Rightshelf

By Pejman Yousefzadeh Comments (0) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

If there was any justice, Douglas Feith's book would get a great deal more attention from the press than would Scott McClellan's opportunistic tell-all. Unlike McClellan, who confines himself to reciting the words and arguments of others and who does not present any kind of original or interesting analysis, Feith presents genuine scholarship, an interesting and original argument concerning 9/11, American actions in Afghanistan and Iraq and the general war on terror and a valuable behind-the-scenes look at the way in which foreign policy, defense and national security policy was made during the course of the Bush Administration.

Feith's main critique of Administration policy when it comes to Iraq revolves around his argument that the Administration should have handed over power to the Iraqis far earlier than it actually did. The reason it failed to--according to Feith--was that the State Department and Paul Bremer were concerned that the Iraqis were not up to the task of handling things and needed a Coalition Provisional Authority to manage a period of transition Feith believes went on far too long. Additionally, Feith faults the State Department and the CIA for a hostile attitude towards "external" Iraqi leaders, including Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress. Feith's opinion of Chalabi is far kinder than that held by conventional wisdom and he points out, interestingly, that when Chalabi was sidelined after the ouster of Saddam Hussein's regime, the American opposition towards "externals" went by the wayside as well. Feith finds this opposition to have been bizarre--independent of any opinion of Chalabi specifically--since the United States relied on externals to head up the Afghan government after the fall of the Taliban and since externals occupied a number of high offices once the CPA was dissolved and power was handed over to the Iraqi people.

Feith additionally points out that the Pentagon was engaged in efforts to point out in advance all of the things that could possibly go wrong with the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime and the subsequent reconstruction period in Iraq. These efforts manifested themselves most notably in the "parade of horribles" memo drawn up at the direction of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to lay out all of the potential pitfalls associated with the execution and aftermath of Operational Iraqi Freedom. Feith does not shrink from describing and decrying problems, errors and blunders associated with the American reconstruction effort, but he still makes a potent and powerful case backing the decision to remove Saddam Hussein. He reminds readers that the belief that Saddam possessed WMD's was universally accepted from the Clinton Administration on and helpfully cites quotes from Democrats stating in stark and unmistakable terms their belief--independent, in many cases, of any intelligence analysis from the Bush Administration--that Saddam possessed WMD's. In addition, Feith points to the Duelfer Report and the work of David Kay and his inspectors, who pointed out that while WMD's could not be found in post-Saddam Iraq, the capacity to regenerate a WMD program was entirely in existence and that a terrible chance would have been taken if Saddam were left in power with a weakening sanctions regime doing next to nothing to restrain any of his malevolent intentions. Feith argues that in the wake of 9/11, ensuring punishment for the perpetrators of the attack was less important than actually preventing a future attack and given Saddam's past acts of aggression, plus what was discovered concerning Saddam's WMD program by Kay and Duelfer, if the decision was made to leave Saddam in power, a future attack would have rightfully brought opprobrium upon the Bush Administration as those very Democrats who in the past sounded the alarm concerning Saddam's behavior would have savaged the Administration for not having taken their warnings seriously. (Rightfully so, though again, it should be noted that many of those same Democrats are currently effectively attacking the Administration for having agreed with their past alarm-raising comments concerning Saddam. Oh, the irony.)

Read on . . .

Feith is also quite right to point out that the Administration has failed, from a public relations standpoint, to fight back against charges that it lied the nation into war. The recent Senate Intelligence Committee "findings" failed to uncover any such effort, as did the bipartisan Silberman-Robb Commission. For whatever reason, however, the Bush Administration failed to aggressively defend itself with the findings of the Silberman-Robb Commission or the Kay and Duelfer reports and it did not strike back against its critics by pointing out what Silberman-Robb, Kay or Duelfer said about Iraq's capacity to restart its WMD-related activities or the pre-war intelligence consensus on Iraq's WMD program that was accepted by Republicans and Democrats alike since the Clinton Administration. This public relations failure on the part of the Bush Administration has had and will continue to have massively deleterious consequences and will harm efforts aimed at accurate policymaking in the future as the "Bush Lied!" meme itself continues to mislead in largely unabated fashion.

It should be noted that I have a significant disagreement with Feith concerning his critique of "realists." First of all, I will note anew that "realism" is an international relations theory that seeks to explain past and present nation-state behavior, and to predict future nation-state behavior. It is not a set of policy prescriptions. As such, the real argument is between Feith and practitioners of realpolitik, which is a set of policy prescriptions.

Feith argues that the practitioners of realpolitik have it wrong when they say that American interests are unaffected when other countries have "totalitarian governments and hostile philosophies." This, I think, is a misreading of realpolitik. It is certainly possible for American interests to be harmed by "hostile philosophies" but only if those philosophies are in line with the interests of the nation-state that holds them. This is not always the case; Feith cites the liberation of the former Warsaw Pact countries and their embrace of a close working relationship and friendship with the United States and its Western allies as proof that a change in government can bring with it a change in nation-state interests. But it is also possible to state that the former Warsaw Pact countries always had an interest in cooperating with the United States and its Western allies and that the only reason they couldn't was because they were effectively subordinated to Soviet control through a pervasive exercise of Soviet command and power concerning the governmental and decision-making apparatuses of those countries. Feith is right to praise democratization--even as he points out that democratization was never an overriding principle to go to war in the first place; the overriding principle was to remove the threat that Saddam posed--but he neglects the fact that democratization serves realpolitik goals. Democratization encourages transparency. Transparency allows other nation-states to calculate more accurately what a democratic nation-state is up to. This naturally reduces the commission of disastrous mistakes and blunders that oftentimes arise because of failed attempts to calculate the interests and intentions of opaque authoritarian or totalitarian states.

As is now well known, Feith has set up a website for his book that gives massive--and largely unprecedented--public access to the documents on which he relied and which he used to write his book. This alone is a valuable contribution to public scholarship. Additionally, as mentioned before, Feith is giving all proceeds from the book to charitable organizations dedicated towards assisting veterans and their families. (Note: I was a participant on a conference call with Douglas Feith in which he talked about his book and the arguments he made.)

Feith's book is a useful and important tool with which to examine American policy in the aftermath of September 11th. One will not agree with everything that Feith wrote. But War and Decision is an important work with which to grapple and a serious study of the post-9/11 world of American policymaking cannot take place successfully without it.