FRIDAY
E-mail a friendDouglas Feith
original airdate April 8, 2008
Before joining the Georgetown University faculty, Douglas Feith was under secretary of defense for policy and helped devise strategy for the war on terrorism. During the Reagan years, he was a National Security Council Middle East specialist and also served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for negotiations policy. Feith has published many works on U.S. security policy, including War and Decision—the new memoir of his Pentagon work. The Harvard grad holds a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center.
Douglas Feith
Tavis: Douglas Feith served as undersecretary of Defense from just before the attacks of 9/11 until 2005. He is now professor of national security policy at Georgetown. His new book, in stores today, is called "War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terror." He joins us tonight from New York. Secretary Feith, nice to have you on the program, sir.
Douglas Feith: Good to be with you.
Tavis: Let me start by suggesting to you or saying to you that as I read the text, this is your opportunity in a rather dense polemic here to vindicate yourself. I read it as an opportunity for you to vindicate yourself, and I want to start with this question.
If I'm right about the way I read the text, that means that Tenet now, George Tenet, that means that Paul Bremer and others have come out in the same way to write text to vindicate themselves. Am I to believe that nobody is responsible if everybody is writing books to vindicate themselves?
Feith: No, I didn't look at the writing of the book that way. My book is very heavily documented, and what I was interested in is providing information that has not come out to date on the actual debates that occurred that contributed to the development of the strategy for the war on terrorism and the decisions for the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Tavis: But it's clear, though, in the reading of the text, you argue that if certain individuals, namely Condi Rice and Colin Powell, had stayed with the script that you were in part responsible for writing that things might not have gone awry the way they did? The way they have?
Feith: No, I think what the readers will find in the book is I'm much more interested in providing information than I am in making judgments, and I think that key judgments are going to have to await many years where historians are going to pull together the accounts that are provided by me and lots of other people.
And when the records become available, I think we'll be in a better position to make judgments. What I was interested in doing was taking that part of the record that I had access to and could use for the book - memoranda that we actually wrote to each other - and presenting it to the public. I've had the book cleared by the Defense Department to make sure that there's nothing in there that shouldn't be published, but it contains a lot of material that has never been published before that gives a true account of important debates.
Tavis: It is, as I mentioned a moment ago, Mr. Feith, a dense text, and again, respectfully, a number of judgments were made that got us into the mess, shall we say, that we are in right now. What principle among those misjudgments do you find most troubling? If we could center our conversation on those few things in the text.
Feith: Well, what I discuss is I discuss the rationale for the war. I explain the debates that went into, in the Iraq case, the debates over what our Iraq policy should be before 9/11 and after 9/11. What I identify, I think, as what I consider to be the single biggest error that we made in Iraq was the decision to run an occupation government.
It was not the original thinking that we had. We had hoped to do a strategy that would be based on liberation, not occupation, but we wound up, through a series of missteps, in creating an occupation government that lasted 14 months, and I think that was a costly error.
Tavis: But there again lies part of the debate that Americans, as you mentioned earlier, will have for years to come about what the truth really is. Because when someone says - you, in this case - says that we had a liberation strategy, that goes counter, runs exactly counter to what President Bush at one point was telling us, which is that this is not about liberation; it's about preventing other attacks.
At another time he said it's not about a change of government, it's about getting weapons of mass destruction. And that's why your being the first person inside the Pentagon to write this book is important to give us some sense of what the truth really is.
Feith: Well I think that's right, but there's not necessarily a contradiction among the things you were talking about. I think it is the case that we went into Iraq because of the concerns about the threat posed by the Saddam Hussein regime, so that the rationale for the war was to deal with those threats. But once the decision was made that all the means short of war had been exhausted and the president decided that he needed to take military action, at that point the idea was that we would function at the liberators, not the occupiers of the country.
And we had a plan that would have put Iraqis quickly in charge of their own government and unfortunately that plan got undone, and how that happened is a large part of the story that I tell in the book.
Tavis: Part of the story you tell in the book, again, is about the fact that the response, as you write, was not the response, that is to say, to go into Iraq was not about revenge but about preventing other attacks. Not about revenge, but about preventing other attacks. A lot of Americans, respectfully, find that still a bit disingenuous when we now know that there is no evidence really linking Iraq or Saddam Hussein to the attacks of 9/11. Help me understand why the focus, why the mission was to prevent other attacks when there was no link directly to Iraq being responsible for 9/11.
Feith: Yes, well, you're pointing out something that's very important in the book, which is the discussion in the hours and days after 9/11 of what was the purpose of our military actions and our general government actions after 9/11? And what I point out is there was an impulse on the part of some people to just retaliate - focus on the people that hit us and hit them.
And what the president decided was we actually had to have a broader strategy because our real purpose was to do everything possible to prevent the follow-on attacks that throughout the government we were worried were going to happen after 9/11.
And the idea was the next attack might come from al Qaeda, but it may come from elsewhere, and we needed to broadly disrupt the terrorist networks, including doing everything we can to change the policies of state supporters so that they would pull the reins in on the groups that they had contacts with and would be less likely to provide help, possibly even weapons of mass destruction, to the terrorist groups that they worked with.
