An interview with Douglas J. Feith, author of “War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism” (Harper, April 2008).
The Denver Post: If there is one area you would like change in the public perception regarding the lead up to the war in Iraq and subsequent rebuilding, what would it be?
Feith: The record of the administration shows that the president and his top advisers dealt with the 9/11 challenge and the Iraq problem soberly and in good faith. The president had difficult choices to make about whether to run the risks of leaving Saddam [Hussein] in power or to run the risks of removing him by force. I think it’s important for the public to understand the analysis of these choices that the president and his team used. The decisions were the kind on which reasonable people could — and did — differ, but the president’s approach was careful and honest and sensible.
The Post: Most Americans believe that WMD was the single casus belli regarding Iraq. Congress had several other justifications. Was the quick erosion of the public’s confidence in the Iraq War effected by a lack of articulation and communication from the administration about what to expect and what the goals were?
Feith: The administration did not do as good a job as it should have done in explaining to the public what is was doing and why, either before the war started in Iraq or after. There are major lessons to be learned from this failure. It’s important for the president to sustain public support for major national security actions, like the war in Iraq . . . . Communications failures are a much bigger deal than a simple public relations or political problem. They can be strategic problems. They can lead to the loss of a war.
The Post: You recount a memo, one which formulated the administration’s aims after 9/11. It reads, in part, “We cannot expect to eliminate every terrorist activity but we can realistically aim to prevent terrorism from undermining our way of life and to demonstrate its futility as a weapon of political blackmail against the America and our interests.” Using this charge as the guideline, do you believe the war on terror has been a success so far?
Feith: I think that very few people would have been willing to predict on the day after the 9/11 attack that we would reach the seventh anniversary of that attack and would not have experienced a follow-up attack on U.S. soil.
The administration developed a concept of fighting the Jihadist terrorist challenge by hitting the terrorist network broadly, using diplomatic means, economic means, law enforcement, as well as military means to disrupt and damage not the just the terrorist group that hit us on 9/11, but the whole international network, including key state supporters of terrorism. The government prosecuted the war on terrorism vigorously, in line with that concept.
Now, there are terrorists who still have the ability to attack us — and someday, we have to expect, they will do so. But it’s a notable accomplishment — and a credit to the president’s strategy — that we’ve not had another attack of that kind for almost seven years.
The Post: Early in “War and Decision” you mention that Donald Rumsfeld was frustrated with the “pitiful” amount of intelligence we possessed on al-Qaeda and Afghanistan. If the administration was cognizant about the general dearth of intelligence, shouldn’t it have been skeptical regarding the information it possessed on Iraq before the war?
Feith: One has to say that we should have been more skeptical about the intelligence that turned out to be erroneous. That’s obvious. In my book, I asked why officials weren’t more skeptical about the WMD intelligence, in particular the CIA’s assessment that we would find chemical and biological weapons stockpiles. The answer is that there was a strong basis for believing that assessment. Saddam wanted to encourage the belief among some of his enemies that he had such stockpiles. He was focused on the Iranians and on the Iraqi Kurds and Shiites, the groups against whom he had used (or tried to use) WMD in the past. He wanted them to believe he still had WMD.
At the same time, Saddam chose not to retain WMD stockpiles because he wanted to escape U.N. sanctions.
Nevertheless, Saddam built civilian-military dual-use production facilities so that he could create new chemical and biological weapons stockpiles for himself within a matter of a few weeks at any time.
The Post: Do you believe the drama and pitfalls of the Iraqi war and subsequent violence will hamper the U.S.’s ability to react to foreign threats, in Iran, for instance? Or do you believe that military action against a nuclear Iran is inevitable regardless of public opinion or who will be president?
Feith: The Iranians appear to have concluded that our difficulties in Iraq — getting bogged down there, and the general unpopularity of the war among Americans — has meant that there is not a credible threat of serious pressure on Iran at present. After we overthrew Saddam, the Iranians made some concessions, which reflected nervousness on their part. Now they are rejecting the diplomatic efforts directed at them. They are being tough against the Europeans, the IAEA and us in a way that shows that they have concluded that we lack forceful options against them.
There is a question, in any event, of what could be accomplished militarily by an air attack against the Iranian nuclear program. The Iranians drew lessons from Israel’s destruction of Osiraq (the Iraqi nuclear facility that was bombed by Israel in 1981). The Iranians have done a lot of work with heavy tunneling equipment and we can’t be certain we know exactly what they have underground. There are disturbing uncertainties about Iran that the U.S. president has to deal with, and will have to deal with in the future, no matter whether McCain or Obama gets elected.
