Feith sets the record straight on Iraq war

Seth Mandel

June 20, 2008

It is perhaps one of the most contentious -- and loaded -- questions in the modern era of foreign policy and international affairs.

And for most of those who are either perplexed by it or sure of their own answer to it, just asking the question is to be done only in the company of those confident in their ability to ride the rough waves it creates.

Why did President George W. Bush declare war on Iraq?

On a warm June afternoon on midtown Manhattan's east side, Douglas J. Feith answered that question. As under secretary of defense for policy from July 2001 until August 2005, Feith was the head of the Pentagon's policy organization when the Sept. 11 terror attacks occurred. The author of the recently published "War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism," Feith is the first Pentagon insider to offer a blow-by-blow account -- complete with nearly 150 pages of declassified documents, charts, notes, and maps -- of precisely how and why decisions were made from the moment the first hijacked plane hit its target less than four miles from the podium at which he stood on June 5.

Speaking at an event that day in Manhattan sponsored by the futurist think-tank Hudson Institute, Feith began with the background of Saddam Hussein's aggression and how the administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton dealt with it, setting the stage for the late dictator's final confrontation with the West during current President Bush's tenure.

Saddam initiated the Iran-Iraq war; he then killed 150,000 Iraqi Kurds with weapons of mass destruction; two years later he invaded Kuwait; defeated there by U.S. troops, Saddam then declared war on his own Shiites in the south of Iraq.

"At that point, at the end of the Gulf War, the world had a dilemma: What do you do about this guy? He's obviously an extremely aggressive, dangerous guy, and he was left in possession of his army after the Gulf War," Feith said. "The option of simply ignoring him did not appeal to anybody."

Clinton's containment undone

The world had two options, Feith said: overthrow Saddam, or try to take advantage of the United Nations Security Council's rare near-consensus and willingness to target a dictator. Choosing the second option, Saddam was hit with weapons inspections, economic sanctions, and no-fly zones.

However, after corrupting the oil-for-food program to bribe U.N. officials (as well as European officials), shooting at the American and British planes patrolling the no-fly zones, and expelling the weapons inspectors, Saddam had "systematically" dismantled that containment strategy.

"And when he did that, President Clinton considered that a serious threat to U.S. interests," Feith said, noting that after the expulsion of the inspectors, Clinton ordered Operation Desert Fox -- three days of aerial bombing of Iraq.

The issue of Iraq was debated in the first months of the current administration in 2001, Feith said. He said all the national security issues were being examined -- North Korea, China, Iran, Iraq, etc., but "Iraq was the only country in the world where U.S. military forces were being shot at every day."

Those security challenges were reassessed after 9/11, and Iraq came to the fore, Feith said, because the terror attacks were the first example of "terrorism of mass destruction." In the decades prior to 9/11, Feith explained, terrorism was mostly of limited violence, which would both draw attention to the perpetrator's cause while allowing them to retain international sympathy.

"So the basic idea is: you shoot up a nursery, you blow up a few school buses, and then you get invited to address the U.N. General Assembly," Feith said.

Feith referenced an adage about terrorism that holds that terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead. But the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center towers and attacked the Pentagon wanted a lot of people dead, Feith said, adding that the new concern was that terrorists would now be in the market for weapons of mass destruction, and out of the market for their usual staple of disinterested international sympathy.

This focused Pentagon and White House officials' attention on what Feith called a "coincidence of strategic importance."

"And that coincidence is that the list of countries that are principal state supporters of terrorism is essentially the same list as the list of countries of (WMD) proliferation concern," Feith said.

Punishment or prevention?

Feith said there were two trains of thought on how to organize the nascent war on terrorism: punish those responsible for 9/11 or focus the response on preventing the next 9/11.

The doctrine of retribution, Feith said, would be repeating past mistakes; this was more than a criminal investigation, and would need to be treated as such.

"And what the president said is, 'The principal purpose of our actions after 9/11 is not retaliation or punishment; the principal purpose of our action after 9/11 is preventing the next attack'," Feith said.

