Hot on the paper trail to the Iraq war

“War and Decision” provides Feith’s point of view on such controversies as his support for Iraqi exiles, including the controversial Ahmad Chalabi, and his push to get the CIA to consider evidence of possible prewar dealings between Al Qaeda and Hussein. (Long story short: He got in trouble for that last one.)

It also devotes much time to debunking what Feith claims are current misconceptions about the US and Iraq. First among them, he says, is the reason the administration went to war. It was not to uproot Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction or to spread democracy in the Middle East, but to counter a general national security threat to the US. The point after Sept. 11, 2001, was to head off the next terrorist attack, writes Feith, and that meant suppressing a range of dangerous actors, including states such as Iraq, thought to be sponsors of Palestinian and other terror groups.

“We took bin Laden seriously, but we believed that the purposes of U.S. military action after 9/11 went beyond striking at the perpetrators,” writes Feith.

How’s that working out, then? True, there hasn’t been another attack on the US homeland, and Hussein demonstrably was an evil guy. But the “perpetrators,” meaning Al Qaeda, are still with us. If anything, Iraq has provided them a motivational and recruiting tool. Even if you accept the strategy, shouldn’t there have been a sequence here? Was not the thought of quickly ending all possible terror threats a touch ... hubristic?

Or more than a touch, depending on your point of view.

Feith does say the US made major mistakes in handling Iraq – such as failing to organize an adequate security force in the wake of Hussein’s ouster. Perhaps they should have sent more US troops, he writes. That’s a move opposed at the time by his then-boss, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

But the biggest misstep, Feith claims, was taking too long (14 months) to hand the keys to the country over to the Iraqi interim authority. During that period resentment of the US occupation grew, as did the Baathist insurgency.

“The occupation was a barrier to cooperation. In fact, it encouraged active opposition,” Feith writes.

Well, maybe. But given the decrepitude of the country’s infrastructure, the resistance of the old Sunni elite to accepting minority status, the influx of jihadists, and the meddling of Iran, would a quicker trip home for Coalition Provisional Authority chief Paul Bremer really have made Iraq today a more peaceful place?

Peter Grier is a staff writer based in the Monitor’s Washington bureau.

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