experiences and grilled about the falsehoods, lies, and pathologically screwed up excuses they gave the American people about the war in Iraq from their prison cells. They should be asked why on earth are American taxpayers forced to give trillions of dollars to a war when our own people are homeless or soon to be, have no jobs, no healthcare and are going without everyday. Bush, Cheney, Rice, Woolsey, Perle,Hadley, Wurmser, Natsios, Barlett, and especially Bolton should all be made to do the same thing, Bush to Anbar province, Cheney to Fallujah, and Rummy? well Rummy… let’s just throw him to the troops and let them tear him apart. These a**holes should be made to disappear and never be allowed to practice their warmongering politics ever again.
Posted 06/21/2008 03:05am with
Just for the hell of it, from 11/3/2002, The Guardian, “Carve-up of Oil Riches Begins”:
The leader of the London-based Iraqi National Congress, Ahmed Chalabi, has met executives of three US oil multinationals to negotiate the carve-up of Iraq’s massive oil reserves post-Saddam.
Disclosure of the meetings in October in Washington – confirmed by an INC spokesman – comes as Lord Browne, the head of BP, has warned that British oil companies have been squeezed out of post-war Iraq even before the first shot has been fired in any US-led land invasion.
Confirming the meetings to US journalists, INC spokesman Zaab Sethna said: ‘The oil people are naturally nervous. We’ve had discussions with them, but they’re not in the habit of going around talking about them.’
Next month oil executives will gather at a country retreat near Sandringham to discuss Iraq and the future of the oil market. The conference, hosted by Sheikh Yamani, the former Oil Minister of Saudi Arabia, will feature a former Iraqi head of military intelligence, an ex-Minister and City financiers. Topics for discussion include the country’s oil potential, whether it can become as big a supplier as Saudi Arabia, and whether a post-Saddam Iraq might destroy the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
Disclosure of talks between the oil executives and the INC – which enjoys the support of Bush administration officials – is bound to exacerbate friction on the UN Security Council between permanent members and veto-holders Russia, France and China, who fear they will be squeezed out of a post-Saddam oil industry in Iraq.
Although Russia, France and China have existing deals with Iraq, Chalabi has made clear that he would reward the US for removing Saddam with lucrative oil contracts, telling the Washington Post recently: ‘American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil.’
Indeed, the issue of who gets their hands on the world’s second largest oil reserves has been a major factor driving splits in the Security Council over a new resolution on Iraq.
[...]
Posted 06/21/2008 04:00am with
For some chuckles, read ‘Iraq Expert’ Perle Shills for Chalabi at Senate Panel
by Juan Cole, April 23, 2004: http://www.antiwar.com/cole/?articleid=2368
Here’s the transcript of the hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee referred to by Cole: http://bulk.resource.org/gpo.gov/hearings/108s/95512.txt
Posted 06/21/2008 12:32pm with
Preemptive, Preventive, or “Inventive”?
This was neither a “preemptive war” (an act considered justifiable in the face of an imminent threat) nor did it even rise to the level of an act of “preventive war” (launched in anticipation of a future loss of security and indistinct from a war of aggression). When Israel attacked Iraq’s the Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 it could at least be reasonably argued that they were preventing a possible nuclear strike against them.
But our specious rationale for attacking Iraq, the hypothetical transfer of imaginary WMD (OMG, did Condi just say “mushroom cloud”?) to al-Qaida, was so unlikely as to be laughable. Saddam was petrified of the REAL and imminent threat he faced from the US and sought to signal his position in one instance by having his own “international terrorist in residence” Abu Nidal shot in the head four times in the lead-up the the invasion. Perhaps this was Saddam’s bid to join us in the Global War On Terror?
Our attack was an unjustified attempt to grab Iraq’s oil and establish a new platform for the projection of U.S. power in the Middle East. Recall that when Bin Ladin demanded that all U.S. forces be recalled from Saudi Arabia, BUSH COMPLIED. The U.S. requires a ringside seat in the region so long as Israel remains our strategic ally.
There was no honor in this decision. This was international larceny disguised as revenge, perpetrated by armchair generals and chicken-hawks whose own personal contempt for our REAL warriors preempted a more sober and cautious approach to such a questionable enterprise. A pox on them . . .
