Sunday, February 18, 2007
Doug Feith's truthiness problem
I am not sure why, but among the "neocons" who so influenced foreign policy in the first term of George W. Bush, the chattering classes seem to dislike Doug Feith particularly. Not only have I heard much more connected friends of mine go bananas at the mere mention of his name, but journalists and academics seem to go out of their way to write unflattering things about him. Almost three years ago I stumbled across this passage from Philip H. Gordon and Jeremy Shapiro's Allies At War: America, Europe, and the Crisis Over Iraq:
French visitors to Washington were berated by their counterparts, especially in the Pentagon, where officials like Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith accused them of defending Saddam Hussein. To a French defense ministry visitor who had come to the Pentagon in December 2002 to discuss possible French participation in a war, Feith said "We don't want you involved! You think you can be Saddam's lawyer for two months without consequences!" Instead of discussing the possible French support, Feith made the derisory proposal that if France wanted to help, it could provide medical units to the Sinai and fighter planes for Iceland to free up the four planes that the United States had deployed there.
OK. That last bit is funny, but these guys were supposed to be Vulcans, not comedians. Both logic and mere politesse dictate that it rarely pays to insult people who cannot change the policies of their government and might be in a position to help you down the road.
Be that as it may, Mr. Feith really seems to have stepped in it last week. He rather brazenly asserted on Fox that "Nobody in our office said there was an operational relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. It’s not correct. Words matter." Tragically for Feith, Chris Wallace knows how to use Google. Feith did, in fact, assert quite plainly that there was an operational relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda back in 2003, all according to -- *cough* -- The Weekly Standard. The transcript and the video of Wallace's humiliating deconstruction of Feith's memory are here.
Now, I believe -- purely as a matter of religious conviction, mind you -- that we will one day learn that there indeed was a pre-war operational relationship between the Ba'athists and al Qaeda, just as newly available Communist histories have shown that Ho was a bad-to-the-bone Commie and that the strategic hamlets program was working smashingly no matter what David Halberstam wrote in The New York Times. If my faith is right, then Feith will be right, but that doesn't mean he shouldn't keep his story straight. Indeed, I would have preferred it if Feith had stuck to his guns and simply said, "As yet, the evidence of the links between Iraq and al Qaeda is insufficient to prove an operational relationship, but the circumstantial evidence is such that after September 11 we would have been foolish to act if there wasn't." History may yet reveal that position to have been the wise one. Unfortunately, Doug Feith will no longer deserve the credit even if it does.
UPDATE: A commenter says I (and the lefty blogs covering the story) am being unfair to Feith. The commenter's argument is that Feith's original statement that nobody in his office "said there was an operational relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda" related to the ex ante case for the war, and that the memo cited in The Weekly Standard -- which Wallace used to impeach Feith -- was written in October 2003, after the start of the war. Wallace, the commenter charges, conflated these two periods to score points against Feith.
There is some merit to this defense of Feith, but it doesn't save the day for him. The transcript of the original interview supports the commenter's argument as far as it goes, but the interview focused on briefings that Feith gave in the summer of 2002 in which he (apparently) made substantially the same arguments that he then repeated in the October 2003 classified memo leaked to The Weekly Standard (one is forced to wonder, by the way, who leaked it). Wallace quotes from Feith's Power Point slides to box Feith into making the "nobody in my office" claim.
I therefore repeat my wish that Feith had stuck to his guns rather than defend a position that, at best, looks like the splitting of hairs. Having read Stephen Hayes book a couple of years back and a lot of the press coverage around this issue, my best guess is that something happened along the lines of the following: The CIA was producing analysis of known or believed facts that depended heavily on the widely-argued conventional wisdom that al Qaeda's jihadis would not work with the secular Ba'athists for ideological reasons. That conventional wisdom struck many of the hawks as asinine for any number of reasons, including that the same rationale would clearly apply to al Qaeda and Iran, and we knew that there was an "operational relationship" there. The hawks, outraged that the CIA would (in their view) structure their analysis around an assumption that they considered to be implausible, fought back bureaucratically by arguing that we should not ignore the evidence of contacts between al Qaeda and the Ba'athists because they do not fit into the CIA's conception of which of our enemies will work together and which will not. Doug Feith, being a lawyer and therefore a trained advocate, was in the middle of that bureaucratic fight.
My own opinion is that Feith was right to make those arguments even if they are now politically disadvantageous or even prove, in the full revelation of the historical record, to be wrong. This idea that the pronouncements of the CIA are of totemic significance and should go unquestioned is a new one, particularly on the left, and one that the press will surely abandon once Democrats control the White House. I just wish that Feith had stuck to his guns with Wallace instead of parsing words in his own defense.
CWCID: Atrios.
2 Comments:
By 
, at
Mon Feb 19, 12:21:00 AM:
Feith and Wolfowitz are both Jews who support Israel's existence.
THAT alone drives journalists, Dems, and Professors insane. The Vichy French too.
As a practical matter Feith may well have had intel on how well Saddam had bribed the French, down to the media and lower level officials. Hence his derisive comments to a man possibly bought and paid for. Certainly large amounts of cash went to the Peace Movement, Media, and French and German Governments. Galloway according to captured Iraqi documents got around 300K US.
Feith may have been responding to the WaPo misreporting of Levin's report as the Inspector General's, and spoke confusedly.
As a matter of RECORD Bill Clinton's DOJ formally indicted Osama bin Laden, one of the indictments being that he formed a partnership with Saddam to kill Americans through terror attacks.
By , at
Mon Feb 19, 03:17:00 AM:
Tigerhawk,
You're usually reliable on issues like this, so I'd like to point out some things which are lost forever on much of the gotcha\netroots crowd but won't be lost on proper history. Feith has been viciously attacked for manipulations of pre-war intelligence. Beside the general comedy that this whole IG investigation\Carl Levin hunt has to do with one briefing his office gave (yet is being used to knock the whole pre-war intelligence canon), this Wallace thing doesn't debunk Feith's claim at all. Because the memo Wallace talks about, which was written up in the Weekly Standard, was written in October 2003 to the Senate Intelligence committee--AFTER the war, not PRE-war. Feith was telling Wallace that in the August 2002 briefing (pre-war) his office wasn't declaring an operational relationship but was suggesting that the CIA revisit some of its raw data that it suppressed based on its theory of al-Qaeda and Iraq not cooperating on religious grounds. For Wallace to bring in this totally separate memo written after the war is to conflate issues, which Feith it seems has been the victim of over and over again. It's a shame you fell to do it too. Those interested in a different picture than the media consensus (which has about the same accuracy as the intelligence consensus that missed the fall of teh Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall, 9\11, WMD, et..) should look to Michael Barone's articles, the Wall Street Journal and NYSun editorials from last week, Hugh Hewitt's writings and interviews. Feith gets a real raw deal from the standard NYTimes-followers.
