Doug Feith is a piece of work. Compare his recent attempts to pain himself as the Cassandra uttering realist warnings to Bush about Iraq in 2004 with his saccharine pro-democracy rhetoric uttered at the time. I agree with his criticism today that Bush’s rhetorical shift from WMDs to democracy confused the American public and resulted in a wrong turn by redefining the mission as “freeing Iraq.” Bush’s talk of liberation obscured the chief pre-war rationale for the war as a self-defensive action based on the reasonable view that Iraq had WMDs coupled with the reasonable reduction in tolerance for risks posed by troublesome and provocative nations like Iraq after 9/11. Bush’s rhetoric in 2004 almost exclusely emphasized the democratization efforts. Too bad for Feith–and Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Perle–all of the administration people were all sayings the same things as Bush at the time. It wasn’t lying per se. Democracy always made an appearance in lists of reasons to attack Iraq. But a tertiary rationale became the main rationale, and no one bothered to acknowledge this change in forthright terms. It’s as if “Elections for Bavaria” replaced “Remember Pearl Harbor” in May of 1943.
More important, whether or not the administration’s unacknowledged change in emphasis constituted ethical rhetoric, no one in the administration dissented about the idealist rhetoric’s major premise: that with or without WMDs, a democratic Iraq was a worthy and achievable goal that furthered American national security.
I confess, before the war, I thought all of this democracy talk was merely window-dressing to justify our realist motives. I only realized later that the Bushies were bona fide foreign policy idealists with general indifference to the welfare of Americans. For Bush and other liberals, fidelity to liberal principles is the chief mark of strategic success.
Feith is a liar and an Israeli spy. He belongs in jail, not on the pages of America’s newspapers. It’s one thing to make mistakes. Everyone does, particularly in the complicated world of foreign policy. But, like Sanchez, Rumsfeld, and George Tenet, his lack of character consists in his unwillingness to acknowledge his own barely hidden dual loyalties and consequent dual motives in promoting and managing a huge failure of an operation that rested on mistaken intelligence and sought to obtain ridiculous goals.
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Actually, none of the liars and Israeli spies have come clean on the reason for the Iraq War. The constantly shifting motives – WMDs, democracy-building, removing a bad guy from a bad neighborhood, and, most cynically, the bait-and-switch “fighting them there so we don’t fight them here” – aren’t really reasons. They’re excuses. Window-dressing. Maybe that’s the cause of all the confusion. This war has no real REASONS. It came about as the product of the post-9/11 conjuction of Zionists and Empire Builders. We stationed an American army in the Mideast to:
- Take the first step of our long march to global superpower ascendancy.
- Provide for the strategic necessity of securing oil resources (and spring some treasure for all those good sports in the deathware business).
- Most importantly, guarantee the present and future regional hegemony of Israel. And that’s HEGEMONY – not security. That was taken care of some fractured electrons ago.
The problem is, this project is too big a bite for any nation to pull off – no matter how bloated the egos at the wheel. Our master planners have NO foresight. They cannot see the bull charging from down the road.
But it’s this country… America… that’s at risk, after all.
So, in their lights, who gives a damn?
There no longer seems to be any connection between power and personal responsibility in this country. No one in the security apparatus lost their job because they ignored the signals (including Oplan Bojinka, an abortive plot to blow up 11 airliners en route simultaneously) that presaged 9/11. No one took the heat for letting Bin Laden slip away when he was cornered. No one while in the Bush administration, as far as I know, has officially acknowledged that what was supposed to be a brilliant “shock and awe” blitzkrieg has turned into an agonizing five-year war and occupation, with no end in sight.
There’s an ironic investment saying that a long-term investment is a trade that went wrong. The smart money likes to say that when you wind up on the wrong side of a trade, you should admit your error, cut your losses, and keep your capital for other opportunities. That’s exactly what we haven’t been doing since 9/11: we’ve turned an investment intended as a quick profit into a long-term loss that drains our human, political, and financial capital further with every passing day. And continue to rationalize it.
Hey, what’s with these little avatars? The one above doesn’t look like me at all. Well, not entirely. Oh, all right, pretty close, but it doesn’t capture my inner spirit. Well, maybe …
If Feith was Cassandra, then Nathan Sharansky was Bush’s Svengali.
About the time when the witless and episodic neocons like Cheney, Perle, Wolfie and your boy Feith were playing pretend war games in the vein of their mentor Scoop Jackson, along came Sharansky to put Bush over the top.
After being invited and courted like royalty, Sharansky spent extended time with Bush in the WH circa ’04 inauguration. He was able to lobotomize Bush with his refined democratist mantra. That is, introduce democracy with guns or butter and save the world. What a legacy to behold.
Feith et al were simple theorists, and Bush never saw in him or the others any hardened battlescars; yes, he ultimately listened to them, but only because 911 and his warped religiosity had made him sanguinary.
It was Sharansky who allowed Bush the final epiphany-of aggressive democracy being triumphant. How could he resist the ideas of a man who spit upon the Gulags?
I’d like to add that Sharanksy got it right, even if Bush got it wrong.
Good point on Sharansky. Not sure what your last sentence means, but I agree that he had a major influence on Bush. When you read two or three books a decade, and meet the author of one of those books, look out.
I looked up what I wrote at the time:
A little knowledge . . . . . . is a completely disastrous thing, particularly if it is philosphical knowledge, and particularly if that philosophical knowledge is not counterbalanced by an ample understanding of history. The problem with sweeping surveys of any kind is that it’s very hard to know if you’re being sold a bill of goods unless you know enough about the underlying subject matter.
As a consequence, there is no one more annoying (and in the case of someone in power, more dangerous) than the guy who rarely reads anything and then goes out and reads some moderately intellectual book like the Da Vinci Code, Brief History of Time, Futureshock or some similar sweeping work, and then begins to opine boldly about how it really is or should be on the basis of his newfound theory.
For this reason, and without knowing very much about its specifics, I’m very concerned about Bush’s recent introduction to Natan Sharansky’s The Case For Democracy. The major premise, which Bush has repeated so breathlessly, is that the US cannot be free and secure unless it makes the whole world free and secure. Does not 200+ years of American freedom and independence in a world full of a range of tyrannical regimes–some petty, some grand–not put this premise into doubt? Of course, to draw those connections one must know something of history.