Book Bin: "War And Indecision: Inside The Pentagon At The Dawn of The War on Terrorism by Douglas Feith

At the Washington Times, John Weisman writes:

There is a lot to recommend "War and Decision," Douglas J. Feith's apologia of his 2001-2005 tour as Donald Rumsfeld's under secretary of defense for policy. Few books have chronicled the labyrinthine, cutthroat process of policy-making from the inside in as detailed a manner as has Mr. Feith. Mr. Feith is also a fine writer. But the most important contribution "W&D" makes to the growing body of literature about Afghanistan, Iraq, and the war on terror and why it should be required reading in schools of public service and government was probably inadvertent on Mr. Feith's part.

"W&D" should be widely read so we never again make the mistakes Mr. Feith and his fellow Pentagon, State Department, CIA and White House senior political staffers made during their planning and execution of the Iraq war, or their tunnel vision abandonment of a successful Afghan campaign that has condemned us to near stalemate and a rejuvenated, opium-funded Taliban. It is obvious Mr. Feith is bright. His vacuity about the real world, however, is shocking.

But not unexpected. Mr. Feith's entire professional life has been spent either in the practice of law or the development of public policy. Thus, he comes off as the textbook example of someone to whom process is more important than victory. Mr. Feith loses sight of the real battlefields — the ones on which soldiers die — in favor of the paper wars fought between competing factions of bureaucrats.

This is a fatal flaw during wartime. Winston Churchill — one of Mr. Feith's heroes — understood this truth. To Churchill, victory meant everything. And if it took head-cracking and tossing process out the window to achieve victory at all costs, so be it. Mr. Feith doesn't think that way. For Mr. Feith, process is all.

There are also some gaps in "W&D." But then Mr. Feith, like the lawyer he is, is prone to buttressing his position with pointillist details and citations while leaving out anything that might give aid and comfort to opposing counsel. He is hugely antagonistic toward CIA. Thus, CIA's many flaws get ample verbiage in "War and Decision." Its accomplishments do not. Even when they deserve to.

Take for example Mr. Feith's timeline "Afghanistan and the War on Terror, September 2001-December 2002." He cites October 7 as the beginning of the Afghan war and October 19th as "First entry into Afghanistan of U.S. Special Ops Forces." Neither Mr. Feith's timeline nor his prose mention the fact that CIA's JAWBREAKER team led by veteran CIA operations officer Gary C. Schroen hit the ground in Afghanistan at 2:45 PM (Local time) on 26 September, 2001, more than three weeks before the first Green Beret.

Mr. Feith never explains that JAWBREAKER, which carried millions of dollars to buy the Northern Alliance's assistance, both paved the way for the Army's special operations personnel, and worked hand in glove with its SF partners to marshal indigenous forces that killed and captured large numbers of Taliban and al-Qaeda combatants.

Equally jarring is Mr. Feith's wide-eyed assertion that his colleague Paul Wolfowitz made "an important contribution" by proposing the concept that Green Beret forces "make contact with the Afghan Northern Alliance and any other potentially cooperating local forces" to act as force multipliers. What is mind-boggling about his assertion is that Mr. Feith appears to have no idea that Green Berets have been acting as force multipliers for decades. Indeed, they are doing exactly that in Afghanistan right now.

Maybe it's naive, but one expects that under secretaries of defense will have at minimum a rudimentary working knowledge of military doctrine and capabilities. Mr. Feith seems not to, which becomes even more than frightening given his wide swath of responsibilities under Secretary Rumsfeld.

Another example of Mr. Feith's real-world ignorance is evident in his coverage of Secretary Rumsfeld's "Strategic Thoughts" paper, Mr. Rumsfeld's "conception of a global war on terrorism." In a nutshell, the Rumsfeldian concept was to get state sponsors of terrorism to alter their behavior through an asymmetric stick-and-carrot combination of military threat, political pressure, humanitarian aid and the use of NGOs.

Again, Mr. Feith's wide-eyed, 'gee whiz' reaction belies the fact that this approach is essentially the same one employed in the 1980s by such counterterrorist pioneers as Adm. James A. Lyons, Jr., who as CINCPACFLT balanced the projection of awesome American sea power with the subtle threat of special forces and humanitarian assistance of the hospital ship USNS Mercy, or Duane R. Clarridge, creator and first chief of CIA CounterTerrorist Center, whose effective asymmetric campaign against the Abu Nidal Organization combined covert action, diplomacy, and PSYOP elements to put Abu Nidal out of business. Seems to me that one vital part of policy-making is knowing when you've invented the wheel, and when you haven't. Once again, Mr. Feith seems clueless.

