[Rhodes22-list] This day in history

Sun May 4 22:11:20 EDT 2008

Herb,

Yeah, I know.  I got side-tracked in my reading this week after finishing
"The Bin Ladens"by Steve  Koll (the guy who wrote "Ghost Wars") and meant to
start Yon's book.  Instead, I'm about a 100 pages into "War and Decision",
the new book out by Douglas Feith.  Fasinating reading!  I'll post a WSJ
report at the bottom.  Sometimes the world just isn't as simple as people
think.  Well, maybe it is for simple people.

Brad

------------------

Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal has reviewed Douglas Feith's
indispensable book *War and
Decision*<http://www.amazon.com/War-Decision-Inside-Pentagon-Terrorism/dp/0060899735>.
His review is such a strong summary of the book that I assumed it was too
long to post on Power Line. But when I looked at the review again, I
realized Stephens got it done in 12 paragraphs. Accordingly, here is the
full review:

In October 2002, a memorandum outlining the worst-case scenarios for postwar
Iraq was circulated among the top members of the Bush administration. Among
its 30 or so warnings were the following:

• "US could fail to find WMD on the ground."

• "Post-Saddam stabilization and reconstruction efforts by the United States
could take not two to four years, but eight to ten years."

• "The United States could become so absorbed in its Iraq effort that we pay
inadequate attention to other serious problems -- including other
proliferation and terrorism problems."

• "Syria and Iran could help our enemies in Iraq. . . . Iraq could
experience ethnic strife among Kurds, Sunnis, and Shia."

The provenance of this remarkable memo? If you guessed the State Department,
the Central Intelligence Agency or anyone else who today might claim to have
been unhappy with the administration's drift toward war, you guessed wrong.
Rather, the memo was the handiwork of former Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld, who drafted it with the assistance of his key military and
civilian advisers. One of them, former Undersecretary for Policy Douglas J.
Feith, has now given us "War and Decision," the best account to date of how
the administration debated, decided, organized and executed its military
responses to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

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."

Or take the idea that administration neocons dismissed the work of the
"Future of Iraq" project and the advice it allegedly offered for rebuilding
Iraq. In fact, the head of that project, exiled Iraqi scholar Kanan Makiya,
was himself something of a neocon favorite, and the project consisted mainly
of conceptual discussions of everything from democratization to judicial
reform -- everything, that is, except a meaningful blueprint for what to do
on the proverbial Day After. By contrast, Mr. Feith and his staff did devise
a plan for transitioning to a new Iraqi-led government, but the plan was
swiftly set aside by U.S. proconsul L. Paul Bremer.

Equally bogus is the idea that the neocons pushed the case for war as part
of a utopian scheme to "impose democracy." In fact, a White House memo from
October 2002 shows that democracy ranked last on an eight-point list of U.S.
goals for Iraq, and even there the modest objective was to "[encourage] the
building of democratic institutions." By contrast, the primary goals were,
first, an Iraq that "does not threaten its neighbors" and, second, one that
"renounces support for, and sponsorship of, international terrorism." The
WMD issue ranked fourth.

Finally, there is the myth that administration officials such as Vice
President Dick Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz
cherry-picked and "politicized" intelligence to build their case for war --
a myth that persists despite two bipartisan commissions concluding that
nothing of the sort happened.

What is true is that intelligence was often politicized internally, mainly
by CIA bureaucrats with their own policy axes to grind. One such policy ax,
widely shared at the State Department, was that exiled Iraqi leaders (known
as "externals") had no credibility with the "internals" -- Iraqis on the
inside. This notion, which seems to have been motivated mainly by an
institutional loathing of exiled Iraqi leader Ahmed Chalabi, was finally
debunked when Iraqis elected a government that consisted mainly of so-called
externals, including Mr. Chalabi.

Before then, however, the mostly phony external/internal dichotomy persuaded
the State Department to drag its heels on organizing Saddam's external
opponents into a coherent political force that could quickly assume
responsibility for Iraq once it was liberated. It also persuaded Mr.
Armitage that a U.S. occupation lasting several years would be necessary to
cultivate suitable "internal" leaders with the right democratic credentials.
Mr. Feith, by contrast, thinks that "maintaining an occupation government
for over a year" was the administration's "chief mistake" in Iraq -- an odd
remark if you believe Mr. Feith and his ilk were hell-bent on imposing
American-style democracy on the recalcitrant natives.

"War and Decision" offers many more such examples where perceptions of the
administration's conduct collide with the reality of it. Much to Mr. Feith's
credit, however, his book is no apologia, even for those he obviously
admires. Of Mr. Rumsfeld, he notes that "his style of leadership did not
always serve his own purposes: He bruised people and made personal enemies."
As for President Bush, Mr. Feith argues -- rightly, in my view -- that his
problem was not that he "discouraged challenges" but rather that he showed
"an excessive tolerance of indiscipline, even of disloyalty, from his own
officials."

Would the U.S. have been better off never undertaking to remove Saddam from
power? Certainly not, though one is left with the impression that the forces
of bureaucratic inertia and ideological resistance within the U.S.
government posed nearly as great an obstacle to the administration's
planning as Saddam himself. More important, Mr. Feith understands that
"policy making often involves choosing to accept one set of likely problems
over another." That's not an insight that will sway public opinion about the
war, but it is indispensable to understanding both the choices already made
and those that lie ahead, for this administration as well as the next.

On Sun, May 4, 2008 at 8:57 PM, Herb Parsons <hparsons at parsonsys.com> wrote:

> Brad,
>
> I KNOW you realize you're talking to the wind. This whole discussion
> reminds me of the kids in high school that were "so much smarter" than
> those dumb-ass teachers, who then turned into the co-workers who were
> "so much smarter" than the dumb-ass owner of the companies I worked for.
> Of course, all these "smart people" failed to ever demonstrate their
> "smartness" by accomplishing a fraction of what the "dumb-asses" of the
> word have.
>
> In other words, consider the source.
>
>
> Brad Haslett wrote:
> > Earth to Frone,
> >
> > Did you catch the snippet from Rummy the other day that his investments
> were
> > doing well?  You think he invested in Castro's Cuba or the country that
> > dumbass Bush destroyed?
> >
> > Brad
> >
> > On Sun, May 4, 2008 at 8:13 PM, <FCrawford0707 at aol.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >> In a message dated 5/3/2008 8:28:50 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
> >> R22RumRunner at aol.com writes:
> >>
> >> Herb,
> >> This isn't about me or my mother. This is a discussion about  the
> dumbest
> >> SOB
> >> that has ever taken the oath of office. I didn't  call you on breaking
> the
> >> rules, that was someone else.
> >>
> >> Rummy
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> Rummy - good for you to have the guts to say it as it is.  Although
>  there
> >> is
> >> more to it than dumb - Bush has done so much damage to our country  in
> a
> >> mere
> >> 8 years that one wonders if he could have been worse had  he been
> trying
> >> to
> >> damage us.  It is hard to find a single policy  that favors the people
> of
> >> our
> >> country over whatever special interest he happened  to favor on a given
> >> day.
> >> Then there was the "proclamation" that if you  "considered " sailing to
> >> Cuba,
> >> your boat was subject to confiscation.   Thanks for your candor - Bush
> >> will be
> >> ranked either just above or just below  Buchanan.
> >>        Frone Crawford
> >>        s/v Sunday  Morning
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> **************Wondering what's for Dinner Tonight? Get new twists on
> >> family
> >> favorites at AOL Food.
> >> (http://food.aol.com/dinner-tonight?NCID=aolfod00030000000001)
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> >>
> >>
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> >
> >
> >
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