War & Punishment
Feith on war, media, and history.
An NRO Q&A
Scott McClellan has made a stir with his book, What Happened, but it’s former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, who sheds some light on what happened in the Bush administration vis-à-vis the Iraq war in his book, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism. He recently took questions from National Review Online editor Kathryn Lopez about the book, it’s treatment in the media, and the war.
Kathryn Jean Lopez: What’s your main goal for War and Decision?
Douglas J. Feith: I wrote War and Decision to provide a documented account of how the Bush administration developed the strategy for responding to the 9/11 attack. I want readers to understand what the president’s team aimed to accomplish in toppling the Taliban and Saddam Hussein regimes. The story is fascinating and important and I tell it from the actual memos we wrote for the president — and from the notes that I took at the key meetings of the Principals Committee and the National Security Council.
Several dozen books have created a conventional wisdom about Iraq policy that’s inaccurate on almost every main point. They did not rely on official records — the actual memos written at the time by the top officials for the key meetings. Rather, they relied either on anonymous sources or on after-the-fact interviews with officials who claimed (without substantiation) to remember what happened in meetings that occurred years before the interviews.
The actual written record refutes the widely believed but false notion that the President came to office hell-bent on war in Iraq and unwilling to consider options short of war. It disproves the assertion that the administration manipulated intelligence to “lie” the country into supporting the war. It exposes the falseness of the charge that the administration failed to plan for postwar Iraq. It counters the now-common contention that Saddam Hussein posed no terrorism threat and no WMD threat. My book brings forward important parts of that written record.
Lopez: Does Paul Bremer take an unfair bulk of the blame for what went wrong in Iraq?
Feith: In my view, Bremer has received much unfair criticism — especially for U.S. de-Baathification policy and for the decision to dissolve the Iraqi army. War and Decision explains why I think criticism on these matters has been unjust. But on other issues, I believe Bremer made large mistakes.
The single biggest mistake the United States made in Iraq, as I see it, was the decision to maintain an occupation government for 14 months, unlike what we had done in Afghanistan, where we overthrew the Taliban but did not establish a US occupation. The US occupation of Iraq helped fuel the insurgency. It tainted the Americans as occupiers and forfeited the opportunity to consolidate our position as liberators. And it was a decision in which Bremer was instrumental.
The latter chapters of my book deal with this history in detail.
Lopez: Bremer has defended himself on NRO. Do you disagree with his recounting of history — that he was following presidential orders, not defying them, when he didn’t “grant sovereignty to a group of Iraqi exiles immediately after Saddam’s defeat”?
Feith: Before my book came out, Bremer wrote that piece in which he anticipated that I would criticize him for disobeying presidential orders. But that is not what I criticize him for in my book. In fact, I take pains in the book to explain why Bremer had grounds to think he was authorized to take the positions he took.
My objection to Bremer’s policy — his refusal to turn substantial authority over to Iraqis soon after Saddam’s overthrow — was that it was unwise, not that it was insubordinate.
Lopez: How do you defend the statement “the record does not support the now-uncommon accusations that [President Bush and his advisers] were either reckless or fraudulent”?
Feith: The deliberations I review in my book show that the President and his advisers grappled in good faith with the range of national security challenges arising out of the 9/11 attack, some of which were unprecedented. The record shows that we did so honestly.
We made some important factual errors — for example, relying on the CIA’s assessment that chemical and biological weapons stockpiles would be found in Iraq — and some errors of judgment, but those errors were not fraudulent. I saw no evidence that the president or his team tried to deceive the Congress or the public.
The argument embodied in the slogan “Bush lied, people died” is itself a lie.
Lopez: Will the history books ever view the Iraq war that way?
Feith: If, down the road, historians take the documentary record seriously — as I’ve done in my book — and if other officials produce well-documented memoirs, the history books may in time promote an accurate picture of the Iraq war that is entirely at odds with today’s conventional wisdom.
I refer in my book to criticisms of the administration that are understandable as politics, but are bad history. I venture that “When there are no longer political motives to say such things, no serious person will say them.”
Lopez: Where did the WMDs go?
Feith: We know that Saddam once had WMDs — after all, he used them against Iran and against his own people. And we know we did not find them. There are only three possible ways to explain this: He destroyed them. He hid them. Or he transferred them out of Iraq. There is no fourth possible explanation.
