May 14, 2008
Analysis: Rethinking The Iraq Critics
U.S. News & World Report's Michael Barone Says We Are Only Beginning To Learn About What Went On Behind The Scenes
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Iraq: 5 Years At War
Five years after the U.S.-led invasion, the war wears on.
In trying to understand news about the conflicts in Iraq, I work to keep in mind the difference between what we know now about decision-making in World War II and what most Americans knew at the time. From the memoirs and documents published after the war, we've learned how leaders made critical judgments. But at the time, even well-informed journalists could only guess at what was going on behind the scenes.
Today we're only beginning to learn about what went on behind the scenes on Iraq. One important new source is the recently published War and Decision by Douglas Feith, the No. 3 civilian at the Pentagon from 2001 to 2005. Feith quotes extensively from unpublished documents and contemporary memorandums, just as in the late 1940s Robert Sherwood did in Roosevelt and Hopkins and Winston Churchill did in his World War II histories. The picture Feith paints is at considerable variance from the narratives with which we've become familiar.
One such narrative is "Bush lied, people died." The claim is that "neocons," including Feith, politicized intelligence to show that Saddam Hussein's regime had weapons of mass destruction. Not so, as the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Silberman-Robb Commission have already concluded. Every intelligence agency believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and the post-invasion Duelfer report concluded that he maintained the capability to produce them on short notice. There was abundant evidence of contacts between Saddam's regime and al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Given Saddam's hostility to the United States and his stonewalling of the United Nations, American leaders had every reason to believe he posed a grave threat. Removing him removed that threat.
Unfortunately -- and here Feith is critical of his ultimate boss, George W. Bush -- the administration allowed its critics to frame the issue around the fact that stockpiles of weapons weren't found. Here we see at work the liberal fallacy, apparent in debates on gun control, that weapons are the problem, rather than the people with the capability and will to use them to kill others. The fact that millions of law-abiding Americans have guns is not a problem; the problem is that criminals can get them and have the will to kill others. Similarly, the fact that France has WMDs is not a problem; the fact that Saddam Hussein had the capability to produce WMDs and the will to use them against us was.
Feith identifies as our central mistake the decision not to create an Iraqi Interim Authority to take over some sovereign functions soon after the overthrow of Saddam. Bush ordered the creation of such an authority on March 10, 2003. But it was resisted by State Department and CIA leaders who argued that Iraqis would not trust "externals" -- those in exile -- and who were especially determined to keep the Iraqi National Congress's Ahmed Chalabi from power. As head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Paul Bremer took the State-CIA view and, without much supervision from Washington, decided that the U.S. occupation would continue for as long as two years. Only deft negotiation by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld produced a June 30, 2004, deadline for returning authority to Iraqis. The January 2005 elections placed many of the "externals," including Chalabi, in high office.
Feith admits he made mistakes and misjudgments. He criticizes Bush for not defending the main rationale for invasion -- protecting Americans from a genuine threat -- and instead emphasizing the subsidiary and iffy goal of establishing democracy. He says little about military operations, beyond noting that Bremer and the military leaders had no common approach to combating disorder.
There's still much to be learned about our decisions, good and bad, in Iraq. But Feith's book is a step forward, as were those of Sherwood and Churchill 60 years ago.
By Michael Barone
Copyright © 2008 U.S.News & World Report, L.P. All rights reserved.





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See all 70 CommentsI don''t have to look up the owners of this publication to know where they stand on politics and war...this article makes it all to clear that they would like to help rewrite the history books ala "The World According to Bush the Great"
"Every intelligence agency believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and the post-invasion Duelfer report concluded that he maintained the capability to produce them on short notice. There was abundant evidence of contacts between Saddam''s regime and al Qaeda and other terrorist groups."
All of this is nothing but a complete set of garbage. The whole argument is doomed to failure. It is one of 2 things: They either lied about the reasons to invade Iraq
OR
All these intelligence agencies are incompetent, and they should be out of work.
Here is a question, would they go to war with China, for example, based on a similar set of criteria? I do think any judicious person would believe that.
Feith is just another apologist for the darkest time in American history.
History will show that Bush was a stupid fool without morals and full of himself. He and Chaney have brought this county to the brink of financial collapse in just six years. That is horribly amazing.
