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Sunday, June 01, 2008
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 "THE STUPIDEST FUCKING GUY ON THE PLANET": DOUGLAS FEITH & THE MARKETING OF WAR
I'm a weird guy in that I often buy books by people that I'm convinced are idiots. Because I like to belittle the intelligence of people I loathe in public, I've found it helpful to know the precise dimensions of their ignorance. It's just one of the things that makes me so goddamn adorable.
For that reason, I recently bought Douglas Feith's War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism. I haven't yet read it, as I am engrossed in Rick Perlstien's magnificent Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, which I recommend heartily to each and every one of you.
I was going to hold off on writing this until I had read Feith's book, but he decided to make that unnecessary by writing an op-ed in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal.
I began this by pointing out my love of calling people idiots and that's where I shall continue. There are few people who have risen to such a high level of the American government who are as profoundly dumb as is Mr. Feith. So disturbing is Feith's ignorance that his nominal subordinate, General Tommy Franks (himself no intellectual powerhouse), reportedly referred to him as "the stupidest fucking guy on the planet."
Some would argue that Feith is more blinded by ideology than actually stupid. The former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy has a longstanding and often noted relationship with Israel's Likud Party and has been known to write policy papers for its leader, Benjamin Netanyahu. So notable is this relationship, that during a meeting on the impending invasion of Iraq, the then-national security advisor, Condolezza Rice, told Feith after one of his briefings "Thanks Doug, but when we want the Israeli position we'll invite the ambassador."
Mr. Feith was one of the so-called "neocons" (a term I try to avoid using due to anti-Semitic connotations attached to it by the left) brought in to the Bush administration by Vice President-elect Dick Cheney. That group also included former Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, former Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, and former Chief of Staff to the Vice President and Counsellor to the President, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. They were seen by Cheney as a check on the influence of then Secretary of State Colin Powell.
According to several sources, Feith was instrumental in setting the stage for the American invasion of Iraq, first suggesting it approximately two days after 9/11. Like many in the administration, including former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, Feith was a signatory to the Project for a New American Century's (whose website has been suspended) open letter to President Clinton calling for an invasion of Iraq in 1998.
Rumsfeld, as we now know from books such as Cobra II:The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq and Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005, wanted to test his theory of a lighter "new" American military in Iraq with a force that the professional military saw as inadequate.
Feith wanted to go even further than Rumsfeld, advocating an invasion force consisting primarily of Iraqi exiles led by Ahmed Chalabi with minimal American tactical support. Chalabi would then be immediately installed as the new president of Iraq, despite his lack of credibility with the State Department and CIA, and his in absentia conviction for a massive bank fraud in neighboring Jordan. Even Rumsfeld knew such a plan to be unmitigated nonsense. And few people in American history have proven to be as consistently wrong as Donald Rumsfeld.
In every aspect of the Iraq War that Douglas Feith was involved in, he was proven to be not only wrong, but fantastically so. This makes him an interesting critic of the administration's handling of the war to say the least.
In his Tuesday essay for the Journal, Feith seems to argue that one of the greatest challenges facing Operation Iraqi Freedom is one of communications.
In the fall of 2003, a few months after Saddam Hussein's overthrow, U.S. officials began to despair of finding stockpiles of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The resulting embarrassment caused a radical shift in administration rhetoric about the war in Iraq.
President Bush no longer stressed Saddam's record or the threats from the Baathist regime as reasons for going to war. Rather, from that point forward, he focused almost exclusively on the larger aim of promoting democracy. This new focus compounded the damage to the president's credibility that had already been caused by the CIA's errors on Iraqi WMD. The president was seen as distancing himself from the actual case he had made for removing the Iraqi regime from power. As my longtime readers know, I supported the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. However, I thought that both WMD and the establishment of democracy were silly beyond words. My support was predicated not on WMD, but Saddam's penchant for strategic miscalculation in invading his neighbours.
If left in power as United Nations sanctions, Saddam would almost certainly have rearmed and threatened Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, or all three, necessitating a US response. If he had to be removed from power - which I thought that he eventually would - better to do it when he was weak than when he was strong.
However, I did not see Iraq as an immediate threat. While it had to be done, it could have waited until Afghanistan was further stabilized. The UN sanctions against Iraq would probably have lasted for another year or two. Even if they were lifted, there is little chance that Saddam would have launched aggressive operations while there was such a heavy American military presence in the region, particularly after 9/11, when the United States had uniform international support.