And that meant keeping a keen eye on not only the perpetrators of the attacks -- al-Qaeda -- and not only on other members of the global terrorist network, but also the state sponsors of terror with active WMD programs and a record of anti-U.S. aggression, including directly aiding and financing terror attacks against Americans. Saddam's Iraq fit that description flawlessly, and it was time, Feith said, for the president to weigh the risks of leaving Saddam in power against the risks of removing him.

What we found: Headlines versus reality

After the quick military victory for U.S. forces over Saddam's army, the Iraq Survey Group studied Saddam's infrastructure from the inside. The CIA then published the findings without so much as a heads-up to the White House about what was in their report. This was done, Feith said, so the CIA could (and later would) boast that the report was free of interference.

Unfortunately, it was also free of an executive summary or any hint of brevity.

"The report is three volumes, it's about three inches thick, and the CIA released it without so much as one-page fact sheet saying what's in the report," Feith said. "So, a wire service reporter has to write a story in approximately an hour. So they're given three inches of material, which the CIA, unhelpfully, did not even yellow highlight for them, and what did they do? They put out a headline that said 'No WMD found'. The headline in virtually every newspaper around the world was 'No WMD found,' which translated into people's minds as 'No WMD in Iraq'."

That, however, is a far cry from what the report actually said. The report showed that Saddam had a chemical and biological weapons program: he had the facilities for making WMD, he had the materials needed for those weapons, he had the capability to produce such a weapon within five weeks, and, significantly, the Iraq Survey Group found that Saddam had the intention to get himself those weapons as soon as he was free of any effective sanctions.

Saddam had also, Feith noted, convinced the CIA, every other allied intelligence agency, the U.N., and his own generals that he still had the chemical and biological weapons stockpiles that the world knew he had in the late 90s and were never accounted for.

Feith said the administration, at that point, made a key communications error: they decided not to litigate the past, and instead look to the future. This enabled Bush's detractors to take free shots at the president's credibility, which eroded under the barrage of unfounded -- but unchallenged -- accusations.

"The administration, I'm sorry to say, was just astonishingly inept in responding to that rewriting of history," Feith said.

The case for going into Iraq included the stockpiles, but by no means hinged on them, Feith said.

"The main reason that people were worried about Saddam was a set of concerns having to do with Saddam's record of aggression, his hostility to the United States, his record of developing and use of WMD" -- a set of concerns, he said, that were proven both founded and urgent by the Iraq Survey Group; in other words, the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power stands up to the highest level of scrutiny and 20/20 hindsight.

Feith has also set up a Web site,

www.waranddecision.com, where he corrects many of the myths about the war, complete with declassified documents, reports, and first-hand accounts of the meetings he attended on the topic.

Why, then, not overthrow the regime of [place name of

dictator here]?

If Iraq was a state supporter of terror and a pursuer of weapons of mass destruction, couldn't other rogue states have been invaded under Bush's logic?

"The decision to go to war is a decision of last resort," Feith said. "And there is no way that the president can decide to launch a war unless he can satisfy himself and satisfy the world that he had tried every reasonable means short of war to solve the problem. In the case of Iran and North Korea, the president did not believe that he could say that."

While the U.S. and U.N. had been grappling with Iraq for almost two decades, Feith said, the same could not be said of Iran, North Korea, Libya, Syria, etc. But it's worth noting, he said, that after Saddam fell, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad pulled his forces out of Lebanon for the first time in 30 years, and Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi gave up his nuclear weapons pursuit.

But those who criticized Bush may get just what they asked for. After six more years of diplomacy, Feith said, Iran has gained some measure of comfort with the American Army's early struggles in Iraq, the lack of reprisals against Iran for attacking and killing American soldiers inside Iraq, and the belief that U.S. and European diplomacy is no longer backed up by a credible threat of force.

The Iranians aren't taking the diplomacy seriously, and without credible diplomacy, Feith said, you've got two options: welcome Iran to the club of nuclear proliferators, or be willing to go to war to stop them.

"And that," Feith said, "is going to be a major challenge that the next administration is going to have."