Mr. Feith does a fair amount of score-settling in "W&D." He repeatedly goes after CIA for its shoddy work, politicized leadership and flawed analysis. And he hits CIA for its inability to gather human-sourced intelligence. "We knew the CIA's coverage of Iraq was spotty," Mr. Feith writes, "though it wasn't until after Saddam's ouster that we learned how pathetically scant its sources in Iraq were."

But even here Mr. Feith's puzzlement is troubling, because as far back as 2001, CIA alumni (including veteran Middle East Clandestine Service officer Robert Baer in his memoir "See No Evil") had gone public about CIA's dearth of human sources in Iraq and the bloodshed and turmoil that would follow any regime change. Did no one in Mr. Feith's office — including Mr. Feith's trusted staffer Chris Straub — who had actually traveled to Northern Iraq with Mr. Baer in the 1990s — read any of these articles or books?

Mr. Feith does have a nice way with words. He portrays former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage as "A hulking bodybuilder with a foghorn voice [who] cultivated the persona of a stereotypical longshoreman union enforcer." Nicely done and spot-on accurate. To Mr. Feith, Mr. Armitage is a constant roadblock to effective policy.

So is Mr. Armitage's boss, SECSTATE Colin Powell, who comes off as insincere and ineffective when it comes to pushing the administration's positions. Mr. Feith is convinced that if Mr. Powell had arm-twisted the Europeans — especially the French and the Germans — and had put his prestige on the line with the Turks pre-invasion, things might have gone differently. And CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks (who according to Bob Woodward's 2004 book "Plan of Attack" once referred to Mr. Feith as "the [expletive] stupidest guy on the face of the earth"), is castigated mainly for his inattention to post-war planning in Iraq.

Here, I must quibble. In his criticism of Gen. Franks, Mr. Feith is far too kind.

There are also fascinating enlightenments. Mr. Feith relates how SECDEF Rumsfeld wrote a pre-war memo listing all the possible calamities that could befall the United States in Iraq. It is unsettling to realize that most of Mr. Rumsfeld's list, which came to be known as the "Parade of the Horribles," came true. And Mr. Feith admits straight up that neither he nor Mr. Rumsfeld nor anyone else anticipated "post regime violence of the type that we encountered in the insurgency . . ." The evidence was there of course, but no one wanted to see it.

And if there was ever any doubt that the Bush administration became so fixated on Iraq that it allowed its initial success in Afghanistan to wither from inattention, Mr. Feith provides a smoking gun. All one has to do is check the index of his book for "Afghanistan." After page 165 of a tome that runs 674 pages there are but three passing citations. Obviously in Mr. Feith's mind, and by extension the administration's, Afghanistan was no longer a matter of consequence once the decision to invade Iraq was made. Once again, process trumped victory. Quel dommage.

John Weisman's most recent CIA novel, "Direct Action," is currently available from Avon Books. He can be reached at blackops@johnweisman.com.

Pinpointing Crucial Moments in The History That Got Us Into The Iraq War

Congressional Quarterly reports:

Hearing horror stories about the manipulation of Iraq intelligence is like watching “The Exorcist” again and again: Each time you see something new and laugh at the parts that used to make your hair go up straight.

Patrick Lang told a hilarious story the other night, for example, about a job interview he had with Douglas Feith, a key architect of the invasion of Iraq.

It was at the beginning of the first Bush term. Lang had been in charge of the Middle East, South Asia and terrorism for the Defense Intelligence Agency in the 1990s. Later he ran the Pentagon’s worldwide spying operations.

In early 2001, his name was put forward as somebody who would be good at running the Pentagon’s office of special operations and low-intensity warfare, i.e., counterinsurgency. Lang had also been a Green Beret, with three tours in South Vietnam.

One of the people he had to impress was Feith, the Defense Department’s number three official and a leading player in the clique of neoconservatives who had taken over the government’s national security apparatus.

Lang went to see him, he recalled during a May 7 panel discussion at the University of the District of Columbia.

“He was sitting there munching a sandwich while he was talking to me,” Lang recalled, “ which I thought was remarkable in itself, but he also had these briefing papers — they always had briefing papers, you know — about me.

“He’s looking at this stuff, and he says, ‘I’ve heard of you. I heard of you.’

“He says, ‘Is it really true that you really know the Arabs this well, and that you speak Arabic this well? Is that really true? Is that really true?’

“And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s really true.’