Posted 06/21/2008 08:53pm with
Mr. Feith’s reconstruction of history directly contradicts eyewitness narratives from objective, disciplined, trained observers who worked in his shadow and the penumbra cast by the neo-conservative cabal that took charge of the machinery of war in the Office of Special Plans. I cite Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a career soldier who was right there as Feith demonstrated a fundamental incapacity to understand, much less project, “good order and discipline” (in her words), which is as essential to the functionality of military bureaucracy as it is to the war-making engine of battlefield management. Almost exactly three years ago, while mainstream news media were still in the thrall of the criminally incompetent neo-cons in the Pentagon and the White House, I wrote favorably of Kwiatkowski:
http://dark-wraith.com/2005/06/analysis-stone-sand-and-wr…
To this day, however, the mainstream media allow the construction of history to be generated in a debate among the distended, self-exonerating insiders of the Bush Administration, none of whom have suffered by any measure, as have the Iraqis and the Afghans in the still-hot cauldron of fevered dreams of the pretenders to the throne of Empire now crumbling.
Posted 06/23/2008 03:00am with
Thank you darkwraith for link to your article on Lt. Col. Kwiatkowski. She may not have been able to stop the madness, but she tried her best. What a courageous military officer, considering the treacherous political warzone she was deployed to. I am quite certain that her writings informed and and appalled then inspired many of her colleagues above and below her in the chain of command. There has been no shortage of top brass who have taken a stand against this cabal of neocon lunatics. Soldiers like Kwiatkowski will one day earn their honorable place in history for the efforts they made to stop the madness. I pray that it’s true that the current Joint Chiefs Of Staff have made it known to Bush and Cheney that they will not obey any order to attack Iran.
Posted 06/23/2008 03:46am with
Poor Doug Feith, the Pentagon team’s, and his own historical standing is being damaged.
“It caused enormous damage to me personally,” Feith said. “I wasn’t in a position to contradict false and damaging things said about me.”
Feith will never understand “enormous personal damage” until he loses a child in a war that should never have happened and to which he holds personal & professional blame.
As a Gold Star mother (my son was KIA in May 2004) I have no sympathy for the likes of Feith (or Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice, Perle et al). Feith’s efforts to rewrite history are an insult to the country, but mostly to the military; the boots on the ground who acted on the orders of their commander-in chief. Fortunately, there are sufficient witnesses to this hideous chapter in our country’s history to keep him from gaining any traction to his convenient 20-20 recall and we will not be silent.
Notwithstanding my hopes for all of them to sit in judgment at the Hague, the least I can ask is that the lot of them live a miserable life until the heat of Hell is hot enough to accept them for eternity. Even that might be too good for them.
Posted 06/23/2008 11:51am with
HELLO GOLD STAR MOTHER.
Most of us will never really know your pain about the loss of your son, but there are many of us who share your anger and fury.
Little by little, we will keep on speaking till we finally stop these war criminals.
Feith and his snivelling, cowardly accomplices and bosses will indeed get their final judgement.
I have never met you, but I know your son is in Heaven, watching down as you tell the truth.
Much love and respect from a guy in oz.
Posted 06/23/2008 11:51am with
HELLO GOLD STAR MOTHER.
Most of us will never really know your pain about the loss of your son, but there are many of us who share your anger and fury.
Little by little, we will keep on speaking till we finally stop these war criminals.
Feith and his snivelling, cowardly accomplices and bosses will indeed get their final judgement.
I have never met you, but I know your son is in Heaven, watching down as you tell the truth.
Much love and respect from a guy in oz.
Posted 06/23/2008 10:59pm with
Mr. Risen has written a compelling book review on Mr. Fieth’s book, “War and Decision.” I haven’t read the book yet but will. From other things that I’ve read about the book it is heavily referenced with documentation of official papers.
I was rather surprised at the anti-semitism and ad hominem attacks on our ally and some of our elected officials in the comments section. More like the raving of maniac’s than considered thought; suited for something like Kos but certainly not for a James Risen review.