Now we have Neocons writing that the ideas about Iraq were sound but the execution (esp after the invasion) was flawed. NeoCons...(radicals in Republican clothing) people wo don''t believe in compromise. Old style love ''em or leave ''em people. Tired of the America being kicked around. Such people have a serious inferiourity complex. America has done as much kicking around as we have been kicked. America foregin policy is no innocent.
The Neocons just took it to an all new level when dealing with the terrorists. They thought this was WWII all over again. Idiots and morons all of them.
What genuine threat? There were no WMD, no connection to Al Qaeda, none of any of the lies they wanted us to believe. Comparing Feith to Churchill and Sherwood and Churchill is ludicrous. Feith was a willing participant in one of the biggest foreign policy blunders in the nations history.
Not his own, of course - those around him. As is typical of a neocon, everything that goes wrong must be pinned onto others.
This is nothing more than apologist garbage from pro-war conservative Michael Barone - a frequent Fox commentator.
How dare you breath the little weasel Feith''s name in tandem with these two men.
This article is revionist nonsense trying to justify the worst military decision in the history of the nation. Barone is trying to purge his sins along with Feiths. I hope you both burn in h.ell.
One word ... Gallipoli!
Posted by terrythr at 06:42 PM : May 14, 2008
No, but I do know a good deal about our friend Mr. Feith. Do you? Do you know much about the PNAC? I do. Do you know much about the Necons? Again, I do.
Tell you what Terry: you read up on the Project for the New American Century, the Neocons and Mr. Feith and I''ll consider reading the book. Do we have a deal?
Google ''PNAC'' - should take you right there.
Apparently, we should have just trusted the Bush administration, and forgiven them when the claims of WMDs proved to be false. When we were threatened with mushroom clouds, we should have seen this as merely a metaphor. When Rumsfeld said we know where the WMDs are "in and around Tikrit" - we should have understood that as we know where weapons might be one day.
Well, Mr. Barone and Feith should realize people don''t like being lied to. No amount of spin, rationalization or blatant rewriting of history will change this fact.
So GWB and the US intelligence agencies either DID know or SHOULD have known. Or at least had enough doubt to not invade.
Of course, this is a smokescreen: the invasion was never really about WMD, terrorism or security--it was about greed.
Some of us sniffed out this hoax before the first shot was fired. Some of us learned about the Neocons, and what they wanted, and what they would do to get it. Some of lifted up the veneer, and saw little scuttling roaches working under the guide of national security, but really what they were doing was cherry-picking intel to support a pre-determined conclusion that would lead the nation to war.
Yes, some of us saw this. And little maggots like Feith and Barone can hardly stomach the thought of it.
Gentlemen, statements like this indicate that you have no interest in investigating what the man has to say and evaluate it in light of other sources. It appears that you intend to dismiss him out of hand. Much the same way you accuse Feith of dismissing intelligence that did not fit his scheme for the war. Wouldn%u2019t you say that is short sighted, narrow minded, and prejudice of you?
I have no love of the Neocon. They have gotten us into a war we did not need, they have greatly enlarged the already blotted carcass we call a government, and failed to secure our borders. Having gotten us into a war for ideological reasons they then mismanaged that war because they were basing their decisions on the same misguided ideology.
But back to the issue of Feith, even is he is wrong, reading his book in search of insights into the minds of those that made the decisions that brought us to this point, rightly or wrongly, is the mark of a historian and a true thinker. To dismiss him out of hand is the mark of an ideological bigot that has no interest in the search for truth. It is the mark of someone who has already made up his mind. We will never know the whole truth, but to through evidence out simply because we do not like the source is egotism and self deception.
As some point the neocons will face a very angry electorate. Presently they are finding that it is easier to ride the tiger then get off. This tiger is real hungry
His attempt to rewrite history will not work!!!
You''ll see, other than his fellow neo-con slime, no one will read his book.
In fact, I won''t be a bit surprised when I see stacks of them on the shelves of my local 99 Cents store.
Thanks for nothing, Doug, you lying sack of sleaze.
It must be some unnatural sexual urge for Barone. There''s no other reason for such a complete pile of cow dung.
And Feith''s book will be good only for a$$-wiping in the outhouse.
