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.
CONTINUED 1 2 3 Next > 