Posted 06/24/2008 06:45am with
Mr. Feith’s book is summarized by him in the Hugh Hewitt show, 60 Minutes, the Daily Show with John Stewart, NPR Morning Edition, PBS Tavis Smiley, This Week in Defense, CSIS Event, and in five videos presented by National Review Online. You can see these summaries and get the gist of his case at http://waranddecision.com He claims the reason the US went to war was this: “What the jihadist threat represents, and what 9/11 drove home, is that people who could just bypass our military can come in, in relatively small numbers, and do something as absolutely mind-boggling as destroy the World Trade Center towers, both of them, knock them down, destroy the west side of the Pentagon. And what we were concerned about in the days right after 9/11 is what are the other follow-on attacks that might occur? And what would be the effect on American society if there had been a series of them? It doesn’t take enormously large numbers on the part of the jihadists to pull this off.” His vision was not specifically focused on Iraq but considered the attack could come from one of the many jihadist groups around the world—but he concluded that the state most likely to help such group would be Iraq.
Every fact he alleges is supported by end notes in the book and on the WarandDecision internet site. He even publishes the many documents on which he relies so that you won’t have to rely on his description of it. They are available at the site. The royalties he receives from the book are to be turned over to veterans groups.
He points out that the strategy he recommended following the war was to turn over control of Iraq quickly to the Iraqis just as they had Afghanistan to the Afghans following the defeat of the Taliban. They pushed Chalabi, not as leader of the new government, but just as someone to take charge of the process of arriving at a new Iraqi government—giving him a chance but not a boost. This did not go as planned because of the opposition at the State Department and the CIA. But for the lengthy occupation that ensued in lieu of this program, he suggests the insurgency likely would not have developed.
His book appears to be based on documented facts and his allegations of his reasons appear to be reasonable. Demonizing Feith without challenging his facts as wrong and his reasons as unconvincing as many of the commenters have done has not convinced me of anything except that the Main Stream Media has been very effective in its blame-America-first line. According to Joseph Lieberman, this has been the Democrats foreign policy view since the 60s, a great change from the patriotic view the party advocated in the great struggles against Fascrism and Communism, the two other utopian schemes we defeated with losses far greater than suffered so far in Iraq. .
Posted 06/24/2008 11:51am with
How do you know what you know? Have you ever been deceived? What about when you thought Che Guevara was a hero of the people? Most of what we think we know about the issues Feith discusses is based on journalists and on the opinions of people who aren’t necessarily informed. I read Feith’s book. He invites serious debate and presents credible evidence.
Posted 07/03/2008 03:43am with
Liar, liar pants on fire…I have a couple of questions. What has Israel ever given us, really? The Arab countries are the ones we get the oil from. Why such blind almost fanatical support fior Israel? They even send spies on our country. We caught one(Pollard) and God only knows how mwny more are out there. Why send our young men and women to conduct Israel’s war? We criticized the Palestinians and former Iraq and Iran for violations of UN rules but Israel has committed even more violations but it is never mentioned. I could give a hoot about those countries but our government’s actions makes our country look like Israel’s lapdog, just like Blair looked like Bush’s lapdog. What the hell for? Why are a lot of Americans so naive about 911? I couldn’t believe at first that our own people and fellow “Americans” (they are not worth being called Americans) can do the things they did to us in 911 (by blowing up the World Trade and sendiing a missile into the Pentagon)but they did. Is it too horrible to accept this fact so WE DO NOT WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT. Conspiracy? Of course, why not? The ends justifies the means after all. The Constitution was designed to protect us from enemies from WITHIN as from without. What happens when the people supposed to protect us are the very people attacking us, from within. God help us. What happened to our great country that we have allowed such people to exist and do the things they have done and still continuing to do?
Posted 07/05/2008 08:08am with
The neo-cons were blinded by their faith in ideology and the certainty of their infallibility regardless of the facts or reality. It’s not the first time this has happened and it is a cautionary tale for those who care about effective democratic self-government and functioning republican institutions, which is why we must be careful of those who will develop opinions based on excessive partisanship or ideology. The greatest evils of human history have been created by simplifications: among them communism, fascism, laissez-faire capitalism and the revealed religions, both secular and sacred, that demand absolute belief without evidence. That is why most revolutions devolve into oppression and dictatorship. We were lucky that the American revolution was guided less by ideology than faith in self-government for the general welfare.
