The Greatest Love Of All: II»

Dan Byman (sorry, I said “Benjamin” in the previous post, now corrected) starts talking about Rumsfeld’s “parade of horribles” memo. Why didn’t it inform planning? Byman’s not sure. Is Feith gonna say nuh-uh, it really did inform our planning? Also, what was up with there not being a pre-war Iraq-al Qaeda connection? Byman’s going out of his way to be respectful here…

…The door opens. Hey hey ho ho Douglas Feith has got to go. I really wish someone would consign hey-hey-ho-ho chants to the dustbin of history… Also, Byman says, wasn’t Iraq an enormous, world-historical disaster that only someone as smart as Douglas Feith could deny?…

…OK, Feith’s speaking. Parade of Horribles: Rumsfeld put it together “of his own initiative.” Bully for him then. That’s like giving Rumsfeld credit for paying his child support on time or something… “An example of how the secretary approached his responsibilities to the president. He did not see himself as an advocate. He saw himself as an advisor.” Is that a subtle dig at Bush for being too dumb to dig through the options?… Also, the memo refutes the idea that the Pentagon “cherrypicked the intelligence.” Because otherwise Rumsfeld would never have presented such a scary memo to the president, so case closed. Because there’s never been anything like a cover-your-ass memo, and Donald Rumsfeld is inexperienced as a bureaucratic operator…

…It’s all the CIA’s fault. The war. Well, not the war, because that wasn’t a mistake, but the decision to use the WMD intelligence as the centerpiece of the case for war. Wait, but that was the administration’s call. Halp!… The door opens: “torture is a war crime!”

…OK, on the (non existent) Iraq-al Qaeda connection. “It is widely misunderstood what the conflict between my office and the CIA was.” Doesn’t agree with Paul Pillar’s contention that “people in my office were arguing there was a connection.” Instead there was a theory that the secular Baathists were not capable of cooperating with Islamic extremists. So the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group was just a needling caveat about how the CIA was using bad methodology. He’s not giving this up! “The people in my office were not arguing that that information [about a connection] was necessarily correct… It was a challenge to the CIA’s professionalism.” Seriously, this is his exculpatory argument: that all he was doing in a time of war was tasking people to poke the CIA in the ribs to say that its analysts are teh dumb on terrorism. If this is true, and it isn’t, it’s a confession of how trivial and frivolous he is, willing to make weakening the CIA a significant effort within an important Pentagon directorate…
…The risks! Do you run the risks of overthrowing Saddam and the war? Or do you run the risks of leaving Saddam Hussein in power and having the things we worry about materialize… The idea that if we would have left Saddam Hussein in power — and he was in the process of breaking out of the containment he was in — and he might have confronted us down the road…” Except that none of those risks were real. It turns out the containment regime contained Saddam…”If we hadn’t removed Saddam and the things we materialized had happened, we’d be having a debate” about not connecting the dots, he said. Except they couldn’t have, because Saddam had no WMD in 2003, and no connection to al-Qaeda…

…He uses the term “externals” to describe the “Iraqi democratic opposition” to Saddam. Democratic like SCIRI/ISCI?…

… Feith wanted “liberation and not occupation.” So why didn’t he quit when Bush established Bremer as viceroy? Question kind of answers itself… Also, no one was trying “to promote Chalabi,” and yet the evil State Department wouldn’t shake itself of this misconception. “Every one of those steps were opposed on the grounds that they were simply a device to benefit Chalabi,” Feith laments. And why might they have thought that?…

…The analysis said the externals had “no legitimacy in Iraq. But what happened of course, when we finally shut down our 14-month occupation of Iraq” Bremer turned over the reins to the externals, and then they won the elections in January. Well, the SCIRI/ISCI certainly had support! But that’s because they glommed onto Sistani and their Shiite identity. This is supposed to be exculpatory? How many people need to die for Feith’s debaters’ points?…

…Colin asks what the story was with de-Baathification and abolishing the Iraqi army. Feith supports Bremer on the first point and says that the second point you could have argued both ways but Bremer made a sensible call. Hey, Ray Tanter is here! … Anyway, the military was “hated by the Iraqi people.” What Iraqi people, paleface? Most Iraqis not named Chalabi say that the Iraqi military was a source of national pride and a force for social cohesion, despite it being so ravaged by Saddam Hussein…

…”Containment, as I said, was supposed to take advantage of this great moment” of unipolar, post-Cold War cooperation — but “Saddam Hussein systematically undid the containment strategy.” Except for the fact that it took away his WMD and stopped him from invading any of his neighbors. If that’s failure, what would Feith call success? Oh yeah: THE IRAQ WAR. Let’s see if I can ask this question…

…Oooh a student asks why Feith’s not being rehired when his two-year appointment comes to a close. Innnnteresting. Ah, shucks, I’m not going to get to ask a question… He’s not going to touch on why he’s not been rehired.

… There’s an idea, he tut-tuts that overthrowing Saddam and “empowering Iraqi Shiites would necessarily empower Iran.” No one says it “necessarily” would; they say it has. “That’s not clear to me.” Like oh so much in this wonderful world. “Automatic simple assumptions” about the war benefiting Iran are foolish, he says. And he’s right. But evidence about what has happened and is happening is a horse of a different color. A Feith-is-a-jackass color…

… Dean of Foreign Service Bob Gallucci, dressed like a lumberjack, addresses the rehiring question. Defends hiring Feith. “His performance in the classroom has been excellent.” So why no rehiring? It was always supposed to be a two-year term, “and I’ve decided to stand by that.” Feith must be so grateful for Gallucci helping him save face… “On the key issues, some of the key issues” raised in the book, “I’m unsatisfied. I’m unsatisfied. The case for linking Iraq to terrorism, and to al-Qaeda, I’m afraid, wasn’t strong.” Now he’s raising his voice. “We got hyped” on the nuclear weapons question by Bush. Gallucci, of course, was a weapons inspector in Iraq. “9/11 for some of your colleagues, to go back to another war, was Pleiku — a street car for some to jump on.” This is becoming a bitchslap (pardon my language). No wonder Gallucci praised him at the beginning of his remarks! “Um, I’m actually done here,” he says…

… Feith’s response. “There are a lot of substantive points that I won’t respond to because I can’t do them justice in the second” we have left. But he wrote the book not to persuade, but to explain. “As people debate this subject and they have their positions… my hope is my book will allow them to think about it and debate it with better information than before the book.” So buy the book! He says he’s donating the proceeds to veterans’ charities. It is literally the least he could do.

OK, that’s it. Where’s the bar? How I hate Georgetown.