‘That’s too bad,” Feith said.

The audience howled.

“That was the end of the interview,” Lang said. “I’m not quite sure what he meant, but you can work it out.”

Feith, of course, like the administration’s other Israel-connected hawks, didn’t want “Arabists” like Lang muddying the road to Baghdad, from where — according to the Bush administration theory — overthrowing Saddam Hussein would ignite mass demands for Western-style, pro-U.S. democracies across the entire Middle East.

Lang’s story is merely an illumination of what the Senate Intelligence Committee said in drier language May 25, that the White House was warned before invading Iraq that creating a stable democracy there “would be a long, difficult and probably turbulent process.”

Suddenly the Cassandras are everywhere. These days you can’t drop a Blackberry between Capitol Hill and Dupont Circle without it being stepped on by a former intelligence official with prepared testimony or a book proposal.

For those of us who have been around Washington for more than awhile, it’s unprecedented.

There were defections from the Johnson administration over Vietnam, more with the Nixon administration’s invasion of Cambodia — and of course there were Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, which exposed a historical record of official deceit on Indochina.

But back then intelligence officials didn’t quit one day and the next day write real-time books exposing the machinations of current, or near-current, defense and intelligence leaders.

When one did in 1974 — dissident CIA executive Victor Marchetti, who wrote “The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence,” an expose of how the agency overthrew governments, etc. (with John Marks, a former State Department intelligence analyst), there was an uproar.

Shrugs
Today, there are fewer uproars than shrugs, weekend news blips. Even George Tenet’s memoir has already started falling down the rungs of The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list.

One reason might be that readers don’t think he’s telling the truth — and too late, at that.

But another may be that the public has already concluded that, at least when it comes to the Middle East, the president and his men are — not to put too fine a point on it — dopes. Or worse.

As Colin Powell’s former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson, appearing on the same panel with Lang, put it, “This is the most colossally inept and incompetent administration in American history.”

And Wilkerson spent more than three decades in the Army. Even coming from the right hand man to the Bush administration’s former secretary of State, however, who was at the center of every intelligence controversy related to Iraq, that’s hardly news anymore.

Still, with the added value of hindsight, their anecdotes still have a fresh punch.

Here’s Another From Lang
“I remember talking to [Paul] Wolfowitz, in his office, in the Pentagon, and telling him — this was after the propaganda build up had started, before the war. I said, ‘You know, these guys are not going to welcome you.’

“He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘For one thing, these guys detest foreigners, and the few who really like you are the least representative of the various breeds of people there. They’re going to fight you, then, if you occupy the place there’s going to be a massive insurgency.’”

“He said, ‘No, no, they’ll be glad to see us,’” Lang continued. “This will start the process of revolution around the Middle East that will transform everything.’

No, Lang told Wolfowitz, “that’s not gonna happen. It’s just an impossibility. They’re not like that. They don’t want to be us.”

Not everyone agrees with all of Lang’s views about the Arab world, but on this issue he was prescient, of course, as were almost all experts on the region outside of the neocon faithful.

How come we learned so much of this dispute only after the war?

Face Time
Wilkerson provides a damning clue.

In February 2003, Powell’s top aide relates, he “spent five of the most intimate days of my life, and five nights, without sleeping, as did my team, staring into . . . the face” of George Tenet, Tenet’s deputy John McLaughlin, and other top CIA officials working on Iraq, at the agency’s headquarters at Langley.

It was the eve of Powell’s now infamous speech at the United Nations detailing Iraq’s alleged biological, chemical and nuclear programs.

“One of the things Secretary Powell and I told Mr. Tenet and Mr. McLaughlin at the outset of our frenetic five or six days, trying to get ready for the U.N., was ‘multiple sources.’ We will not take anything and put it in this presentation, unless there are multiple, independently corroborated sources for the items we’re putting in the testimony,” Wilkerson said.

“That was the going-in position.”

Subsequently, he learned that there was but “a single source for the mobile biological laboratories; that his code name was Curveball; and that there were several very key dissents as to this individual’s testimony, during or before the preparation of the secretary of State.”

Curveball, an Iraqi refugee, turned out to be a liar.

“None of that, ladies and gentlemen, none of that was revealed to the secretary of State, or to me, or to any member of my team, by either John McLaughlin or George Tenet,” Wilkerson said.

Tenet says in his memoir that he never heard of any serious questions about Curveball.

As readers of this column know , however, Tenet’s chief of European operations, Tyler Drumheller, insists he sent a flurry of warnings about Curveball to Tenet’s deputies.

