Tomorrow is the release date for Doug Feith's War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism. Here is the beginning of Chapter 1:
The threat of jihadist terrorism was on the list of U.S. government concerns at the start of the Bush administration in early 2001, but it got less attention than Russia did. As a first order of business, President George W. Bush wanted his new administration to ensure, if possible, that Russia and the United States would never revive the nuclear tensions of the Cold War.
OK, so Bush enters office dismissive of the terrorist threat, but all ready to take on the Cold War. Let's see where it goes from there...
You probably want to know right off how it ends, don't you. OK, so here are the last lines of the book:
Public debate among citizens is the proper means to get the best answers--and the broadest possible support for those answers. Is the debate in America as serious and civil as it should be? Is it worthy of the stakes in this war, worthy of the reason we are fighting, to preserve the free and open nature of our society? And is it worthy of the men and women in our armed forces, who are bearing the brunt of this fight? Our military forces are performing skillfully and courageously. Their sacrifices are securing our lives and liberty. We owe them gratitude, and we honor them when we aspire to fulfill our duties as citizens at home as nobly as they fulfill their duties as warriors abroad. [my emphasis]
In other words, he's telling us to stop being so critical in our judgment of how the Bush administration has handled Iraq, Afghanistan and terrorism, because when we are so harshly critical, we're helping the terrorists, harming the country, and denigrating the troops.
You arrogant bastard.
Since I've just gotten my hands on the nearly 700 page book, this will be just a quick taste of what it contains. I look forward to others reviewing the book in the coming days. I also urge you to check out devtob's Diary yesterday about Feith's appearance on Sixty Minutes.
It doesn't take long confirm the expectation that there will be few admissions of poor judgment or execution in this book. Here we have Feith describing an expanded National Security Council meeting on September 13th 2001, two days after the WTC attack:
Looking beyond bin Laden and Afghanistan, Rumsfeld mentioned Saddam Hussein's Iraq as a threat to both its region and to the United States....In Iraq, he noted, we could inflict the kind of costly damage that could cause terrorist-supporting regimes around the world to rethink their policies....
President Bush picked up on the subject of Iraq, declaring that any U.S. military action there would have to go beyond merely making a statement: it would have to bring about a new government. The United States needed an option that would bring others in the region along with us.
So already, two days after the WTC fell, Bush and his neocon gang are elbowing aside the focus on bin Laden and Afghanistan, and instead plotting to an make an example of Iraq, and fantasizing about transforming the entire region.
Nevertheless, the first weeks of preparation were focused on Afghanistan. Feith transcribes in boldface dozens of the almost child-like musings of Rumsfeld in this planning stage ("Perhaps the most telling difference in how the Rumsfeld and [Colin] Powell teams operated from Rumsfeld's passion for documentation and the written word. In his view, the only way to ensure clarity of thinking was to get one's arguements down on paper....Powell showed little appreciation for these efforts and made cutting remarks about the stream of Defense Department memos..")
Oh...but no wonder Feith is so enamored of Rumsfeld's prose: "Helping Rumsfeld commit his ideas to writing became a major part of my work as Under Secretary."
Some examples of this incisive thought? Here's Rumsfeld/Feith on making an impression:
If the initial U.S. military action is not confidence-inspiring, it could undermine our entire effort:
- Bombing for a few days
- not destroying anything of high value (there's nothing of high value in all of Afghanistan);
- attacking a suspected chemical weapons facility that may turn out to be a mere commercial factory--none of this reflects the distinctive policies and frame of mind of the George W. Bush administration....
I love the "there's nothing of high value in all of Afghanistan" line.
Rumsfeld/Feith on vision:
If the war does not significantly change the world's political map, the U'S. will not achieve its aim....
Rumsfeld/Feith on strategy:
It would instead be surprising and impressive if we built our forces up patiently, took some early action outside of Afghanistan, perhaps in multiple locations, and began not exclusively or primarily with military strikes but with train-and-equip activities with local opposition forces and humanitarian aid and intense information operations.
