A dispassionate but devastating review of Feith's "War and Decision"

Reviews
The review appears in the July issue of Army, the organ of the Association of the US Army (AUSA), which is a private, but closely-linked group to which many officers belong. The reviewer is Derek Leebaert, a military historian, who teaches at Georgetown U. Incidentally, while most officers will not say so on the record, in private conversations there is often deep contempt expressed toward some of the top military brass and civilians appointees (including Feith) for their failures in leadership and decisionmaking in Iraq (e.g., check out this bright retired officer). In discussions I have had, as recently as this summer, I have discerned serious concern about the health of the over-committed army. There is also widespread concern about the fate of Afghanistan (alluded to in the Leebaert review).

Here is most of the closing paragraph of the review.

"War and Decision obliges readers to consider what a “national security expert” and politically appointed “strategists” might actually be. Again the nation has encountered “the best and brightest,” the iconic term placed on the country’s national security decision makers of a generation ago, such as Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and National Security Adviser Mc-George Bundy, who had all the answers to all of the questions about Vietnam. In War and Decision, we have a true to life, though unintended, portrait of men and women also not knowing what they did not know, who appear to have been in the grip of that most dangerous of illusions—that they have no illusions at all."

Trenchant and often perceptive review of Sanchez and Feith

Boston Review — Fault Lines

My earlier comment here on Douglas Feith.

Douglas Feith: "Pre-emptive self-defense"

60 Minutes interviewed Douglas Feith, who is promoting his new book. Feith was one of the most energetic Bush administration advocates of war. Watching him I could not help pondering the mediocrity of a administration in which Mr. Feith was able to play such a consequential role.

Feith was a junior NSC staffer in the Reagan administration. In 1982, he was fired by Judge William P. Clark, the president's National Security advisor. The circumstances of his dismissal were never made fully explicit. Some writers have claimed that Clark canned Feith because of inappropriate contacts with the Israeli embassy in Washington, but I don't think Clark ever spoke publicly of the episode. If any readers have seen a discussion of the incident, please post it in a comment.

An earlier post about Douglas Feit links to a WaPo story about his new book.

Douglas J. Feith deserves our thanks for illustrating the ex post facto ergo propter hoc fallacy

Namely, assuming that what came was caused by what happened before.
This is a particularly blatant illustration of the fallacy because there is no good evidence that the toppled Ba'thist regime cooperated with al-Qaeda. Feith clings to his talisman of purported cooperation, which he then uses to claim a logical connection: post-invasion cooperation between some insurgents and al-Qaeda oriented jihadists logically flowed from cooperation (which did not exist) between the toppled regime and al-Qaeda.

Douglas J. Feith - Tough Questions We Were Right to Ask - washingtonpost.com: "In evaluating our policy toward Iraq after Sept. 11, 2001, my office realized that CIA analysts were suppressing some of their information. They excluded reports conflicting with their favored theory: that the secular Iraqi Baathist regime would not cooperate with al-Qaeda jihadists. (We now face a strategic alliance of jihadists and former Baathists in Iraq.) Pentagon officials did not buy that theory, and in 2002 they gave a briefing that reflected their skepticism."