Both can’t be right.

“Either George Tenet is lying through his teeth, or Tyler Drumheller is lying through his teeth,” Wilkerson says, “with regard to one of the most important pillars of Secretary Powell’s presentation at the United Nations: the mobile biological laboratories.”

We’re waiting now for a third CIA official to come forth with an answer.

Duped
The other “pillar” for the invasion, of course, was Saddam Hussein’s alleged connection to al Qaeda.

Now everybody knows that, too, was bogus.

But in Wilkerson’s hands this “old news” seems fresh — like watching Tony Perkins creep up on Janet Leigh in “Psycho” again.

Wilkerson relates how he and Powell were dubious about the Saddam-al Qaeda link the White House was pushing, and were trimming back that section of Powell’s draft on the eve of the speech.

“All of a sudden, we were told that a high-level al Qaeda operative . . . had been interrogated and . . . revealed that there was major training going on by . . . Saddam Hussein’s people — of al Qaeda operatives in how to use chemical and biological weapons,” Wilkerson said.

“This was quite a revelation, and, as you can imagine, changed the secretary’s mind about how much he was going to include about contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq in his presentation.”

But that, too, it turned out, was phony.

“One definition of news,” a mentor told me long ago, “is what people have forgotten.”

If that’s so, then the horror stories of Iraq can be told again and again.

And here’s one reason why they should be: CIA veterans are leaving in droves.

The other night I was talking with a recently retired top CIA operations officer, a man who had been a station chief in several foreign capitals.

“This government — what have they done to themselves?” he vented.

“They took a fine intelligence service,” he said, “and managed to destroy it in two administrations.”

I’m probably way out of step, but to me that’s still news.

Bill Kristol Defends Co-PNAC-Signator, Richard Perle, Against George Tenet's Claims

Bill Kristol goes on the offensive in the Weekly Standard:

Scott Shane reported in Saturday's New York Times that former CIA chief George Tenet's dramatic description in his book, At the Center of the Storm, of an August 2002 presentation at the CIA by defense undersecretary Douglas Feith and his staff, is at the very least misleading. In order to suggest that Feith's staff was utterly out of its depth, Tenet characterized the main briefer, Tina Shelton, as a "naval reservist." In fact, she had been a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst for almost two decades. Tenet also claimed that Shelton said in her presentation of Iraq-al Qaeda contacts, "It is an open-and-shut case." Shelton and Feith both deny she said that. One person who served in government with Shelton told THE WEEKLY STANDARD today he finds it "inconceivable" that Shelton, an experienced analyst, would have made such an unequivocal assertion.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has now learned of a second, more stunning error in Tenet's book (which is due to appear in bookstores tomorrow). According to Michiko Kakutani's review in Saturday's Times,

On the day after 9/11, he [Tenet] adds, he ran into Richard Perle, a leading neoconservative and the head of the Defense Policy Board, coming out of the White House. He says Mr. Perle turned to him and said: "Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear responsibility."

Here's the problem: Richard Perle was in France on that day, unable to fly back after September 11. In fact Perle did not return to the United State until September 15.

Did Tenet perhaps merely get the date of this encounter wrong? Well, the quote Tenet ascribes to Perle hinges on the encounter taking place September 12: "Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday." And Perle in any case categorically denies to THE WEEKLY STANDARD ever having said any such thing to Tenet, while coming out of the White House or anywhere else.

According to Kakutani, Tenet concludes by paraphrasing Daniel Patrick Moynihan's comment: "Policymakers are entitled to their own opinions--but not to their own set of facts." How many other facts has George Tenet invented?

Operation Clean Break

Wayne Madsen reports:

July 21, 2006 -- Informed sources have told WMR that arch-neocon Michael Ledeen, who acts as an unofficial foreign policy adviser to Karl Rove, was at the White House yesterday with a group of Iranian opposition figures. Among the topics discussed was a promised $25 million grant by the Bush administration to the Iranian insurgents. The money is to be used to plant Desert Storm-vintage biological and chemical weapons shells, confiscated by U.S. forces in Iraq, on the Iranian side of the Iraqi border. The weapons will be used as "proof" of Iran's plan to "attack" U.S. troops in Iraq. That will be used to justify, ex post facto, the coming U.S. attack on Iran. Our sources report that George W. Bush dropped by the White House meeting to offer his support to the Iranian opposition operatives.

Pretext for war with Iran: White House plans to move chem-bio weapons from Iraq into Iranian side of this desolate border.