Nor was the Ba'ath regime itself a serious threat. There is no evidence whatsoever that the party itself would have acted as it did in the absence of Saddam. In fact, the party had been in power for a decade before Saddam assumed power and went to war with no one. Was it repressive against its own people? Yes, but so is every Arab government, including some of America's closest allies. Saddam was the threat, not the Ba'ath Party. Unlike the Nazi party of Adolf Hitler, Ba'ath long pre-existed the arrival of Saddam Hussein.
Had Saddam been removed from power and a Ba'athist or military government been left in power, the American military could have been out of Iraq in a year or two. Every subsequent disaster in that theatre stem from those decisions.
The stunning change in rhetoric appeared to confirm his critics' argument that the security rationale for the war was at best an error, and at worst a lie. That's a shame, for Mr. Bush had solid grounds for worrying about the dangers of leaving Saddam in power.
(...)
On May 22, 2004, I gave Mr. Rumsfeld a memo to pass along to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and the president's speechwriters. I proposed that the speech "should deal with some basics – in particular, why we went to war in the first place." It would be useful to "make clear the tie-in between Iraq and the broader war on terrorism" in the following terms: The Saddam Hussein regime "had used WMD, supported various terrorist groups, was hostile to the U.S. and had a record of aggression and of defiance of numerous U.N. resolutions."
In light of 9/11, the "danger that Saddam's regime could provide biological weapons or other WMD to terrorist groups for use against us was too great" to let stand. And other ways of countering the danger – containment, sanctions, inspections, no-fly zones – had proven "unsustainable or inadequate." I suggested that the president distinguish between the essential U.S. interests in Iraq and the extra benefits if we could succeed in building democratic institutions there: "A unified Iraq that does not support terrorism or pursue WMD will in and of itself be an important victory in the war on terrorism." Those arguments are wildly ridiculous and easily refuted by anyone who knows anything about the history of Saddam's Iraq. They should be addressed one by one.
1. "The Saddam Hussein regime had used WMD:"
So had the United States, so what? The last recorded use of WMD by the Ba'ath regime was in 1988 and the Reagan administration did everything in its power to ignore it. It was only after Time magazine printed photos from Halabja that the United States government said anything at all.
2. "The Saddam Hussein regime supported various terrorist groups:"
This is true, but with a very important qualification. Among Middle Eastern regimes that support terror, Saddam's was probably the most conservative. He did provide post-facto sanctuary to terrorists, but he did very little in supporting or financing foreign terrorist attacks before the fact.
Saddam was reluctant in the extreme to have anything at all to do with groups that he couldn't control. His first priority was maintaining his hold on power in Iraq and was very careful to insure that. It's important to remember that Iraq only invaded Kuwait after the American ambassador, April Glaspie, told Saddam that "We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America."
It is entirely possible that Iraq would not have invaded Kuwait were it not for the mixed signals the United States sent in the summer of 1990. One should also remember that, current conventional wisdom to the contrary, the United States supported Iraq's invasion of Iran, reestablished diplomatic relations during that period and provided it with both arms, loan guarantees and intelligence.
If Iraq was going to support terrorism against the American homeland or foreign interests, it almost certainly would have done so just before the 1991 war or in the period thereafter. There is no evidence that Saddam did and that is probably likely due to his instinct for self-preservation.
Saddam was likely involved in the 1993 assassination attempt against former President Bush, but that is noteworthy for its singularity. Furthermore, the only retaliation for it was a one night strike against the Mukhabarat headquarters in Baghdad.
Was one decade-old instance of prior support for a foreign terrorist act the predicate for war? Despite the assertions of the administration, Iraq under Saddam was not a state sponsor of terrorism in the way that Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia or Pakistan were and are to this day.
3. "In light of 9/11, 'the danger that Saddam's regime could provide biological weapons or other WMD to terrorist groups for use against us was too great:'"
This is the silliest and most easily refuted of all arguments. It was also the central premise of the 2003 war and the argument Mr. Feith insists that President Bush should have stood by.
Everything we know about Saddam Hussein indicates that his grip on power was his single priority. This is why he had 11 intelligence services devoted to spying on one another and it is why he called in Ambassador Glaspie to get the American position on his dispute with Kuwait prior to the invasion.