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Feith can place a thousand endnotes in his book but if they are selective then they tell more about his desire to avoid accountability than they do about what happened. For example, he seems to expend a great deal of effort in distancing himself from Chalabi. The facts that we do have contradict his assertions. The Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon used information from the dubious Chalabi source “Curveball” to skew the case for war. This included the assertions about rolling biological labs, an al Qaeda-Iraq relationship and WMDs. Feith states there was no “conspiracy” to place Chalabi as head of the government but he was given a key role in the Iraq interim government council under the Coalition Provisional Authority. (A fact missing from the article). This was the culmination of many years of seeking to support the Iraqi National Congress (INC), which was Chalabi’s group. Thanks to lobbying by the neo-cons outside of government (which included Perle, Feith and Wolfowitz, among others) the (Republican) Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 which funneled almost $97 million to the INC. Feith would scapegoat Powell and the CIA but the INC also received $33 million dollars from the State Department between 2000 and September 2003 and $335K a month from the DIA from September 2003 through May 2004—and that is only what has been uncovered by auditors and the GAO. He was a special guest of First Lady Bush at the 2004 State of the Union Address. So SOMEONE influential and senior in the Administration was working very hard to finance Chalabi and the INC and all fingers point to his sponsors: the principals at the Project for the New American Century—the neo-cons who drove the case for war based on a belief in American hegemony in the region. Ockham’s Razor, regardless of all of the jesuitical arguments that Feith and his ilk can come up with to try to cloud the issue, tells us that the obvious really is obvious. Documentary evidence, while the best evidence for determining motivation or establishing a direct relationship in a simple manner, is not the only evidence. Phone calls, undocumented personal conversations, unwritten orders can all be determined by the historian through cause and effect—what is called circumstantial evidence. No “smoking gun” standard stands against common sense. Documents can and have been destroyed and altered. Criminals are convicted every day absent documentary evidence.
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The judgment of history will fall very heavily against this Administration. The cause and effect of Iraq and the economic effects we are now feeling has yet to be fully realized and the history yet to be assessed. Despite their assertions to the contrary, historians tend to get things right about an American Administration right. Few presidents have risen significantly over time. Even Truman—that favorite of Nixon and Bush apologists—though vilified and unpopular when he left office in 1953, was seen as an above-average president by historians when he left office; one who got the small things wrong but the big things right. He has risen to near-great in assessment but no one has gone from being considered a failure to rise above an assessment of mediocrity or malfeasance. I am afraid that this time in our history will be seen as not only one in which we experienced that manner of human frailty, but also an Administration, blinded by faith in the rightness of its cause and ideology, subjected the country to abuse of power and tyranny. Those who continue to want to paint this as a partisan issue (like Senator Lieberman) and not learn from it damn future generations of Americans to a worse fate.
Posted 07/17/2008 06:20pm with
It is disheartening to see critics of the Iraq invasion get sucked into yet another diversionary argument by its architects (Feith, etc). It is of virtually no importance whether these architects intended (conspired?) to install Chalabi as their puppet. The ONLY importance of Chalabi is that his lies were used to support three implausible claims: (1) that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction; (2) that our invasion would be welcomed; and (3) that Chalabi or someone else could form a government which would allow us to leave quickly. By getting people to argue about whether their implausible post- invasion plans depended upon a conspiracy to install Chalabi and the supposed paralyzing battle between Defense, State, the White House and the CIA over this conspiracy, we are diverted from understanding that there was no plausible way that a stable government could have been created following the US invasion. Feith had no such plan; Wolfowitz had no such plan; Rumsfeld had no such plan; Cheney had no such plan; Perle had no such plan; Powell had no such plan; Rice had no such plan; (well you get the point). One or more of the following was bound to occur: (a) civil war between the Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish factions; (b) partition of the country into two or three pieces; (c) takeover of the country by the Shiite majority, probably aided by Iran; (d) direct takeover of all or part of the country by Iran; (e) an invasion by Turkey to suppress the creation of a hostile Kurdish state on its border. None of these outcomes were or are better than having Saddam Hussein continue in office.
