HOME > REVIEWS AND COMMENTS >

Commentaries

"Run — do not walk, do not wait for Amazon's SuperSaver delivery schedule — to your local bookstore and buy Douglas J. Feith's War and Decision. . . . It is, in a word, scholarly; with massive references to documents and the actual decisionmaking record, Feith sets out the evidence on how the decision to go to war in Iraq was made, on who and which institutions supported what courses of action, etc. If you want hard evidence to refute the various disinformation campaigns of the left — and others — this is the work in which to find it."

Benjamin Zycher

"Today we're only beginning to learn about what went on behind the scenes on Iraq. One important new source is the recently published War and Decision by Douglas Feith, the No. 3 civilian at the Pentagon from 2001 to 2005. Feith quotes extensively from unpublished documents and contemporary memorandums, just as in the late 1940s Robert Sherwood did in Roosevelt and Hopkins and Winston Churchill did in his World War II histories. The picture Feith paints is at considerable variance from the narratives with which we've
become familiar.

"One such narrative is "Bush lied, people died." The claim is that "neocons," including Feith, politicized intelligence to show that Saddam Hussein's regime had weapons of mass destruction. Not so, as the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Silberman-Robb Commission have already concluded. Every intelligence agency believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and the post-invasion Duelfer report concluded that he maintained the capability to produce them on short notice. There was abundant evidence of contacts between Saddam's regime and al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Given Saddam's hostility to the United States and his stonewalling of the United Nations, American leaders had every reason to believe he posed a grave threat. Removing him removed that threat. . . .

"Feith identifies as our central mistake the decision not to create an Iraqi Interim Authority to take over some sovereign functions soon after the overthrow of Saddam. Bush ordered the creation of such an authority on March 10, 2003. But it was resisted by State Department and CIA leaders who argued that Iraqis would not trust "externals"-those in exile-and who were especially determined to keep the Iraqi National Congress's Ahmed Chalabi from power. As head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Paul Bremer took the State-CIA view and, without much supervision from Washington, decided that the U.S. occupation would continue for as long as two years. Only deft negotiation by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld produced a June 30, 2004, deadline for returning authority to Iraqis. The January 2005 elections placed many of the "externals," including Chalabi, in high office."

Michael Barone

U.S. News and World Report

"Government has many flaws but an inability or reluctance to draw up plans is not among them. Yet the 'no plan' refrain is repeated endlessly. . . .  Doug Feith was not only privy to the planning, he did much of it. And in his new, invaluable, book War and Decision, Feith describes what the plan was, how it was developed, how the State Department fought against it, how President Bush approved it, and how L. Paul Bremer cast it aside. . . .

"The State Department opposed both a provisional government and the IIA concept. Its fear was that Iraqi exiles, and especially Ahmad Chalabi, would dominate in such an arrangement. The fear was rational in the sense that exiles, including Chalabi, might well dominate. What’s less clear is why this prospect was so alarming as to become the touchstone for State's thinking. Feith speculates that this had to do with Chalabi's status as an anathema to Arab states, a status based on (a) his religion -- Shiite -- and (b) his association with the movement for Arab democracy. It is not unheard of for the State Department to accord substantial weight to the preferences of friendly, or nominally friendly, Arab governments.

"Feith insists that the Defense Department had no particular interest in installing Chalabi or other “externals.” It was not seriously pro- or anti-Chalabi. Feith says that while there are dozen State Department memos that talk about Chalabi in negative terms, he knows of no Defense Department memo that advocates on his behalf. In fact, Rumsfeld was unequivocally against tilting in Chalabi’s favor. Consistent with that view, the IIA was to be a mixture of externals and internals. Elections would later decide which Iraqis ran the government."

Paul Mirengoff

Power Line

"Feith says that if someone had told him the Post would decline to review his
book, he would have attributed the statement to right-wing paranoia. And
even I would not have predicted this outcome. It's difficult, then, to
escape the conclusion that those who made the decision did so based on some
combination of dislike for the administration, disapproval of Feith's views
(as they understand them), and a desire to see the liberal narrative of the
war go unchallenged in the public's mind."

Power Line

"One of the themes in our conversation with Feith that interested me the most
is what he calls 'strategic communication,' the sustained effort to make the
case for the Administration's policy and explain it to the American people.
For those of us who supported President Bush, this has been a source of
immense frustration, as he and his subordinates have only sporadically
sought to guide the public discussion. Feith offered a contrast between the
Bush and Reagan Administrations on this point. While he praised the speeches
delivered and arguments made by principal figures in the Bush
Administration, he argued that, outside the limelight, the Administration
failed."

Joseph Knippenberg

Ashbrook Center Blog

“By far the most balanced, detailed, and lucid account of this story that’s come out yet. . . . Feith makes the first intellectually serious attempt to explain how the government tried to answer that question [of settling post-9/11 defense strategy] in the years after 9/11.”

National Review Online

< PREVIOUS PAGE

NEXT PAGE >