Douglas Feith, a longtime pro-Likud mole inside successive US administrations and one of the small coterie of neocons near the top of the Rumsfeld Pentagon who worked tirelessly to push the US into invading Iraq… is now admitting some doubts about aspects of the planning and conduct of the war???
This, after 1,758 members of the US military and scores of thousands of Iraqis have lost their lives, and millions more have had their lives irreparably blighted, because of the invasion…
Feith, who will soon be leaving his position as Under-Secretary of Defense of Policy, had this to say about the invasion of Iraq, according to that article by WaPo reporter Ann Scott Tyson:
- “I am not asserting to you that I know that the answer is, we did it right. What I am saying is it’s an extremely complex judgment to know whether the course that we chose with its pros and cons was more sensible.”
… He said mistaken actions and policies in Iraq resulted in frequent “course corrections,” pointing to two that he considered significant.
He identified these “mistaken actions and policies” as:
- (1) not giving military training to enough Iraqi exiles before the invasion was launched (for which he appeared to blame the generals of U.S. Centcom), and
(2) the reluctance among some U.S. officials to transfer power early on to an Iraqi government and dismantle the U.S. occupation authority, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), headed by Ambassador L. Paul Bremer.
Oh, how very handy to be able to blame the generals and the now-ousted Paul Bremer… Rather than, for example, the extremely immoral decision to launch the invasion at all– let alone, to launch it almost completely unilaterally, and according to Rumsfeld’s stealth-induced and extremely rushed timetable…
Tyson apparently asked Feith explicitly about the question of the troop levels at the time of entering Iraq. She got this response:
- On troop levels in Iraq, Feith said U.S. military commanders — not the Pentagon — determined the flow of and number of forces into the country. “I don’t believe there was a single case where the commander asked for forces and didn’t get them . . . the commander controlled the forces in the theater,” he said.
Senior U.S. Army officers dispute this view, saying the Pentagon cut off the planned influx of nine division-equivalents into Iraq in the war’s initial phase.
I wonder whether she got around to asking him the really big question: From the vantage point of today, do you still think that the decision to launch the war against Iraq was the right one?
I think I can guess Feith’s answer. (“Yes.”) But I wish we had his response to that question on the record.
So, shortly this extremely ideological, racist, and militarist man will be leaving the upper echelons of the US government payroll and returning to the private sector. Maybe he’ll go back to the same law firm he was a partner in before, along with the Israeli settler and lawyer Marc Zell? I’m sure they could organize some nice land-sale deals for good clients in the occupied West Bank.
(Oh, make that good Jewish clients, since those are the only people allowed to undertake real-estate projects under the present “Jews-only” land-grab system in the West Bank.)
But what about Iraq meanwhile? Tyson’s article ends with this about Feith:
- He declined to comment on a possible timetable for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.
Helena, I have no love for Doug Feith, but referring to him as a ‘mole’ seems a bit over-the-top. A mole is a spy. You are point blank accusing him of treason.
Treason? Treason? I guess Helena must have excised this word. Trying to save her from accusation of libel I suppose. But why split hairs? Anyway, maybe deluded scum would would better serve. If not deluded, than intentional scum indeed, and we are talking treason.
Don S, I’d watch myself. ‘Deluded scum’ treads perilously close to ‘hate speech’ which I’ve been assured is not tolerated on Helena’s site.
Thanks Vadim, I’ll take the chance. Being banished for such offense might sting, but, you know, there are people dying over all this and that hurts a whole lot more. And, with respect to the English language, a case can be made that its not even close to “hate speech”.
The invasion troop levels were greatly compromised by the assumption that we could count on another great ally of us, the Turks, to provide access to the northern front. With allies like Pakistan and Turkey who needs enemies?
David
The word “Mole” implies dishonesty — that Feith hid his feelings about Israel. The very article Helena links to disproves that. I’d guess Helena is very, very angry or still suffering from jet lag.
As bad as the war in Iraq is, it still is a net saving of lives over letting Saddam stay in power, and that should provide some comfort, I would hope.
More, there is every prospect that a peaceful, maybe even democratic government will take hold.
While I am afraid that a great many people may yet die in the Iraq conflict (probably mostly Sunnis, as the Shiite and Kurds get fed up), there is still the prospect of a peaceful and democratic future. Where under Saddam (and his sons) the future could only be another 50 years of mass murder and rule by terror.
WarrenW and his mates are useful. They give us fresh expamples every day of the madness we are facing.
Today, WarrenW wants to tell us that the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the USA has been a life-saver!
This bloke WarrenW is a classic.
If a public opinion poll were held in Iraq today re life under Saddam or the present “liberated” situation, I bet I know what the answer would be.