We could thereby
-garner actionable intelligence on lucrative targets, which we do not now have.
-Reduce empahsis on images of US killing Moslems from the air....
--Capitalize on our strong suit, which is not finding a few hundred terrorists in caves in Afghanistan, but in the vastness of our military and humanitarian resources, which can strengthen the opposition forces in terrorist-supporting states.
Hmmm...a couple pages of that memo must have gotten lost when the Iraq war was in its planning stages.
Feith revels in disparaging those who in late 2001 predicted things would go badly in Afghanistan:
Peter Jennings of ABC News interviewed Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and asked if the United States is "possibly facing a quagmire...."
The Times kept the ball rolling with an October 31 front-page piece under the headline "A Military Quagmire Remembered: Afghanistan as Vietnam...."
This Times story spawned hundreds of articles in other journals and countless commentaries on the "quagmire" in Afghanistan. Zbigniew Brzezinski...told the Christian Science Monitor: "When we started out, we were going to smash Al Qaeda and punish the Taliban. Now we seem to be getting engaged in an Afghan civil war, almost as an end in itself. That could be a quagmire."
Ummm...does Feith realize that he's writing this book over six years later, and that Afghanistan remains dangerous, unstable and deadly to our continued troop presence? Does he really believe that it was "Mission Accomplished" in Afghanistan with the fall of the Taliban?
Well, his next chapter is entitled " Easier to Topple Than Rebuild." But an awful lot of that chapter focuses on tidbits like these:
But the lead-nation efforts of the British, Germans and Italians were disappointing....The British...failed to invest the necessary resources....The British also failed to send in enough trucks and helicopters for operations against the drug lords....The Germans, too, performed poorly in their assigned task: police training, where they should have excelled....As a lead nation for reconstruction of the Afghan judiciary, Italy made the underperforming Germans look good.
Yeah, those Europeans screwed everything up. And I admit I'm curious to know the thought process behind Feith's statement that the Germans "should have excelled" in police training. Perhaps he has a bit of latent admiration for Nazis and the Stasi?
The next chapter is entitled "Why Iraq?" it's opening lines make the case:
Why did President Bush decide to overthrow Saddam Hussein?
In short, it was to end a range of threats. No other contemporary leader--and few in history--had a record of aggression to match Saddam's [my emphasis]
Sort of diminishes your expectations for a nuanced examination of the subject, doesn't it?
Feith does take the opportunity in this chapter to whine about being misunderstood:
Common explanations of how the Bush administration resolved on military action against Iraq have generally followed one of a few different stotylines.
One line of arguement is that "they" lied the United States into war. Sometimes the "they" in question included the President. Sometimes it has referred only to lower-level officials, including myself, who have been accused of willfully misrepresenting Iraq's WMD programs or support for terrorism to get the President and his National Security Council to make war against Saddam. Critics have sometimes asserted both that Bush lied to the public and that he was lied to by his subordinates, though those propositions contradict each other.
The assertion that officials lied about the war's rationale is false. In the many thousands of official comments on the matter, there were some sloppy formulations, ill-chosen phrases, and outright errors....But mis-statements and other mistakes are not lies. [my emphasis]
That's right...all the critics are just cherry-picking a few poorly-turned phrases. There was no organized effort to inflate the threat Saddam posed. None at all.
Well, I think I've had enough for tonight. I've sifted through about 225 pages to distill these few quotes. As I said at the outset, I look forward to hearing from others about this book in the days ahead, and especially from those most informed on these issues. But I hope my offering tonight gives you a foretaste of the smug denial, ass-covering and self-satisfaction that remains strong in the hearts of these Neo-Cons. They clearly lose no sleep over the destruction they have wrought.
I'll close by describing a picture included in the book, captioned " At president Bush's first post-9/11 meeting in the Pentagon..." In it we can see Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, both with wide smiles on their faces. Ah yes, they were on the verge of realizing their greatest fantasies...