Douglas Feith explains to us that George W. Bush didn’t make a choice to invade Iraq. In fact, George W. Bush only responded to the necessity of invading Iraq. It wasn’t something that Bush could choose to do or not to do.
Then Feith goes about explaining to us all the mistaken and idiotic reasons why Bush chose to invade Iraq. He even provides a July 2001 memo from Rumsfeld. It’s funny how things get declassified when its convenient. Here’s Rummy’s memo:
“The U.S. can roll up its tents and end the no-fly zones before someone is killed or captured. . . . We can publicly acknowledge that sanctions don’t work over extended periods and stop the pretense of having a policy that is keeping Saddam ‘in the box,’ when we know he has crawled a good distance out of the box and is currently doing the things that will ultimately be harmful to his neighbors in the region and to U.S. interests – namely developing WMD and the means to deliver them and increasing his strength at home and in the region month-by-month. Within a few years the U.S. will undoubtedly have to confront a Saddam armed with nuclear weapons.
“A second option would be to go to our moderate Arab friends, have a reappraisal, and see whether they are willing to engage in a more robust policy. . . .
“A third possibility perhaps is to take a crack at initiating contact with Saddam Hussein. He has his own interests. It may be that, for whatever reason, at his stage in life he might prefer to not have the hostility of the United States and the West and might be willing to make some accommodation.”
Feith also reveals a bit more about pre-9/11 thinking within the administration.
In the months before the 9/11 attack, Secretary of State Colin Powell advocated diluting the multinational economic sanctions, in the hope that a weaker set of sanctions could win stronger and more sustained international support.
Actually, Colin Powell didn’t just advocate this. He made his first foreign travel a trip to the Middle East to try to rally support for a ‘Smart Sanctions’ regime. His trip was deemed a failure. However, Feith deliberately misleads when he describes ‘Smart Sanctions’ as a ‘dilution’. You can read a contemporaneous (with Rummy’s memo) discussion of the ‘Smart Sanctions’ effort here.
Central Intelligence Agency officials floated the possibility of a coup, though the 1990s showed that Saddam was far better at undoing coup plots than the CIA was at engineering them.
It seems never to occur to our highest officials that the CIA’s constant coup-plotting provides many world leaders with a motive to strike back at our country and our leaders that they might not otherwise have.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz asked if the U.S. might create an autonomous area in southern Iraq similar to the autonomous Kurdish region in the north, with the goal of making Saddam little more than the “mayor of Baghdad.”
In retrospect, we can see that Wolfowitz was advocating the creation of a kind of de facto Iranistan in southern Iraq. It never seems to have occurred to Wolfowitz that Iraqis kind of liked their country whole or that the Sunnis would frown on having all their southern oil fields taken away and given to Iran-leaning Shi’ites. More meddling without forethought.
U.S. officials also discussed whether a popular uprising in Iraq should be encouraged, and how we could best work with free Iraqi groups that opposed the Saddam regime.
Popular uprisings are related to coups. All of this invites blowback. Here we have a government that is spending the summer of 2001 trying to decide just how to carve up Iraq and under what pretenses, and we’re surprised when some intemperate Arabs attack the Pentagon.
Feith pushes a false narrative on us, but it’s a familiar one. We had no reliable intelligence in 2001 that suggested that Saddam Hussein was reconstituting his biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons programs. His armed forces were weak, disloyal, ill-paid, ill-equipped, and totally unable to project force towards any of his neighbors. Insofar as the Intelligence Community worked on the issue of Iraq, they were mainly concerned with an international disinformation campaign to heighten the threat from Saddam in order to maintain support for a crumbling sanctions regime. Belief in Iraq’s WMD’s was nothing more than a convenient case of believing our own hype. How many times did the Bush administration point to misinformation put out by the Clinton administration to bolster their case for war (and to justify their decision after the fact)?
But there is a key difference between the lies of the Clinton administration and the lies of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) of Douglas Feith. Clinton administration lies were intended to keep Saddam Hussein from rearming and/or slaughtering internal dissidents. Bush administration lies were intended to justify actions that have now cost over 4,000 American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis their lives, created over 2 million refugees, and cost a trillion dollars.
That was a choice that George W. Bush made. He chose to lie in the service of a policy that created all this tragedy and waste. And to think that Feith would quote Rumsfeld’s concern about the loss of a single pilot as justification for the necessity of doing this! No wonder General Tommy Franks said of Feith, “I have to deal with the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth almost every day.”