When American troops invaded southern Iraq during the liberation of Kuwait, Iraqi WMD - which we know that there were then adequate stockpiles of - were not deployed. The only plausible reason for that is that a WMD strike against US troops would have forced a drive to Baghdad and the certain end of the regime as former Secretary of State James Baker made clear in his memoir. If there was a time to deploy WMD against American forces or pass it on to terrorists groups, that time would have been in 1991, not after 9/11.
Let's assume that Saddam did pass WMD to al-Qaeda or a like group despite the lack of evidence of any operational relationship, and such a weapon was used against the American homeland. Iraq would have to know that such an act would invite massive - and very probably nuclear - retaliation with broad international support. It would be an act of national and personal suicide that Saddam Hussein had absolutely no history of.
On the other hand, if he had WMD in 2003 and knew as a certainty that the United States was going to remove his regime, that would have provided the necessary predicate to give those weapons to terrorists as a retalitory measure. They certainly had enough time to do so, since the congressional vote autorizing military force in Iraq was in early October and the invasion didn't happen until the end of March.
By Douglas Feith's own logic, the Bush administration ran the risk of suffering a chemical or biological strike on the American homeland. But for the grace of God and the incredible incompetence of the international intelligence community, they missed an attack that their own actions practically invited.
There are, however, other nations with active WMD programs and significant ties to al-Qaeda. The most notable is Pakistan.
Throughout the 1980s, the Reagan administration passed Mujahadeen financing for Afghanistan through Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence. It is believed that a significant proportion of those funds were diverted by the ISI to the Pakistani nuclear program headed by A.Q Khan.
We know that the Khan network was instrumental in the North Korean, Iranian and Lybian weapons programs. We also know that scientists associated with Khan visited al-Qaeda figures in Afghanistan and that the CIA found design diagrams for a nuclear weapon there following the October 2001 invasion.
We know that the government of Pakistan supported both terrorist actions against the Indian parliament, in Kashmir, and were indispensable early supporters of both the Taliban and al-Qaeda. We know that they have a history of weapons proliferation.
We know that Iran has an active weapons program and has an operational relationship with terrorist groups such as Hezbollah with active cells within the United States. The same has recently been suspected of Syria.
That is the history. It is not, however, the history of Iraq. Furthermore, the case presented by the Bush administration is more applicable to other nations than it was to Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
4. "A unified Iraq that does not support terrorism or pursue WMD will in and of itself be an important victory in the war on terrorism:"
That might be the most unknowable and dangerous assertion of all. Iraq is not a natural country and never has been. It was a rump country haphazardly carved out of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. It is much more like Yugoslavia than any of its immediate neighbors in that it is populated by antagonistic ethnic groups with competing national aspirations.
When even a small measure of democracy was introduced in Yugoslavia, the country immediately disintegrated. The only thing preventing this from happening is likely the continuing presence of 150,000 American troops. To this very day, you would be hard pressed to find an Iraqi flag flying north of Kirkuk, which does not bode well for a future unified Iraq. There is absolutely no reason to believe that Iraqi Kurdistan will not democratically declare independence and claim Kirkuk as its capital once the United States leaves Iraq.
Mr. Feith also ignores the fact unified and democratic countries also have WMD programs. India and Israel are the two most famous examples. Iraq has already demonstrated that they have both the technology and the scientific capability to produce WMD.
Furthermore, if Iran is the danger that the Bush administration presents it as, why shouldn't have a defensive deterrent? In what way would a democratic Iraq be different than Israel? Does the administration forsee an endless American presence in Iraq to defend it from Iran?
Then there's the issue of terrorism itself. Most terrorist groups do not see themselves as such. They see themselves as "freedom fighters." That's certainly true of the African National Congress, which only renounced "armed struggle" - a popular euphemism for terrorism - after it had become the government of South Africa. As a matter of fact, Nelson Mandela remains on an American terrorist watch list to this day.
India is a democracy and both the Indian army and RAW have been accused of atrocities in Kashmir that can certainly be defined as terrorism. Then there's the small matter of the PKK within Iraq itself.
What if a democratic Iraq decides to ally itself with and support Palestinian "freedom fighters" such as Hamas? Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has yet to recognize Israel or denounce Hezbollah's kidnapping of Israeli soldiers on the Lebanese border, which predicated the 2006 war. Maliki still does not designate Hezbollah as a terrorist group.