Warren, thanks for your insight. Its really hard to believe your are in earnest. You’re right up there with Feith. As the idiocy of this war becomes clearer to most, the remaining true believers really do sound brainwashed.
Warren, do you have any figures to back up your claim? In particular, do you have any figures for the number of people Hussein killed AFTER the U.S. stopped supporting him as an ally?
Not including war dead, of course, since we certainly wouldn’t want to include collateral damage. That just wouldn’t be fair.
On the 12th July, UPI had a paper concerning Iraqi casualties. The beginning of the wire says that “An Iraqi humanitarian organization is reporting that 128,000 Iraqis have been killed since the U.S. invasion began in March 2003”. The link alas result in an error just like all other UPI links, mmm.. may be that the access to these news isn’t free. Too bad, I’d really be glad to know what this reports says.
“WarrenW and his mates are useful. They give us fresh expamples every day of the madness we are facing.”
Dominic, this ad hominem, personal attack is neither courteous nor helpful. You should re-read Helena’s posting guidelines. and re-consider your own earlier wiser statement rE: gresham’s law.
do you have any figures for the number of people Hussein killed AFTER the U.S. stopped supporting him as an ally?
http://www.hrw.org/press/2003/01/iraq012503.htm
Several hundred thousand Marsh Arabs since GWI. [exact figures unknowable, sorry.]
Not counting dead of course from sanctions, for which Hussein alone is responsible, and whose implementation was essential to his containment. and why containment was viewed as fundamentally inhumane, and sanctions dead adapted as a talking point by the pro-war camp.
I would point out here that the same vaccines banned for import under sanctions are some of the very same “precursor agents” cited by US critics as evidence that the US ‘armed’ Hussein. According to SIPRI, the US supplied Hussein with no weapons systems at all (versus the USSR.)
see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_sales_to_Iraq_1973-1990
“As bad as the war in Iraq is, it still is a net saving of lives over letting Saddam stay in power, and that should provide some comfort, I would hope.” -WarrenW
The final count is far, far from complete.
“More, there is every prospect that a peaceful, maybe even democratic government will take hold.”- WarrenW
I don’t believe that. But then, I didn’t believe in the invisible nuclear WMDs either.
“While I am afraid that a great many people may yet die in the Iraq conflict (probably mostly Sunnis, as the Shiite and Kurds get fed up), there is still the prospect of a peaceful and democratic future. Where under Saddam (and his sons) the future could only be another 50 years of mass murder and rule by terror.”-WarrenW
Well, I’m not sure that Saddam’s sons would have lived another 50 years, but I am totally, totally, confident that there is no way on earth to get rid of a bad dictator besides war.
Not.
It is reported that Saddam made hundreds of thousands of mass graves. So far (I’ve been following it) there were less than 12,000 uncovered. Due to the total lack of security in Iraq, a lot of sites have not been explored. But the ones that have been explored have shown way less bodies than were thought.
The US military actions created new mass graves in Iraq in Fallujah in April and November 2004. They number less than 2,000. But, this is far, far from over.
And then there was the mass burial of still-alive Iraqi troops in 1991 – by US forces. They had sand and soil bulldozed right on top of them in their trenches.
Oh, and the gassing in Halabja? Reportedly delivered by US-made helicopters.
Today, we are busy helping arm and fund the lovely dictator in Uzbekistan. He is known for boiling people alive and shooting down unarmed protestors. I guess in 5 or 10 or 15 years, we will have to have a war there, to save the poor people from “mass murder and rule by terror”. No point in doing anything about it now. The arms manufacturer would not like that!! NO, NO, NO!!!! And the fools of the world can then make fun of those of us who feel “WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER.”
WarrenW: why don’t you buy a house and Fallujah and go live there and experience the freedom from “mass murder and rule by terror” yourself?
vadim, you say Hussein killed “several hundred thousand Marsh Arabs since GWI”.
But the article you link to for support does not give an estimated figure for the number killed by Hussein. The estimates it gives suggest that 70,000 at worst could have been killed by Hussein. The killings happened in the immediate aftermath of the 1991 war, during and after the Shiite uprising in the south.
So you haven’t really provided support for the allegation that there were ongoing mass killings in Iraq. In fact most observers say that that stopped ten years before the US invasion.
It’s a travesty that a guy like Douglas Feith, who is a right-wing extremist even in the context of the Likud party, should have been given the brief of planning the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
You would not imagine from reading Feith’s excuses that he himself was responsible for our policy. You would not imagine that he threw out ten month’s worth of planning by an interdisciplinary military-civilian team that predicted many of the problems that we in fact have encountered. Nor would you know that he promoted the hiring of callow young right-wing Republicans to staff the CPA, rejecting experienced State Department administrators on the grounds that they were “too pro-Arab”.
