Review War and Decision, Inside The Pentagon At The Dawn Of The War On Terrorism

Feith, Douglas, War and Decision, Inside The Pentagon At The Dawn Of The War On Terrorism, New York: Harper Collins, 2008

 

Douglas Feith was the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy in the Bush administration. War and Decision, Inside The Pentagon At The Dawn Of The War On Terrorism is his attempt to answer the critics of the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. His problem was that he tried to make this argument using what was known in 2008 when the justifications for war had been disproven. He twists and turns events and omits others to try to say that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United States while blaming the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and Paul Bremer for everything that went wrong. War and Decision is an amazing example of verbal gymnastics but ironically exposes many of the problems with the Iraq War.

 

The main take away from Feith’s book is that immediately after 9/11 the Bush administration wanted to go on the offensive and wasn’t happy with attacking Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It wanted to take on states and Iraq was first on its list because it had been a problem since the Gulf War. Talk about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and ties to terrorists and Osama bin Laden were simply justifications for removing Saddam Hussein something many in the White House thought should’ve been done in 1991.

 

Here are Feith’s main points:

 

1. Feith said the Iraq War was a defensive response to 9/11. Acting in self-defense is legal under international law. Feith then writes that President Bush and the Pentagon wanted an expansive view of the war on terror to attack any threat especially state sponsors of terrorism. That required offensive action. He repeats this contradiction several times that the U.S. was defending itself by going on the offensive. If America was only defending itself it would have only taken on Al Qaeda. Feith’s theory allowed the U.S. to go after Iraq because it was a nation which the Bush administration was much more comfortable dealing with than a terrorist group.

 

2. Feith never believed that Al Qaeda was a threat to the United States. He said the problem after 9/11 was that the U.S. could be hit from anywhere and from anyone and never says that Osama bin Laden would be involved. This was another way to open the door to attacking Iraq since it supported terrorist groups and trained foreign fighters.

 

3. Feith wrote that Iraq-Al Qaeda ties were not a major reason for war. He then complained that the 9/11 Commission said there was no connections between the two when he believed there was. This ignores multiple comments by President Bush and others that Iraq and Al Qaeda were allies and that Iraq could give WMD to bin Laden who could use them to attack the United States. Feith’s own office made a briefing that the CIA was ignoring the connections between the two and claimed Iraq was involved in 9/11. Feith made this point because no alliance was found between the two after the invasion so he tried to retract everything he and the White House said about the matter.

 

4. The threat from Iraq wasn’t that it had stockpiles of WMD but that Iraq had scientists that worked on WMD in the past, possessed dual use equipment that could be used to produce WMD in the future if sanctions were ever removed, and Iraqi intelligence had a biological program to assassinate opponents which Feith said proved Iraq was still making these weapons. Despite President Bush and officials constantly saying the problem with Iraq was that it had tons of WMD that was proven false after the invasion. Feith says the possibility that Iraq might produce WMD in the future represented an imminent threat and the U.S. public and Congress would’ve still supported war if his version was presented to them.

 

5. The problem with Iraq was that it could’ve given WMD to a terrorist group but what Feith writes more about is that Saddam might’ve moved against Kuwait or another Middle Eastern country again and if it had WMD or a nuclear bomb it could’ve deterred the United States from responding. What this shows is that Feith was still thinking about Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait like many others in the Bush administration. Feith stated that Iraq had been a problem since the 1990s and was more of one after 9/11. He ignored the fact that Iraq had WMD in 1990 and that didn’t stop the Gulf War from happening.

 

6. Feith claimed that it was the invasion commander General Franks who decided on using a small number of troops. Feith wrote that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld always deferred to his operational commanders. In fact, it was Rumsfeld who constantly pushed for the smallest possible number of troops leading to several revisions of the invasion plan. Rumsfeld also canceled sending one more division to Iraq right after the fighting ceased.

 

7. The U.S. did lots of planning for postwar Iraq. That’s true. What Feith doesn’t mention was that none of it was coordinated and groups would start working on the issue and then be replaced with a new one having no knowledge of what happened before. For example, two months before the war started the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) was created to run Iraq which only incorporated a small portion of the planning done before. There were many groups which came up with lots of ideas about what should happen in Iraq but little of it was actually used.

 

8. In October 2002 Rumsfeld wrote a memo on things that could go wrong in Iraq including not finding WMD and ethnosectarian strife. Feith claims this proves that the Pentagon predicted what happened after the invasion and that the paper was used for post-war planning. The memo wasn’t widely distributed and had no impact on any ideas for Iraq after the invasion.

 

9. Feith claims that the reason why the U.S. ended up being occupiers rather than liberators of Iraq was because the CIA, State and Paul Bremer opposed the Pentagon’s plan to quickly turn over power to Iraqi exiles. Feith said this was because the Agency and State were opposed to Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress being put into office. President Bush approved the Pentagon’s plan for turning over authority quickly after the invasion, and the ORHA was working on creating an Interim Iraqi Authority before it was closed. Feith runs into problems when he said the Pentagon tried to put together a provisional Iraqi government before the invasion but that was opposed by not only State and the CIA but Rumsfeld as well. Feith was right that it was ultimately Bremer who killed the idea. The State Department and the CIA were the main rivals of the Defense Department so Feith tries to blame them for nearly everything. Bremer was also picked by the Pentagon to run Iraq so it was its own choice that sunk its plan for an early Iraqi authority.

 

10. The CIA assessed that the Iraqi police were professional and would be on duty and that the Iraqi army would largely be intact and could handle security after the invasion. Both of these proved false and Feith blames them for the chaos that ensued. He also blamed the postwar looting on Baathists. He said the CIA didn’t discover this plan before the war and therefore the Agency was responsible for the pillaging as well which helped undermine the U.S. in Iraq. Feith said that he wrote a paper saying Iraqi police might not be adequate and a rapid reaction force should be created in the U.S. He says this was another example of the Pentagon planning for the postwar problems. The force was never created however. This is just another example of Feith’s pettiness and attempt to defer blame to the Pentagon’s rivals for almost everything.

 

What’s most ironic about War and Decision is that it brings up U.S. interrogations of Saddam Hussein after he was captured. Saddam said he wanted WMD to deter Iran and stop Iraq’s Kurds and Shiites rising up again like they did after the Gulf War. Saddam also dismissed the threat of war before 2003 because he didn’t see the U.S. as a real problem. Feith’s entire book is trying to paint Iraq as the most important issue facing America after 9/11 but Saddam didn’t really think the United States was a top priority. It’s just another example of how poorly written Feith’s book is. He tried to use what was discovered about Iraq by 2008 to make the argument for overthrowing Saddam but it just didn’t work because it didn’t have a foot to stand on.

 

If Al Qaeda wasn’t a real threat to the United States and it didn’t have a working relationship with Iraq who also didn’t have WMD why should President Bush still have invaded the country? That’s the question which Douglas Feith tries and fails to answer. What the reader gets is a highly convoluted argument that makes no sense. It ultimately comes down to the president, Feith, Rumsfeld and others all wanting to get rid of Saddam because they thought he should’ve been removed in 1991. That led to an eight year occupation, killed thousands of Iraqis and Americans and left behind one of the most dysfunctional and corrupt states in the world. For people like Feith he would’ve done it all over again and you can read why in War and Decision.

 

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