Precisely how is that "an important victory in the war on terrorism?" The policy of democratic Iraq vis-a-vis terrorism is virtually unchanged from the Saddam era and could very well degenerate into operational cooperation that threatens Isreal that didn't exist under Saddam. Remember, Iraq offered compensation to the families of suicide bombers only after they were dead. There is no evidence that it was involved in the planning or execution of the attacks themselves.
Democracy is usually a safeguard against terrorism, but it isn't always. A conservative policy would assume that it isn't and plan for any eventuality, which the administration clearly hasn't done.
Again, I proposed that the president distinguish between achieving our primary goal in Iraq – eliminating a security threat – and aiming for the over-and-above goal of democracy promotion, which may not be readily achievable.
Mr. Bush gave his speech at the Army War College on May 24, as Iraq was entering into the last month of its 14-month occupation by the U.S. The president declared: "I sent American troops to Iraq to defend our security, not to stay as an occupying power. I sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, not to make them American. Iraqis will write their own history, and find their own way."
I had hoped the president would explain why sending American troops to Iraq had helped defend our security, but he did not. The questionable line about sending those troops to make Iraq's people free had remained in the speech. And it was rather late to be promising the Iraqis that we would not stay as an occupying power but instead let them find their own way. In this, President Bush might prove to be more intelligent than even the celebrated defense intellectual, Douglas Feith. Once the canard of WMD and Iraqi intentions was conclusively disproved, Mr. Bush would have only looked foolish to remain publicly attached to them. How does one argue that there was a sucessful defense against a security threat that didn't exist? It's bad enough that the president of the United States continues to insist that Iraq was something other than what it was, a war of choice.
The president had chosen to talk almost exclusively about Iraq's future. His political opponents noticed that if they talked about the past – about prewar intelligence and prewar planning for the war and the aftermath – no one in the White House communications effort would contradict them. Opponents could say anything about the prewar period – misstating Saddam's record, the administration's record or their own – and their statements would go uncorrected. This was a big incentive for them to recriminate about the administration's prewar work, and congressional Democrats have pressed for one retrospective investigation after another. There is no evidence that Iraq was going to provide WMD to terrorists, had the capability to use them directly on the American homeland or engage in third state proliferation, and there never was. If they were going to, it would have been far more sensible for them to have done so over a decade before the invasion or in the months leading up to it.
The administration itself misstated Saddam's record and continue to do so to this day. And the tragedy is that it wasn't necessary. The provable likelihood of further agression by Saddam against his neighbors necessitating American intervention was more than enough of a causus belli to remove Saddam from power.
But that wasn't sexy or "imminent" enough for the president and his minions, and that's where the ridiculous "mushroom cloud" imagery came from. What it did instead was create a case that was far more applicable to other countries than it was to Iraq. Furthermore, it created a precedent for other countries to use with far more dangerous consequences.
What, for example, would the United States have to say if India launched a full-scale invasion of Pakistan citing its WMD program, proliferation efforts and operational relationship with terrorists? The above would all be far truer and more imminent than the Iraqi threat was and would leave the United States with no other option than to stand aside as an important strategic partner was dismembered.
This was a public affairs decision that has had enormous strategic consequences for American support for the war. The new formula fails to connect the Iraq war directly to U.S. interests. It causes many Americans to question why we should be investing so much blood and treasure for Iraqis. And many Americans doubt that the new aim is realistic – that stable democracy can be achieved in Iraq in the foreseeable future. To fight a long war, the president has to ensure he can preserve public and congressional support for the effort. It is not an overstatement to say that the president's shift in rhetoric nearly cost the U.S. the war. Victory or defeat can hinge on the president's words as much as on the military plans of his generals or the actions of their troops on the ground.
In his book, former CIA director George Tenant described "marketing meetings" in the Oval Ofiice to best "sell" the war to the American people. What the president didn't understand and still doesn't is that war is not a political campaign and marketing such a thing can only lead to a case of buyer's remorse with far more dramatic consequences than a single election can cure.
To this day, all Douglas Feith wants to argue about is marketing. And that's why General Franks was right all along. Feith was and remains "the stupidest fucking guy on the planet."
Link lovingly stolen from Decision '08
Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: War Pigs By: Black Sabbath From: Paranoid
PermalinkLabels: The Department of International Relations
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