“Too pro-Arab”. That kind of says it all.
The man was a bad joke in that role. The fact that he got to the number three position in the Pentagon says something very sad about the state of our country.
BTW, his would-be magic bullet for the occupation of Iraq – giving military training to Ahmad Chalabi’s men before the invasion, is another bad joke. There were articles at the time about what poor material for soldiers the Chalabi guys were. Their biggest accomplishment during the invasion was, of course, the famous pulling down of that statue of Saddam.
“The killings happened in the immediate aftermath of the 1991 war,”
this is incorrect. Persecution of the marsh arabs persisted through the 90’s as HRW has documented:
The last major drainage canal, the al-Wafa’ lil-Qa’id (Loyalty to the Leader) River was completed as late as December 1997. Between 1995 and 1997, military operations in search of suspected government opponents hiding in the marshes also continued, as did indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets.
http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/mena/marsharabs1.htm
I’m unsure from what source you get 70,000 (this figure appears nowhere in the article I cited.) it does say Human Rights Watch documents how systematic bombardment of villages, widespread arbitrary arrests, torture, disappearances, summary executions, and forced displacement have reduced the Marsh Arabs from more than 250,000 to as few as 40,000.
And of course sanctions, which were Hussein’s responsibility, killed anywhere from 300k to over a million.
re: marsh arabs
Juan Cole: “I believe that what Saddam was doing to the Marsh Arabs from the mid-1990s could legitimately qualify as a genocide. Likewise, the Anfal campaign against the Kurds. Although the latter was carried out some years ago, the former had been recent and ongoing.”
Vadim, I had forgotten that stuff about Gresham’s law. But in fact we were talking at that time about Gresham in reverse, good driving out bad.
That was then. Now we’ve got another Gresham variant. At this stage it is ridicule that is driving down the WarrenW types. They have become laughable. I don’t think calling it “ad hominem” will help you. The imperialists’ clothes are off and there is nothing to stop the laughter.
Sorry, mate. Laugh, and the world laughs with you. The party’s over for WarrenW and his ilk. As for you, you had better make your choice.
I am a person who happens to think that we bear responsibility for Iraq and if we can help we should stay despite great, great cost.
I also think that people like warren defeat this effort. Feith has pretty much stated that the Bremer reign was a mistake. Over and over there have been specific critiques.
Administration supporters have ignored all such approaches and created the staw man that all who question are leftists who find excuses for terrorists. Rather than put pressure on the admnistration to do this right, they have encouragd it’s delusion that all is well.
By the standards they use they are traitors because they’ve acted to increase the odds of failure. I say this on some of the pro Bush groups. I would remind others to do the same. At least get this people to look at the facts rather than imitate Baghdad Bob.
Bring in the quotes and articles from conservatives and war supporters. At least encourage some rationality.
Vadim: Juan Cole: “I believe that what Saddam was doing to the Marsh Arabs from the mid-1990s could legitimately qualify as a genocide…
Juan is free to “believe” whatever he wants to believe. However the campaign against the Marsh Arabs does not fit into the actual definition of genocide:
“genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
People get a little hyperbolic when it comes to launching accusations of genocide around. The technical category of “crimes against humanity” is most likely applicable, and is entirely bad enough.
I consider Juan an expert on many things but not on international humanitarian law.
Also, we don’t actually know if Juan wrote that unless you give us the link.
I’m unsure from what source you get 70,000 (this figure appears nowhere in the article I cited.) Large-scale government drainage projects . . . along with severe repression, forced the displacement of at least 100,000 of the Marsh Arabs inside Iraq. More than 40,000 others fled as refugees to Iran.
The original 250,000 minus 100,000 displaced inside Iraq minus 40,000 fled to Iran minus the 40,000 remaining leaves 70,000 unaccounted for. No way could the article possibly be interpreted to say that Hussein killed hundreds of thousands. You really should be more careful with your facts.
“I am a person who happens to think that we bear responsibility for Iraq and if we can help we should stay despite great, great cost.”
With all due deference to your good intentions, this is a typical self-centered American point of view. Great, great cost to whom? To you? Whe the ones who are paying by far the greatest cost for your continued presence in Iraq are Iraqis, present and future. You have not helped so far, and you cannot help as long as you remain there. Your presence is the root cause of all the problems, and the direct cause of most of them. If you really want to help, get out completely as soon as possible, and leave your checkbook at the door because you’ve got a lot of reparations to pay.
“Also, we don’t actually know if Juan wrote that unless you give us the link.”
http://www.juancole.com/2004_01_01_juancole_archive.html
I assumed you remembered the remarks of your friend Dr. Cole. My apologies.