A multinational intelligence team — the Iraq Survey Group — concluded after the Saddam’s overthrow that Iraqi officials “probably” destroyed them, but the ISG said it did not find dispositive evidence of the destruction.
We may learn more in time — for example, when we finally get around to reading the vast amounts of official Iraqi documents that still remained unexamined. Perhaps in the future we’ll find authoritative evidence that he either destroyed the WMDs, hid them, or transferred them abroad.
Lopez: Did Bush sell the war wrong?
Feith: The president could have done a much better job of explaining the rationale for the war to the public. But the gravest communications problem wasn’t the “selling” of the war before it started, but the president’s decision to change his rhetoric about Iraq after we failed to find WMD stockpiles. From the fall of 2003 on, the president largely stopped talking about Saddam’s record of hostility to us, about Saddam’s aggression and threats. Instead, President Bush talked almost exclusively about the future and about democracy promotion.
This shift in rhetoric hurt the president’s credibility. It encouraged critics of the war to rewrite (that is, misstate) history, confident that the White House wouldn’t challenge their revisionism. And it moved the goal post away from us. It went beyond the original concept of victory — which was to remove the threats inherent in Saddam’s regime. Victory was effectively redefined as the achievement of stable democracy in Iraq. This new and higher goal was not obviously tied to key U.S. interests — and, in any event, many Americans saw it as unrealistic.
Critics often focus on the “selling” of the war, but the key question, in my opinion, is whether the president made the right decision in deciding that the risks of leaving Saddam in power justified the war, despite the war’s obvious and non-obvious risks. I think he did. The dangers in leaving Saddam in power were very large. Many people now tend to discount those dangers, because Saddam and his sons are dead and gone. But Saddam’s record gave President Bush grounds to conclude that those dangers were grave and even weightier than the formidable risks of removing Saddam’s regime.
Lopez: Has Don Rumsfeld been subject to unfair criticism?
Feith: Some of the criticism has been unfair. Most unfair has been the accusation that he is ideological and closeminded. He is not — in fact, he’s the opposite of ideological: he continually questions his own assumptions and ideas. He wants to know if his thoughts need revision in light of new facts. He invites challenge of his thinking.
But he is a sharp debater and I saw him at the Pentagon demolish briefers who were unrigorous in the logic, or vague in their language or incapable of supporting their propositions factually or analytically. It’s clear that a number of people interpreted his devastating intolerance for such failings as closemindedness.
Lopez: Is the so-called democracy project destined to doom?
Feith: I not exactly sure of what you mean by the democracy project. Some people have claimed that the Bush administration went to war in Iraq in order to spread democracy. I don’t think that was the case. In my view, it would not have been proper to go to war for that reason.
At the same time, I believe that the U.S. has an important national interest in encouraging the spread of democracy. Democratic reforms could possibly, over time, help make the Middle East more peaceful and prosperous — and more humane. If democratic institutions spread and grew in the Muslim world, it could help counter the appeal of jihadist extremism. The events of recent years have stimulated debate in the Muslim world about democracy. Some important good developments might occur down the road as a result. The US will continue to have an interest in such developments, so I don’t think the US will lose interest in promoting democracy.
Lopez: The New York Times is evidently not reviewing your book. Why would you ever want them to? Wouldn’t it almost certainly be an attack?
Feith: I would like the Times and other journals to take the book seriously and discuss it, even criticize it. The book deals with many important issues on which reasonable people can differ.
I don’t think it would be professional for papers like the Times or the Washington Post to ignore the book — to fail to ask serious people to read it and review it. It is a first hand account by someone who played a role in top-level national security policy making in this momentous period. It is provocative, analytical and extensively documented. I think it deserves to be reviewed intelligently, whether or not by someone who agrees with its conclusions.
Lopez: What worries you most about this next election? Would we lose Iraq if we pulled out immediately?
Feith: My concerns about the election are (1) that the withdrawal rhetoric of Obama may be spurring Iraqis to hedge their bets and to withhold cooperation with American forces and (2) the positive recent developments in Iraq — in the security and political arenas — could be undermined and reversed if the next U.S. administration curtails U.S. help too soon.
National Review Online - article.nationalreview.com |