There is a reason that Senator McCain, while claiming that the surge was a success, says we have to stay in Iraq for 50 or 100 years. There is a reason why the first President Bush, supported by almost all of his advisors, decided not to take over Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein during the First Gulf War. There is reason why Senator Clinton (when she thought she was going to be the next president) practically begged the current President Bush to get us out of Iraq before leaving office. And now, unfortunately, there is a reason why Senator Obama is waffling on his pledge to leave Iraq. The invasion was a mistake which cannot be easily fixed. There was no way out and there is no way out. To borrow the title of a recent movie, “There Will Be Blood”
Posted 07/31/2008 12:39am with
Risen did a poor job of summarising Feith’s narrative. According to Feith, his key goal, accepted by Rumsfeld and President Bush, was to have a very short occupation—to turn over governance to the Iraqis in two or three weeks after the fall of Baghdad. The purpose was to avoid an insurgency or at least to weaken it. This policy had been a success in Afghanistan when there was quickly a plan to have a “loya jurga”, a tribal gathering to decide on a new government. It wasn’t long before Hamid Karzai, an “external”, was installed by the Iraqi tribal governments.
Feith had designed an interim government arrangement in which some “externals” such as Chalabi and others Iraqis who had been outside Iraq, along with “internals”, would take over governance just long enough to organize a vote for a government that would arrange for an election and the resulting government would write a constitution.
Armitage (State) and Tenet (CIA) did not like Chalabi nor did Bremer who replace Jay Garner. They claimed he would never be acceptable to the internal Iraqis. (At one time Chalabi had accused the CIA of incompetence). According to Feith, Armitage, Tenet and Bremer took actions so as to avoid the interim plan for some 14 months which exacerbated the insurgency. Finally Bush told Bremer he would have to leave and shortened the process, otherwise the Americans might still be sovereign today and the insurgency still flourishing.
It appears that Armitage, Tenet, and Bremer were wrong as the Iraqis have elected Chalabi and several other “externals” to full time positions in the Iraqi government. Feith strongly believes that the failure to adopt his interim Iraqi government plan was the cause of that insurgency or at least strengthened it appreciably.
This is what I got from Feith’s book. He claims this history is derived from contemporaneous notes and memoranda. I have not, as yet, checked them.
Two other points Feith raised were quite interesting. He denied the purpose of the Iraq invasion was to introduce democracy into the Middle East although he thought that was an ancillary benefit but would not have, by itself, justified the invasion. Nor was the invasion for the purpose of revenge against al Qaeda. He claimed it was to avoid further attacks such as had occurred on 9/11. These were not necessarily attacks by al-Qaeda. There was and still is a global network of many terrorist organizations other than al Qaeda and he was concerned that a state terrorist such as Iran, North Korea or Iraq could provide WMD to one or more of these groups. Why Iraq? Feith explains that they had tried diplomacy on Iraq and it hadn’t work. They had yet to fully explore diplomacy with Iran and North Korea. Although no stockpiles of WMD were found, the inspectors showed that Iraq still maintained resources from which WMD could be manufactured in a very short time frame.
Finally, one more interesting point was the discussion over the interaction between Defense and CIA on whether there were meaningful contacts between Iraq and terrorist groups. One of Feith’s researchers found that CIA was systematically devaluating many contacts between Iraq and terrorist groups because of its analysts preconceptions that a secular government such as that of Saddam Hussein would never collaborate with a religious extremist group—even against a common enemy. Defense’s people thought that each contact should be evaluated on its own merits and not be watered down or filtered out because of the CIA’s preconceptions. According to Feith, this was a matter of professionalism rather than a question of the administration trying to pressure the CIA to change its views as was leaked to the press by CIA. I have not yet checked the contemporaneous notes and memoranda on this point either.
Posted 07/31/2008 01:05am with
Risen was closer to Feith’s Narrative in his story for the New York Times.
Posted 08/01/2008 03:10pm with
There are a number of things wrong with Feith’s post hoc justification of the invasions and explanation of why “If only they had taken my advise, all would have been well” Webrand actually highlights these flaws in his attempted defense of Feith.
1) The Adminstration SAID it was invading because there were weapons of mass destruction. It never said it was invading because there were materials from which Iraq could make weapons of mass destruction and give them to our enemies. Why didn’t we say that before the invasion, instead of making this claim only when our public claims proved to be completely and utterly false?
