The reasons for the quiet break with Mr. Bush: spending, they say first, growth in the power and size of government, Iraq. I imagine some of this: a fine and bitter conservative sense that he has never had to stand in his stockinged feet at the airport holding the bin, being harassed. He has never had to live in the world he helped make, the one where grandma’s hip replacement is setting off the beeper here and the child is crying there. And of course as a former president, with the entourage and the private jets, he never will. I bet conservatives don’t like it. I’m certain Gate 14 doesn’t.
I think we could say that about the majority of politicians, they don’t live in the mess they create.
The thing about Iraq that I most resent is how Bush handled informing the public about what’s been happening in Iraq. He’s made speeches about it but he hasn’t gone out and engaged the press enough or sent out others to do so. He hasn’t defended his policy at all, he doesn’t respond to his critics. It’s been very frustrating that there is so much misinformation about this war that is completely unchallenged. As an example WMDs:
HH: Right, right, and that’s very important. And the distortions in the public record, which we’re going to go through, are many and important. But I want to start with a more global question, that War And Decision answers in a sort of backwards way. Six and a half years after 9/11, five years after the invasion of Iraq, does the American public, Doug Feith, have a good grasp on the network of jihadists, and the threat they pose?
DF: Well, we have some grasp of it, and I think in some respects, we have knowledge, and we’ve had some accomplishments. But as Secretary Rumsfeld used to emphasize all the time, we’ve got a thinking enemy. And so as we get on top of issues, the enemy adapts.
HH: Well, I think…my question was the American public, not our decision makers, but generally speaking, the average man or woman in the street.
DF: Oh, no. There, I would agree with you. There is, I think, I think that there is not, in general, an appreciation of the nature of this problem. And partly, it’s because the administration decided, and that this is I think one of the things that is most to the President’s credit, the President decided immediately after 9/11 that our main goal was not retaliation, but preventing the next attack.
HH: Yup.
DF: And he developed an entire strategy, with multiple aspects that I’m sure we could talk about at some length if you want to.
HH: We will be, yeah.
DF: And the goal was to prevent the next attack. It is interesting, as you pointed out in your question, that here we are six and a half years later, and we have not had another 9/11-scale attack. And one of the consequences, which is you know, ironic but important, is that because we have been able to prevent the next attacks, there are many people who think that the whole problem of jihadist terrorism was overblown.
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HH: Doug Feith, there are a lot of personalities in this book which I have to cover, because personalities drive policy. But before we get there, a couple more sort of overarching questions, why is it so long after the fall of Baghdad that so much in the material from Saddam’s regime and years is untranslated and unpublished?
DF: I’m amazed, and I think it’s a terrible failing on the part of the government. We should be knowing what’s in that material. And I take your question, it’s an important question, and I don’t know why the administration has not devoted the resources necessary to making sure that we can read through the enormously important material that was found in Iraq. There’s a lot of stuff that hasn’t been translated yet, or studied yet, and I think it’s partly the result of something that I talk about in the book, which is the administration made a decision somewhere along the way, some months after we went into Baghdad, and we failed to find the WMD stockpiles that the CIA had said we would find. It appears that people at the White House made the decision that the President is going to focus his attention and his comments on the future and on democracy promotion rather than on the past and the actual rationale for the war, the focus on the threats that came from the regime. And that knocked the priority down for examining things like the historical record. And I think the administration did itself and its whole war effort enormous harm by making that decision to kind of turn its back on the past, and try to focus only on the future.
HH: I’ll jump ahead in my question sequence, because the Duelfer Report is a great part of the book, War And Decision. And in fact, as you point out, he discovered that Saddam had the capacity to reinitiate massive weapons of mass destruction programs, but the administration abandoned the effort. They didn’t even try to make a case that that mattered almost as much as stockpiles. Strategic error on their part, Doug Feith?
DF: Yes, I think it was. And what the Duelfer Report, the so-called Iraq Survey Group Report found was that Saddam had purposefully put himself in a position where he could manufacture chemical and biological weapon stockpiles in three to five weeks. And I mean, this was an enormously important finding, but the Iraq Survey Group report was done under the control of the CIA. And when the report was issued, it was three volumes. It was almost like three inches of paper. And the CIA put it out to the press without so much as a one page sheet of bullets saying here are the key findings. So what did the journalists do when they were all of a sudden handed three inches of paper? Many of the key reports, the first reports came from the wire services, who have to write about something within an hour or two, they got a three inch report, and all they wrote was no WMD found. And so the whole world got the impression that the only thing that was of significance that was found by the Iraq Survey Group was no WMD. Now the fact is what the report actually found, and I quote it at length in my book, is they found that Saddam had facilities, they found that he had personnel, they found that he had material for chemical and biological weapons. The found that he had the intention to have it, they found that he had purposefully built dual-use facilities that could produce military and civilian items, so that nobody could pin it down as specifically military, even though it could be used for military purposes. And as I said, they found that he had purposefully structured his programs so that he could have chemical and biological weapons production within three to five weeks. And these were the things that if the CIA had put those in a fact sheet, a one page fact sheet, the whole world’s perception of the Iraq WMD threat would be different.
That’s a quote from Hugh Hewitt’s excellent interview with Douglas Feith who was number three at the Pentagon and has just written a book about the war on terrorism (Hewitt has a link to it in the transcript).
It’s frustrating to listen to stuff like this because you know that no one is listening anymore. The time for making the case for this war has passed and now the people just want to move on. Even those of us who support the war (and continue to do so).
If Bush had done that, kept the spending down, didn’t push for amnesty for illegal aliens and didn’t grow the size of government, he would be a lot more popular right now.
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