Douglas Feith

BA, Harvard University

We start with a raging controversy: Did General Tommy Franks, commander of US Central Command and top military guy in the Middle East before, during, and after the invasion of Iraq, describe Douglas Feith as “the dumbest fucking guy on the planet,” or as “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the Earth”? It depends on your source. The first comes from Franks’s autobiography, the latter from Bob Woodward’s excitingly titled Plan of Attack.

Whatevs. The key thing is that you can graduate magna cum laude from Harvard, which Feith did, be spoken of by your peers as brilliant, and still find yourself tits-deep in (and supremely culpable for) the biggest, bloodiest, most costly fuckup since Vietnam. Or possibly since ever. And years later still be trying to worm your way out of responsibility.

Douglas Feith got his neocon feet wet and laid the groundwork for his eventual involvement in the Abu Ghraib fiasco when, as a Pentagon official in the 1980s, he propounded an argument that terrorists didn’t deserve protection under the protocols of the Geneva Conventions. President Ronald Reagan agreed (so did the New York Times and the Washington Post, for that matter). Defense secretary Caspar Weinberger gave Feith a medal, and that was that, until George W. Bush was selected [sic] president. Bush, Vice President DICK “Darth” CHENEY, and the rest of Bush’s foreign policy team met literally the day after Bush was inaugurated—i.e., eight months before 9/11—and discussed invading Iraq. Soon Feith was named undersecretary of defense for policy and, along with Richard Perle and PAUL WOLFOWITZ, began constructing the case for regime change in Iraq.

Feith worked with others to kick out Pentagon professionals who weren’t as keen on whacking Saddam as they should have been, regardless of their experience and… you know… knowledge. Then 9/11 happened. It was one of the worst days in history for America, but it was the best thing that ever happened to George W. Bush (for a while, at least) and the neocon crowd. This was the excuse—or, rather, the foundation on which to construct a fake excuse—they had been waiting for.

An unnamed, secret unit was established in Feith’s office to find or concoct disinformation to promote the war. While the CIA and the State Department concentrated on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, Feith et al. obsessed about Saddam. Their thesis was roundly mocked and derided by people who had studied Saddam and counterterrorism for decades. There was no relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq; Feith’s and Paul Wolfowitz’s labors to establish a connection led to the term “Feith-based intelligence.”

But Feith and his buds persisted, creating two ad hoc desks in the Pentagon. The Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group’s purpose was to “prove,” via bogus intel and the revelations of paid liars, that Saddam was connected to 9/11. The Office of Special Plans would, after the invasion, be in charge of horribly bungling the occupation. It all worked in the sense that Wile E. Coyote’s rampage off a cliff works: until he looks down.

When Feith was forced to look down, he did his best to persuade others (if not himself) that he wasn’t plummeting to the ground. “When history looks back,” he told Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker in 2005, “I want to be in the class of people who did the right thing, the sensible thing, and not necessarily the fashionable thing, the thing that met the aesthetic of the moment.” To Feith, then, opposing an unnecessary war was a matter of fashion and aesthetics. Uh-huh. Meanwhile, when Goldberg suggested that the deaths of “more than fifteen hundred soldiers”* was “a terrible loss,” Feith took the larger view. Granting the horror of the loss to the families involved, he nonetheless persisted: “But this was an operation to prevent the next, as it were, 9/11, the next major attack that could kill tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Americans, and Iraq is a country of twenty-five million people and it was a major enterprise.”

Feith said this two years after the rationale for the invasion—those pesky WMDs—had failed to materialize, and knowing that the “evidence” he had used to persuade the country to go to war had been hyped, faked, and long discredited.

Let’s end with two quotes. When Goldberg pressed Feith on whether the administration was still unrealistically committed to the image of Iraqis welcoming the Americans with flowers, Feith said that some of the Iraqis were still too intimidated by Baath Party members to openly express themselves, but “they had flowers in their minds.”

Then, gesturing to the books on Feith’s shelves—“books,” Goldberg writes, “by the great British Arabists, men such as T. E. Lawrence, John Bagot Glubb, and Harry St. John Philby”—the writer asks Feith what he’s learned from them. Because don’t neocons have “a certain nostalgia for the era of British imperialism”? Feith concedes that it helps to be deeply knowledgeable, but adds that that is no guarantee of having the right strategy. “The great experts in certain areas sometimes get it fundamentally wrong.”

And then comes the punch line. “George W. Bush has more insight, because of his knowledge of human beings and his sense of history, about the motive force, the craving for freedom and participation in self-rule, than do many of the language experts and history experts and culture experts.”

So there you have it. In the midst of the fiasco that was Iraq, Douglas Feith praises the insight and the “knowledge of human beings” of George W. Bush, the least curious, least insightful, and least self-aware man in Washington.

What a dumb fucking guy.