I listened to him on NPR a while back and it was all I could do to keep from tasting bile while listening to him weasel his way through the questions. He never answered a single question directly. He just kept piling on the lawyerly lingo to keep from admitting what a sack of feces he is and how he and the rest of the Bush cabal have sacrificed our sons and daughters for their oil scheme.
What a truly vile and disgusting little toad.
AMERICA STAND UP OR SHUT UP!
Go Obama! Go Hillary! Woohoo!!!
4072 Dead Americans because of those lies.
''nuff said!
Posted by ausus at 08:08 PM : May 14, 2008
And here is another alternate scenario. In 2004, Saddam wants to diversify and have multiple incomes beside just oil. Disney Inc. wants to expand globally. Saddam and Disney get together and create Disney on The Tigris with the Magic Carpet Ride...
10 days after taking office Bush wanted excuses to invade Iraq, 8 months before 911. Feith was nothing more than a propagandist and continues to spin. Why out Plame because her husband exposes a lie? Why the Downing Street memo ?
935 false statements and counting...
That is true. But what your missing is that the only insight that reading this book would give a historian is that at the current time, Feith is still attempting to manipulate public opinion.
A book like this simply cannot be objectively analyzed until many years after it''s been published, when history reveals many of the reasons the author wrote it. For all we know Feith is running out of money and sat down and banged out this book in a couple months, aiming it at the neocons because that would be the most sure market for getting a lot of sales quick. Your not going to know any of this for at least another 10-20 years, until then this book is simply another layer of the gauze that the White House is shrouding all of it''s reasons in.
THERE IS NO DIFFERENT BETWEEN THE TRUMPHED UP REASON THE REPUBLICANS AND THEIR NEOCONS SENT AMERICA TO WAR IN IRAQ IN 2003 THAN THE NAZI ATTACK ON POLAND IN 1939!
BOTH ARE BUILT ON LIES AND DECEPTION AND THE NAZIS HAD THEIR DAY IN COURT FOR WWII SO WILL BUSH CHENEY AND THE NEOCONS FOR IRAQ!
AMERICA STAND UP OR SHUT UP!
What threat? A nuclear attack?
Or, he says, Saddam''s "stonewalling" of the UN.
Is this a reason to order the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people?
It is without doubt, this kind of moralless thinking that has brought this great country''s principles into the gutter.
This author must have been a comic writer. Of course the issue is that there were no weapons, you tool, and Barone also forgets that even the pentagon told Bush three days before the infamous address that his evidence was BS.
Barone also forgets that the British intel report, spewed to lend "credibility" to the Bush BS, was pirated from a 10 year old thesis by an Indian student from Berkeley University, in the US. He seems to think that those presenting the report somehow didn''t know they had pirated it.
Then he says "There was abundant evidence of contacts between Saddam''s regime and al Qaeda and other terrorist groups." Which, of course contradicts the pentagon, whose job it is to know more than Barone does, and he writes this without reference to said "evidence", or to the fact that Al Qaeda was created, funded, trained, and maintained by the CIA to be the US proxy in the Russia Afghanistan war.
Barone is either a sucker who is unwilling to admit to having been suckered, or a pro war fascist, who is profiting in some way by being a total tool.
Yo tool, it is not a "fact", that has been long ago been proven to be nothing more than lies, if he had the capability, why have the "existing" logistics been shown to the public to vindicate the liar in chief?
"...Every intelligence agency believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction,"
Again, more lies, Barone doesn''t say who these agencies were, and we know now that even the CIA themselves didn''t believe this, and since the Brits used pirated a thesis from the US, it is obvious they also had no real evidence with which to support such lies.
Hans Blix told the world that Saddam had no weapons, having spent 2 years searching for them, but Bush was intentionally ignorant of that, choosing to order the inspectors out. I suppose Barone would also lie about this, and say that Saddam ordered them out.
The whole bunch should be imprisoned in GitMo and waterboarded to get the whole truth out. Let''s see how they like torture when it''s done to them.
I''d like to be a fly on that wall. What scum!
Now this freak of a foreign plant traitor has been allowed to publish a book in america to justify his attack on our country from within. We have freeedom of the press in America to a point, but there are limits to everything. A known traitor who has allegience to a foreign country above the US has no right to publish from within the US. This situation si grave indeed when an admitted Zionist is allowed to work within the government to bring us down from within.
