The Greatest Love Of All»

We’re live in the Mortara building on the Georgetown campus, where Doug Feith, the smartest fucking person on the face of the planet is showing us why he earned his nickname. Outside are 14 students — one in a Dead Kennedys t-shirt! — chanting “torture is not a Jesuit position. Woo! Inside, my homie Colin Kahl from CNAS and Georgetown has a big pie-eating grin on his face as Feith talks…

… Feith: 9/11 was caused by al-Qaeda, sure, but the next attack could have come from a network — “a global movement of Islamist extremists” — and “their state sponsors,” so it didn’t make sense to focus “just” on al-Qaeda. Yup! The next attack could have come from the Popular Front For the Liberation of Palestine. It really is monolithic communism all over again…

… Some people, after 9/11, wanted to “hit” those responsible. “There’s a certain logic to that,” Feith says. But better to not hit those responsible when we could make them stronger by invading Iraq…

… The danger: a second attack could lead us to “destroy our free and open society” in the wake of mass hysteria. So we had to beat the terrorists to it!…

… A “notable accomplishment” is that the administration’s “strategy’s goal of preventing another attack” has worked for 6 years. Because al-Qaeda’s operational planning is totally dependent on Bush’s political calendar or something…
… War And Decision relies on contemporaneous documents to guard against the impulse to vanity. “People tend to remember themselves as prescient geniuses,” Feith says. No irony…

…He’s plugging his new website, waranddecision.com, where you can check his endnotes. Outside I can hear students chant that he’s got to go. He expects to post new docs as they’re declassified. How I hope he publishes, like, the 9/11 Commission report, the Senate intelligence committee’s two-part report, Carl Levin’s investigation into his office, the Silbermann-Robb commission report, the Pentagon inspector-general report into his office (it wasn’t illegal!), the Joint Forces Command report…

…A plea to civility! Is the debate “worthy of the men and women in the armed forces”? I think that was a quote from something he’s reading… OK Dan Benjamin Byman is speaking, so I’m publishing this and continuing in a new post.