In Bad Feith

Andrew J. Bacevich reviews Douglas Feith’s apologia for the Iraq War at the Boston Review:

Setting aside combat memoirs, of which there are a growing number, the literature of the Iraq War divides neatly into two categories. The first category, dominated by journalistic observers, indicts. The second category, accounts authored by insider participants, acquits. The two books reviewed here fall into the second category: They are exercises in self-exculpation. Pretending to explain, their actual purpose is to deflect responsibility.

Douglas Feith and Ricardo Sanchez are not exactly marquee figures. Yet each for a time played an important role in America’s Mesopotamian misadventure. From 2001 to 2005 Feith served in the Pentagon as the third-ranking figure in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) under Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy. From 2003 to 2004 Lieutenant General Sanchez, now retired, served in Baghdad, commanding all coalition forces in Iraq.

Of the two accounts, Feith’s qualifies as the more sophisticated. It is also far and away the more dishonest. Feith trained as a lawyer, and War and Decision qualifies as a masterpiece of lawyerly, even Nixonian, obfuscation.

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In mounting this defense of OSD, Feith concentrates on two themes. In the first, he offers a highly imaginative revisionist account of Operation Iraqi Freedom’s rationale and justification. In the second, he absolves himself and his Pentagon colleagues of any responsibility for the invasion’s catastrophic aftermath.

According to Feith, for all the emphasis that senior U. S. officials prior to March 2003 placed on weapons of mass destruction and Saddam’s alleged ties to Al Qaeda, those issues do not explain why the Bush administration actually opted for war. The truth is that the United States invaded Iraq as an act of self-defense. Saddam’s regime, Feith explains, posed a direct, looming threat to America itself. To permit the Iraqi dictator to remain in power was to give him “a chance to intimidate and hurt the United States”—an intolerable prospect. Viewed from this perspective, the much-ballyhooed failure to find any nuclear or biological weapons or to establish any connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda is simply beside the point. Saddam’s record of misbehavior and his persistent antagonism toward the United States provided more than ample justification for war. Indeed, Feith insists, after 9/11 force had become the only reasonable option. Invading Iraq was not only justified; it was a moral and strategic imperative.

Although Operation Iraqi Freedom opened on a promising note, President Bush’s declaration of mission accomplished, televised worldwide on May 1, 2003, proved a trifle premature. Hard on the heels of Saddam’s removal came a protracted, costly, and deeply embarrassing insurgency. Feith’s second theme is an attempt to claim credit for the successful drive on Baghdad while blaming everyone else for the ensuing quagmire. In effect, he constructs a variation on what we might call the Manstein Defense, mimicking German generals like Erich von Manstein who crowned themselves with laurels for the Wehrmacht’s early victories while tagging Hitler with responsibility for the army’s later defeats.

As Feith tells the tale, he and his Pentagon colleagues insisted from the outset on styling the American invasion as an act of liberation. The idea was to topple Saddam, quickly hand over the reins of government to friendly Iraqis, and get out. “Iraq belonged to the Iraqis,” Feith writes, as if personally uncovering a profound truth. The model was to be Afghanistan, currently a narco-state riven with armed Islamic radicals, which Feith nonetheless depicts as a stupendous success. There, after the invasion of 2001, he observes, the United States “never became an occupying power.” Mere weeks after the fall of Baghdad, however, the United States unwisely jettisoned its strategy of liberation. Largely as a consequence of a series of ill-advised decisions by Bremer, it opted instead to occupy and reconstruct Iraq. This, according to Feith, proved a fateful, yet utterly avoidable “self-inflicted wound.”

Neither of these arguments stands up to even casual scrutiny. Yet however unwittingly, Feith tells a revealing story that demonstrates above all the astonishing combination of hubris and naiveté that pervaded Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon.    [more]