2) If we invaded because we feared that Saddam was about to give WMD to terrorists, how could the brief invasion now claimed by Feith prevent that? The reason we had long supported Saddam was that he was surpressing the anti-American Shiite majority. In the absence of occupying American troops, no government friendly to the US can govern Iraq. If and when we leave, there will be a terrorist—friendly government (probably allied with Iran) in Iraq. This government will be motivated to help terrorists.
3) Consistent with #2, Feith admits that creating a democracy in Iraq was not the goal. However, contrary to Feith’s claim, democracy was not a hoped-for “ancillary benefit”. The US has long supported undemocratic governments in Epypt and Saudi Arabia because democratically-elected governments in these countries would be anti-American. We supported Saddam for this same reason and the Shah of Iran as well. (No one would describe the current Iran as a functioning democracy, but its government is more reflective of popular sentiment than are the governments of most of our allies in the Middle East and much more so than the Shah’s brutal dictatorship which we strongly supported for many years.) Since our invasion of Iraq, it is well documented that we have attempted, through a variety of means, to influence the elections in that country in ways which, if some country attempted to do to us, would end diplomatic relations.
4) Feith and Webrand’s argument that a similar plan in Afghanistan was a “success” is quite revealing. Like Iraq, we claimed that we invaded Afghanistran because our “negotiations” with their government failed to get us what we wanted—in this case, having Osama bin Laden and the rest of his criminal gang turned over to us. Of course, these negotiation were preposterous since, despite years of occupation, WE have not been able to capture or kill Osama or most of his followers. If we couldn’t do this over a period of years, how did we expect the Afghanistan government to do so in the short time we gave them? In good faith negotiations, you ask the other side to do something that they actually have the power to do.
5)Since our invasion, many (most?) things in Afghanistan has gotten worse. For example, prior to our invastion, the Taliban had virtually eliminated the poppy/opium business. Now they have reversed course and are using it to support their insurgency. It is the largest cash crop. If our invasion of Afghanistan was such a success, then why are we still there and why are both presidential candidates arguing that we have to send more troops? (Obama and others have suggested that we could have succeeded in Afghanistan if only we hadn’t pulled resources out in order to invade Iraq. Whatever its merits, I don’t suppose Feith will be making this argument.)
6) Well there is an answer to all of these questions. The goal of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq was long-term American control of these countries. While a brief invasion could not prevent the creation of a terrorist-friendly government in Iraq, long-term occupation might. Similarly, the surge can be viewed as a success if the goal was to reduce the insurgency to the point that Americans would stop complaining about the loss of American life and put up with the (hopefully reduced) costs of a permanent occupying force.
7) The Bush Administration has long claimed that we should ignore sentimentaly rhetoric and claims of good intentions and deal with the harsh realities of the world as they really are. Now that their policies have made all of those realities worse, they are writing books like Feith’s in which they beg us to judge them on their good intentions. They meant well. Unfortunately, for Feith and his friends, there is little evidence that anyone in the Bush administration meant well.
Posted 08/12/2008 12:20pm with
Lets see my choice is cranky old John McCain or that energetic young, smart black man Barack Obama?
McCain who does not know how to use a computer but is willing to learn if we elect him – I’ll just vote for that smart black man.
My Choices are: John McCain who says the economic downturn is psychological? – Na! I’ll vote for the smart black man.
McCain who says you are better off under George Bush? – Nope I’ll vote for the smart black man.
Mc Cain who wants to continue killing more people looking for weapons of mass destruction that do not exist? – Gee! I’ll vote for the smart black man.
McCain who believes that we should stay the course but is not willing to support the people he puts in harms way. – I’ll take a chance on the smart black man.
Should I vote for a man that does not know that 9-11 was caused by Osama Bin Laden not Sedam Hussein? – Easy! I’ll vote for the smart black man.
Vote for the man who does not know if the Sunnis or Sheits are our enemies? – No way I’ll vote for the smart black man.
Vote for the man who helped put our government on the China, Saudi Arabia credit card? – Not a chance I’ll vote for the smart black man.
Vote for the man with the worst temper in the Senate to have his finger on the nuclear button? – No way – I’ll vote for the smart black man.