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July 21, 2006 -- The current Israeli assault on Lebanon was stage-managed between the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and neocons in the Bush administration, according to well-connected sources in the nation's capital. The Bush administration had prior knowledge of and supported Israel's planned attacks on Gaza and Lebanon, the sources have revealed. In addition, there was no move by the Bush administration to warn Americans in the Occupied Palestinian Territories or Lebanon to leave the areas before the Israeli invasions. No travel warnings were issued to U.S. citizens in an attempt to mask Israeli attack plans, an action that resulted in last-minute Dunkirk-like sea evacuations of foreigners from Lebanon.

The first indication that Israel pre-planned its assault on the Palestinians came early this month when the Israelis began denying entry to the West Bank to Palestinians holding U.S. passports. The U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv and the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem refused to intervene with Israel, claiming it was the decision of a sovereign nation. The denial of entry to Palestinian-Americans was a violation of the Oslo Accords and the Geneva Conventions. The United States does not officially recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Washington insiders report that the Bush administration's coordination with Israel in the attacks on Hamas and Hezbollah involve the official adoption of the white paper, "A Clean Break: New Strategies for Securing the Realm," as U.S. policy. The "Clean Break" document, authored in 1996 by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and other neocon operatives, was written at the same time the program for the invasion and occupation of Iraq was drawn up by the same neocon players.


Carrying out the next phase of the neo-con "Clean Break": Netanyahu, Perle, and Ledeen still call the shots on U.S. and Israeli policies. First it was Iraq, then Palestine and Lebanon, next is Syria and Iran.

The current U.S.-Israeli strategy of bombing and invading Lebanon is a follow-up to four years of covert activities by the Pentagon, White House, and Mossad in Lebanon that involved the car bombing assassinations of top Lebanese officials in order to clear out Syrian forces from Lebanon. The assassinations of Elie Hobeika, George Hawi, and Rafik Hariri were all carried out to destabilize Lebanon and force the withdrawal of Syria from Lebanon. Syria was blamed by the Bush administration for all the car bombing assassinations in Lebanon.

Israel's border exercise that saw the capture by Hezbollah of two Israeli soldiers on the Lebanese side of the border and the contingency plans involving the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier by Hamas in Israel, near the Israeli-Gazan border, provided a pre-text for the Israeli attack on Gaza and Lebanon. Similar plans have been drawn up to respond to a Syrian "capture" of Israeli troops in Lebanon near the Syrian border or from the Golan Heights. That will be used to justify a joint Israeli and American attack on Syria, with Israel entering from Lebanon and the U.S. entering from Iraq.

The carrying out of the joint Israeli-U.S. attack plan for Lebanon, Syria (and eventually, Iran) is the reason why the United States has stymied UN attempts to seek an immediate cease-fire. The intent of the Bush administration is to see a widening of the conflict. Unconfirmed UN ambassador to the UN John Bolton, appearing on Fox News, laid out the future blueprint for the joint U.S.-Israeli regionalization of the war in the Middle East when he stated, "I think that if you look at the support that Iran and Syria have given groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad that really the reckoning we need here is a reckoning, not just with the terrorist groups, but with the states that finance them."

WMR has also learned that top Israeli and U.S. military officers are adamantly opposed to the Clean Break policy. Many Israeli generals, remembering Israel's bloody occupation of Lebanon in the 1980s, favored negotiating a prisoner swap with Hezbollah. The Olmert government is purging the last remnants of the Yitzhak Rabin elements who favored negotiations from the Israeli military and intelligence agencies much in the same way that opponents of the Bush regime have been purged from the U.S. military, CIA, and State Department.


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July 21, 2006 -- The son of David Gribben, Vice President Dick Cheney's boyhood friend and his chief of staff at the Pentagon and Vice President for Corporate Affairs at Halliburton, has reportedly joined Cheney's White House staff as an assistant. The elder Gribben is an active player in the corporate-religious tax dodge known as The Fellowship, an Arlington, Virginia-based contrivance that uses religious tax-exempt status to lobby the U.S. and foreign governments on behalf of the military-industrial complex. With the carrying out of the Clean Break by Israel and the United States, profits for companies like Halliburton are bound to skyrocket. The Israeli attack on Lebanon is already estimated to have resulted in $2 billion in damage to Lebanon's infrastructure. WMR previously reported that Jacobs/Sverdrup has been promised a lucrative Pentagon contract to build a large U.S. airbase in northern Lebanon.


The stage is set for Halliburton to move into U.S. and Israeli-occupied Lebanon.