So Douglas Feith's brand-new book comes out tomorrow. Feith was pimping it on 60 Minutes last night, offering not much more than he's offered before: A poisonous mix of arrogance, incompetence and half-truth designed more to confuse than inform.
As a counter-offer to Feith's offering, I'd like to bring to your attention that while the rest of the country will wake up tomorrow to Feith's role in the run-up to the war, the liberal blogosphere was of course on the story while nobody else was paying attention.
In 2005, Special Plans: The Blogs on Douglas Feith and the Faulty Intelligence that Led to War was published. More than two years ago, this collection (which I was privileged to gather and introduce) laid out in detail and through liberal blog posts Feith's background, his ideological influences, and his work, including but not limited to:
Foisting upon us "Curveball," the alcoholic cousin of an aide to Ahmed Chalabi, whose information about supposed WMDs was stovepiped directly to the president and used as a key rationale for war. Curveball's friends described him as a "congenital liar" and his CIA handler called him "crazy." Good times.
Disbanding the Iraqi army, leaving a heavily armed population unemployed and pissed off.
Downplaying concerns about troop numbers as "anti-war," thus being caught utterly shocked when looting and violence overtook the country.
And admittedly -- deliberately! -- overlooking what he called last night the "horribles," a list of all the things that could go wrong in the war, including Iraq becoming an unstable breeding ground for future terrorism.
Feith also had his hands in another major news story this week: the torture memo. He's even now accusing anyone of siding with the Geneva Conventions and caring about torture of "siding with the assholes."
Yet he's teaching at Georgetown, giving speeches, as though he was right, and all of us were wrong. At the very least, Special Plans stands as a small counterweight to all those lies.
The book uses the best of the liberal blogs to tell Feith's story, including this masterful diary by abw, which lays out research on Feith going all the way back to the late 1990s. It's the kind of work that, had it been done by more journalists and reached a critical level in the mainstream discourse, could have really changed the course of our disastrous foreign policy. It should be required reading for anybody asking, "How did we get here? And how on earth did they get away with it?"
Special Plans didn't make much of a dent when it came out in 2005; why should it, after all? We were just a bunch of dirty Internet hippies, being all anti-war and stuff. That we were right, that Feith was wrong, seems almost immaterial. And even now that the traditional media seem onto the story in a collective fashion, it's as if the trouble began in 2005, when the rest of the country began waking up to the fact that Bush's war wasn't exactly sunshine and kittens.
In reality, the story was told long before, by the people who were paying attention.
On a week when Feith's going to be all over the TV, it's well worth pointing that out.
A.