Tavis: That's now, though - that decision has now led to what is called the Bush doctrine. Put directly and put simply, this notion of if we think you're going to hit us, we hit you first. If we think you're going to do damage to us, we come after you. If we're wrong, if we find out after the fact that you really weren't going to hit us, you really didn't have WMDs, I guess we just say, "Oops, our mistake - our bad." But that's that Bush doctrine: we hit you first if we think you're going to hit us. We hit you preemptively rather than waiting for you to hit us.
I wonder now on this side of Iraq whether or not you believe that Bush doctrine is an appropriate policy for the U.S. to engage going forward in the world that we live today.
Feith: Well, I think that the Bush doctrine actually was a somewhat different proposition. The Bush doctrine was a recognition that certain kinds of threats are of the type that we would not be able to know in advance when a country was actually going to attack imminently. And so the standard of waiting for an imminent attack, the upraised knife, that standard was not realistic in a world where countries, for example, could build biological weapons, smallpox weapons, for example, and then launch them on us.
And that we had to look for something other than simply waiting around until you saw the kind of massive military build-up that in the old days was necessary for a country to really do a lot of damage to another country.
Tavis: I don't think, respectfully, although you said it differently, you phrased it differently; you didn't say anything now different than what I said in my set-up to it. My language might not have been the same as yours. We have basically said the same thing, that we're looking at countries who we think might hit us, and trying to find a different way to navigate our way in the world that we live.
My question remains, which is now on this side of Iraq, given what we see we have done to Iraq, given that we did not find weapons of mass destruction, given that this Bush doctrine in Iraq failed us, is your position now the same on this Bush doctrine post-Iraq as opposed to pre-Iraq, which you write about in the text?
Feith: Well, you gave a long string of givens that I would take issue with, and what I would say is the - what we were interested in doing is having policies that sensibly addressed the different types of threats that came from different countries. I would take issue with your formulation that the Bush doctrine meant that we necessarily hit any country that we think poses a threat to us. That's not true.
We, for example, did not launch military operations against Iran or North Korea or Syria or Libya or other countries that were state supporters of terrorism with histories of pursuing weapons of mass destruction. What we did was we created strategies and policies for each of the major state supporters of terrorism, as appropriate.
Now in the case of Iraq, the president came to the conclusion that we had been working for 10 or a dozen years on a whole series of measures short of war to try to deal with the Iraq problem. We had tried weapons inspections and economic sanctions and limited military strikes and condemnations and various means of containment, and they were all either failing or undone or crumbling.
And the president came to the conclusion eventually that there was no reasonable means short of war to deal with the serious threats from Saddam Hussein. And those threats were serious, even though we did not find WMD stockpiles. We did find that he had programs; we did find that he had capabilities; we found that he had the intention to restore his chemical and biological weapons capabilities.
And he put himself in a position - this is what we found after the war - that in three to five weeks he could have manufactured the chemical and biological weapon stockpiles that the CIA thought he had. So he was a very dangerous guy and was very hostile to us, and the president's worries about him were generally very well grounded, even though the CIA did make a serious error in believing that Saddam had chemical and biological weapon stockpiles.
Tavis: To your latter point now, let me offer this as a two-part exit question, if I might, sir. One, the viewer will get a chance to read the text for himself or herself. Let me ask, though, quickly, whether or not you think, in retrospect, very directly, did we get it wrong in Iraq, and whether you think we got it wrong or not, and I'll let you answer, how do we now get out of this mess that we're in?
Feith: Well, I think that the world is much better off that Saddam Hussein is gone, and I think that the president, faced with the decisions that he had at the time, weighing the risks of leaving Saddam in power versus the risks of removing him by force, made the right decision. And the war did not go as we wanted, it's been costlier and bloodier and the sacrifice of American lives and Iraqi lives has been large, and that's certainly deeply troubling.
Tavis: And now what?
Feith: Well now we actually have a situation where in recent months we've seen that there is a possibility that the Iraqi government is going to be able to push its political process forward to the point where Sunnis and Shi'ites can cooperate, and create a country that, while it's going to have undoubtedly major problems for many years to come, may have a government that's in a position to handle those problems itself with a minimum amount of outside support. And if we get to that point, I think that's a serious accomplishment.
Tavis: That's a big if. That's a big if. As we sit here now, do you honestly believe, given what you're watching - you're watching the same stuff I'm watching, and you've got more insight and exposure to these facts than I do, but you honestly can look at me now and tell me you believe we're anywhere near that reality in Iraq?
Feith: Oh, I think that the idea that the Iraqi government may be able to largely handle its own problems, you know, at some point in the near future with, as I said, a certain amount of outside support but not necessarily Americans actively engaging in combat, I think that's a realistic goal, and that's something that I would hope we could achieve in coming months.
Tavis: Okay. The book is called "War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism." It is written by the former undersecretary of Defense for policy, Douglas Feith, the first one of power and authority inside the Pentagon with a book about what happened on the inside. Mr. Feith, an honor to have you on the program. Thank you for your time, sir.
Feith: Good to talk with you.
Tavis: Thank you, sir.
Back to April 8, 2008