To date, the literary chronicles of the Bush administration, and the Iraq war in particular, have been chock full of “if they’d only listened to me” assertions by midlevel, often anonymous sources — heavy on anecdote and assertion and light on documentary evidence and analysis. Douglas J. Feith’s War and Decision, which steers clear of these self-promoting fantasies, is certain to amaze readers accustomed to such fare.
Feith draws on countless internal documents, many of which were intended for, written by, or debated among members of the president’s Cabinet, the most senior advisers to Cabinet officials, and the president himself. Feith has performed a public service by taking the time to present these documents, which have gone through the painstaking process of official declassification, in nearly 600 citations that are reproduced online with links to full texts, transcripts, and presentations. (To pick another insider account by comparison, George Tenet’s At the Center of the Storm offers, well, zero documents, citations, or footnotes).
Feith’s book brings the reader into the deliberative process to observe, as he notes early on, that “policy making often involves choosing to accept one set of likely problems over another.” On issue after issue — the quality and interpretation of prewar intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, the desired constitution of post-war Iraqi governance, Iraq-al-Qaeda/terrorist relations, and many others — Feith has laid out the most well-documented explanation of how decisions were made.
Feith’s book is no less than a reference publication for the deconstruction of the myths and assertions promoted by those who either oppose or have become disenchanted with the Iraq invasion and, more broadly, the Bush counterattack on Islamic terror.
In grasping the importance of this book, it’s crucial to understand the current state of the Iraq-war literature — a genre largely created by journalists, who bring to the task the same rigor and sourcing found in daily news stories (which is to say not much). Tom Ricks, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Bob Woodward, George Packer, Michael Gordon, and others have created a narrative arc that relies upon the insights of civilian and military actors willing to air their opinions, insights, grievances, and point papers with reporters eager to give them a hearing. Many of these sources were developed during periods of formal embedding by journalists with military units.
Alas, even in a government as large as ours, there are only so many people who are willing to offer themselves as “insiders” for the purpose of trying to feed such accounts as these. As a result, the existing “scholarship” on Iraq recycles many of the same anecdotes, and they are used to embellish an essentially false construct that goes like this: The Bush administration rushed to war with Iraq, an adversary that was in the administration’s crosshairs from its earliest days in office. Administration hawks, notably the vice president, the secretary of defense, and their neocon acolytes, ignored the sagacity of State Department planners who had carefully and painstakingly prepared for a free Iraq if only someday that might happen. Pentagon civilians — who themselves failed to plan for postwar chaos in their rush to install Ahmed Chalabi as leader of a pro-U.S., secular Iraq — ignored or rejected detailed State Department plans for a post-Saddam government.
According to that storyline, Pentagon civilians also assured the president and the State Department that grateful Iraqis would welcome U.S. military forces after a “cakewalk” military operation. Thus, the first account by a Pentagon civilian — and not just any Pentagon civilian, but the top policy adviser — deserves particular attention.
Feith’s work is more than a match for the scrutiny. It is a careful, dispassionate, and massively documented counterweight to the conventional wisdom.
Nearly seven years after 9/11 it is understandable, fashionable, and wrong to forget that Iraq was on the national and international agenda for a decade prior to those attacks. Feith carefully reconstructs that reality, a long-forgotten era in which Nancy Pelosi, for instance, in 1998 correctly noted that “Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology . . . and he has made a mockery of the weapons-inspection process.”
Feith does not present such evidence with an intent to expose or embarrass, but to document, and in no area does he provide greater and more important documentation than in his presentation of planning for a postwar Iraq. Feith carefully reconstructs the pre-war deliberations and decisions, which relied fundamentally on a presidentially approved plan to turn Iraqi governance over to Iraqis “as soon as possible after liberation.”
The vehicle for relatively quick turnover of governance to Iraqis was to be the Iraqi Interim Authority (IIA). There was significant debate on the approach within the U.S. government, and in various international venues (including conferences in London and Kurdish-controlled Iraq). The approach was based upon the relative success of a rapid turnover of governing authority to Afghans shortly after the fall of the Taliban regime. Feith recounts, again with impressive documentary detail, the National Security Council deliberations on this approach – deliberations that included the president, and his Cabinet- and sub-Cabinet-level policymakers and advisers.
The debate centered on the tension between “speed” and “legitimacy” in forming an Iraqi government. Feith recounts that Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage consistently argued for a slow approach, based upon the need to establish a “legitimate” Iraqi government. This was a reasonable concern, and Feith treats it with respect.
Although circumstances were different in many respects, in Afghanistan, “speed” versus “legitimacy” was never really at issue; it was seen as self-evident that a rapid turnover was desirable and would allow the United States to keep a relatively light military presence to boot. That was the backdrop to the debate over postwar Iraq, and Feith lays it out in fascinating detail.
On March 10, 2003, the president approved the creation of the IIA, which was intended to draw from the various Iraqi opposition groups inside (primarily Kurds) and outside Iraq. Many of these opposition leaders, and the Iraqi intellectual diaspora whose ideas had helped inform U.S. government policy well back into the 1990s, had agreed with the approach and were prepared to quickly take responsibility for governing their own country.
Feith demonstrates that Powell and Armitage never really embraced the president’s March 2003 decision. He offers no recrimination, but given the respect one must have for the Powell/Armitage record of press management over the years, the book makes it pretty easy to understand how the “DoD bad, State good” construct might have been originated, sustained, and embellished by Washington-based journalists since the fall of Saddam’s regime.
The book also presents in significant detail the State Department’s influence via the Future of Iraq Project beginning in 2002. Feith obliterates the fashionable belief that the Department of Defense was hostile to this work, and in rejecting it sowed the seeds for failure.
In fact, the work of the State Department-led team, consisting of working groups that involved Iraqi Americans under the leadership of State Department policy experts, greatly informed the planning. Feith provides no small amount of evidence to that effect. Retired general Jay Garner, who led the short-lived Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Affairs (ORHA) included several senior State Department officials in his first wave of postwar U.S. civilian presence. His initial work was greatly facilitated by Zal Khalilzad and Ryan Crocker, both of whom eventually served as ambassadors to Iraq. Further, State Department professionals formed the core of Jerry Bremer’s team, which followed Garner.
Feith then shifts the venue from Washington to Iraq itself. He recounts how the rapid transition to Iraqi rule after Saddam’s regime fell evolved into a more than one-year occupation by Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority. In the words of Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, the U.S. changed its objective from “liberation to occupation.” The rest, one might say, is history.
Feith’s documentation and careful reconstruction of a largely written record treats ideas, policies, and decisions on an equal basis. He in effect lets each of the participants speak for themselves — at the time the discussions were held. Feith’s role at Principals and Deputies Committee meetings of the National Security Council was often that of note-taker for Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz, and quotes that Feith attributes to officials during those discussions are drawn from these notes, not from a subsequent recounting by the participants or observers. This latter technique might be characterized as “the Woodward method,” and it tends to result in officials — even with the best of intentions — putting their roles in a favorable light.
War and Decision sets a high standard for official memoirs that will follow. It is fair enough for other officials to take issue with Feith’s conclusions, and some have, but these criticisms are blunt until they can rely on documentation as rich as Feith’s. The press wrote the first draft of the Bush administration and the War on Terror, but Feith’s book relegates it to the recycling bin.
– Larry Di Rita served in a variety of assignments at the Department of Defense from 2001 to 2006. In 2003, he was policy adviser to the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Affairs in Iraq.