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Any list of the many major Bush defects would be shamefully incomplete if it didn’t include Doug Feith. With a smug victory lap indiscriminate finger-pointing of a book to promote, Feith is now touring the country explaining why the Iraq mess is everyone else’s fault. Inevitably Ahmad Chalabi, a neocon darling, con man and nincompoop, figures large in the story. Keep in mind that Chalabi is an agent for Iran.

“Antagonism to him actually wound up having a major effect on the shaping of U.S. policy,” says Douglas Feith, an architect of the war in Iraq.

[…] “Feith says that Chalabi had a “longstanding bad relationship” with the CIA and several people at the State Department. What’s more, he explains, the State Department and the National Security Council were at odds over how to deal with him.

If I knew that Chalabi was a useless font of bullshit intelligence and likely agent for an antagonistic foreign power then I wouldn’t feel all that guilty about antagonizing him. I guess that’s the difference between me and Doug Feith.

Particularly note the incoherence of Feith’s defense. The underlying message of Feith’s two interviews with NPR is that if America had followed his “liberation not occupation” strategy, this whole mess would have turned out just fine. I suppose that’s true in the sense that 4000 Americans would be alive right now, but how exactly did Feith envision Saddam’s removal helping us? There were four chief power centers in Iraq after we invaded: The Sadrists, the Iranian-allied Shiites such as Dawa and SCIRI (now ISCI), the Sunnis and the Kurds. Sistani doesn’t count because his religious perspective rules out taking an active political role. The Kurds don’t want anything to do with south-central Iraq. Handing over power to one of Saddam’s nephews seems silly and empowering SCIRI is literally the same thing as passing the keys to Tehran. The Sadrists weren’t even on our radar until they took a fast lead in the occupation body count.

That leaves…who? Feith thinks that we should have knocked over Saddam and left, which agrees with most reports of what neocons had in mind, but Feith only vaguely references some unnamed “external leaders.” Why not name them? There weren’t that many exile groups working with us at the time. Gary Makiya didn’t want to job. Richard Perle underlined the point in 2006:

In an interview last week, Perle said the administration’s big mistake was occupying the country rather than creating an interim Iraqi government led by a coalition of exile groups to take over after Hussein was toppled. “If I had known that the U.S. was going to essentially establish an occupation, then I’d say, ‘Let’s not do it,’ ” and instead find another way to target Hussein, Perle said. “It was a foolish thing to do.”

Rajiv Chandrasekaran:

RC: As I write in the book, Wolfowitz and Feith never told Garner how to select the interim government. If they did that, they feared it would force a White House-level decision on the political transition that could backfire on them. Their hope, as described to me by people familiar with the process, was that Garner would naturally gravitate toward Chalabi and the other exiles because they would be the best organized Iraqis. Well, as we all know, that didn’t happen. Chalabi and his ilk weren’t all that organized, or well-regarded among the Iraqis.

George Packer in Assassin’s Gate (via Amazon Book Reader):

Just two or three days before leaving for Kuwait, Jay Garner held his first and only press conference. When a reporter asked whether he would hand power over to Chalabi and the INC, Garner replied, “I don’t intend to empower the [Chalabi-led] INC. I don’t have a candidate. The best man will rise.”

That night, he received several agitated calls from Feith. Garner found him so difficult to work with, simultaneously overbearing and mentally scattered, that he had taken to sending his deputy, a retired lieutenant general named Ron Adams, to deal with the undersecretary. On the phone Feith lamented, “You’ve damaged the INC, you’ve caused Ahmad embarrassment.”

Garner snapped, “Hey, goddamnit, then what you need to do, Doug, is have a little press conference in the morning and say, ‘We’re firing Garner because he embarrassed Amad Chalabi.'”

“We can’t do that.”

“Then get off my ass.”

Jay Garner was sacked within two months of taking the job; the reasons he cited were enlightening. Asked about the call(s) by Steve Inskeep, Feith gave the usual non-denial answer (“I don’t remember every call I make…”).

We invaded Iraq without having any domestic Iraqi faction in mind to take over after us. The only “option” was the INC. In every meaningful way the INC meant Ahmad Chalabi, an Iranian agent who had such a profound constituency in the country that his bloc failed to win a single seat in Iraq’s national election on December 15, 2005. So what was plan B? I’m glad you asked.

“There was no Phase IV plan” for occupying Iraq after the combat phase, writes Maj. Isaiah Wilson III, who served as an official historian of the campaign and later as a war planner in Iraq. While a variety of government offices had considered the possible situations that would follow a U.S. victory, Wilson writes, no one produced an actual document laying out a strategy to consolidate the victory after major combat operations ended.

These are the guys who don’t want to talk about the past. Imagine that.

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(*) Tommy Franks on Douglas Feith: “I have to deal with the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth almost every day.”

The Fucking Stupidest Book On The Face Of The EarthPost + Comments (64)