People, if we don''t defend our government from known traitors who are members of foreign nations, we are lost. The Iraq war is a wakeup call. We spent trillions, and 4000 lives, and Feith got his Zionist aims met over our bloody dead soldiers. This must be prosecuted, we must begin to protect our country from foreign agents planted in our government.
The other point about the thesis rip-off that this article neatly sidesteps is that it wasn''t British Intel who presented it as evidence anyway, but politicos. It came straight from Alistair Campbell''s PR obsessed press office (from a civil servant) and was most likely OK''d by Campbell himself prior to Blair stating it as fact. Blair might not have known any better at the time he gave the original speech - he was handed a document and told to present it as truth - but he WOULD have known instantly from the backlash as millions of people shouted him down with the REAL evidence that rubbished his ''claims''... the rest''s history - just not the history these revisionist journos are attempting to paint. We know, we were there, we remember - how can we ever forget these grand crimes?
Perhaps the revisionism so prevalent in the media is an attempt to cover up their culpability in grand crimes. They''re trying to wash their hands of the fact that THEY framed the discussion, therefore THEY stifled the truth and laid the groundwork for the crimes to be committed.
Posted by ausus at 12:16 AM : May 15, 2008
He told the world he didn''t have nuclear weapons (wink,wink) and even his generals believed he did.
And he was telling the truth about the WMDs. What his generals may or may not believe is not the question ?
How many generals has Bush gone through because they don''t share the same optometrist?
It is like Petraeus on 9/11/2007 telling Congress the surge (escalation of troops) is working but the fact is the surge and being in Iraq is not making the US any more secure.
Bush has failed to address the main reason for 911.
Would FDR remain as president if he had gone after and invaded Brazil instead Japan because Brazil wronged his daddy?
Let them have their wars, their little games of death and politics. They can do whatever they want to each other on their little island, but they can never again influence the rest of the world or have any power of the majority of humanity.
Then we can all sit back, get on with each other, cooperate to sort out the poverty/health/water supply/education problems and watch as our species makes advancement after advancement with the massive amount of manpower suddenly available to work on ANY PROBLEM OUR SPECIES FACES... the warmongers are unevolved humans who need to die out (or be weeded out) for the betterment of the majority.
There are those who still think the "actual" price of oil changes on a day to day bases.
To find fault is easy, all we have to do is close our eyes and visualize.
Posted by M-RES at 08:34 AM : May 15, 2008
""
To achieve this one hell of a war would have to be fought. I am sure the warmongers would probley win because the masses have soft bellies and no taste for war. There will be wars and rumors of war. When a country is attacked, somebody has to die.
Posted by M-RES at 08:34 AM : May 15, 2008
I like this idea!!
Not necessarily. All we need to do is build dig a moat around them and leave them stranded. Leave them where they are and WE all go somewhere else ;)
Plus, peace loving people outnumber warmongers by ratios of hundreds of thousands to one. That''s a vastly overwhelming majority. Plus factor in that MOST warmongers have no taste for war if THEY have to fight it - most are armchair generals who hide behind those that actually do the dying. Given that the numbers of those who want peace are vast, and that we have a CAUSE that we''d possibly have to fight FOR, then we could never lose. The warmongers only like war for the sake of it and that''s why they usually lose those wars, they''re fighting against ideology. People die, but ideas live on...
That''s because he knows history will remember him as the little weasel who helped lie the nation into war. It''s little wonder he would try and lie his way out as well.
Barone, if by some bizarre miracle these posts reach you, are an weak apologists and you - like Feith - only fool those eager to be deceived. You''re both little cowardly maggots IMO.
Oh the article states it, so it must be true? What about the parts that are clearly not true? are they true also, because the article said so?
To say that EVERYONE on both sides of the isle believed these lies is yet another lie. The lies presented by the intelligence community to the senate and house have been waived off as bad intelligence gathering. Bad because they knew in many cases that the so-called intel came from known liars who made hundreds of thousands of dollars on their lies.
Lie-on. It works. Bush is obviosly a well trained graduate of the School for Scoundrels.
They knew Saddam was crippled and posed no real threat to us after the first Gulf War - he had his hands full dealing with the same Islamic extremists that have killed more than 4,000 of our best equipped troops and permanently maimed another 25,000.
Lie, lie, lie and then lie some more.
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