Feith Meets Cabal
Robert Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Virginia, who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is currently working on a book about America's policy toward political Islam over the past 30 years.
Looking boyish and remarkably well-fed, a jovial Douglas Feith, the Pentagon's undersecretary for policy, held forth for his favorite cabal Tuesday morning.
"I'm pleased to be here at the American Enterprise Institute," chortled the neatly coiffed Feith, thin-lipped and roly-poly. "I have some longtime friends here, as you know if you've studied the published wiring diagrams that purport to illuminate the anatomy of the neocon cabal." The audience, including a smattering of Pentagon officials, AEI staffers and denizens of assorted other think tanks, chuckled.
What followed was meant as an in-house rallying cry to conservatives, neo and otherwise, to stop worrying about Iraq and to stick with the Feith-based, and Wolfowitz-designed, game plan. "Who are you going to believe about Iraq?" Feith seemed to say. "Me, or your lying eyes?" According to Feith, everything is going well: Iraqis are liberated, health care spending in Iraq is up, unemployment is shrinking, and "Iraqi marketplaces are filled with consumer goods for the first time in decades."
Then there's that pesky resistance. But that, too, said Feith, is just a tempest in a teapot. "There has been great interest in whether the fighting in Fallujah represents a widespread insurgency," Feith said. "It is not one now. Coalition forces, Iraqi authorities, and the Coalition Provisional Authority are working with Sunni, tribal and other leaders to try to ensure that it doesn't become a broad-based attack that could threaten the progress country-wide toward Iraqi self-rule. They're working to prevent the other major Sunni cities from erupting in sympathy with Fallujah." Perhaps they are"but scrambling to prevent Iraqi cities from "erupting in sympathy with Fallujah" doesn't sound too reassuring.
As to the Shiite end of the insurgency, Feith said that Muqtada al-Sadr's militia-based rebellion is nothing to worry about either. "In the Shia community, Muqtada al-Sadr's power grab has not succeeded. According to all reports, support for him continues to decrease, as the major Shia religious figures influence their community against him. Our desire to avoid fighting in the Shia holy city of Najaf has given Sadr something of a sanctuary for the moment, but the Shia community continues to pressure him to agree to a peaceful resolution of the situation." So, in other words, we can stop worrying about Sadr, too. "Neither Sadr nor the Fallujah anti-coalition fighters represent a broad movement or insurgency in Iraq," said Feith. Any questions?
Putting a happy face on the United States' this-way-and-that policy reversals since the end of the war, Feith touted the Pentagon's newfound "flexibility" in decision-making. With a straight face, he declared: "In war, plans are at best the basis for future changes. This coalition has the benefit of leadership and strategic thinking, but it's also shown that it can be flexible as necessary." As "examples of flexibility" Feith cited the mad rush to come up with extra (but still useless) Iraqi security forces when it turned out that Iraqi police forces were, umm, "not... as well trained as we had supposed." And the hot-potato-like dumping of the Rube Goldberg plan to hold caucuses when it, umm, "turned out to be unpopular with Iraqis." And, after pledging to purge everyone in the country who even walked like a Baathist, the all-of-a-sudden plan for, umm, "revising the mechanisms for implementing the de-Baathification policy." And so on.
Still, there were some interesting moments. Asked to comment on Ahmad Chalabi, the Feith favorite who's lately seen his fortunes plummet in Iraq, Feith damned Chalabi with faint praise, refusing to come to the beleaguered Chalabi's defense. (The questioner, Eli Lake from the Richard Perle-connected New York Sun, a neocon rag, mentioned that Feith's former law partner, Mark Zell, was quoted in Tuesday's Sun saying that Chalabi had "betrayed" him.) Said Feith: "Iraq has a number of people who've been playing an important role in the Governing Council. Chalabi is one of them." That's it. Zip. No more.
By far, the most (unintentionally) comic moment came when Feith struggled to answer a question about how badly the Pentagon bungled post-war planning for Iraq. Funniest is the fact that Feith was specifically responsible for planning the war and its aftermath, through the tightly held Pentagon Office of Special Plans, which happened to be under his direct authority. In a mealymouthed effort to spread the blame, Feith even managed to blame the Treasury Department! To get the full effect, take time to read an excerpted transcript:
Well, there was a great deal of planning done throughout the U.S. government. I think that your question reflects a theme that is rather common in a lot of reporting of the subject, that kind of implies that people in Washington were somehow responsible for all of the planning regarding Iraq or postwar Iraq. And I think that's a rather wild oversimplification.
There was a lot of planning done interagency here in Washington, at the strategic level. There was also, among the White House, the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Justice Department and the Pentagon"there was also, obviously a lot of operational-level planning done by CENTCOM.
And it's a very complex subject to evaluate the quality of the planning. Some of it was very good. Some of it was a lot less good. I think that it's something that is best left to historians to sort out, rather than ask people in the middle of everything to step back and evaluate their own work.
Oh, forgive us. We're only spending $4.5 billion a month on the occupation, and losing about 30 U.S. soldiers and Marines a week, not to mention killing thousands of Iraqis. We won't ask you, Mr. Feith, to "step back and evaluate [your] work."
No. Instead, let's hear what Feith had to say about President's Bush's resolve.
"When a president is steady, as President Bush has remained, throughout Operation Iraqi Freedom, some folks inevitably will describe his steadiness as unapologetic stubbornness." Well, yes. Other words come to mind, too.
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Published: May 05 2004
