Feith makes his case

Douglas Feith stands his ground in this New Yorker article by Jeffrey Goldberg, who seems determined to make Feith admit the error of ways in regards to Iraq.

One afternoon, I asked Feith what had gone wrong in Iraq.

“Your assumption is that everything went wrong,” he replied.

I hadn’t said that, but I spoke of the loss of American lives—more than fifteen hundred soldiers, most of whom died after the declared end of major combat operations. This number, I said, strikes many people as a large and terrible loss.

“Based on what?” Feith asked. “It’s a large sacrifice. It’s a serious loss. It’s an absolute disaster for the families. Nobody can possibly deny how horrible the loss is for the families involved. But this was an operation to prevent the next, as it were, 9/11, the next major attack that could kill tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Americans, and Iraq is a country of twenty-five million people and it was a major enterprise.”

Goldberg tries another tack: The old there were no WMD dodge.

I asked Feith if he would have recommended the invasion of Iraq if he knew then what he knows now.

“The main rationale was not based on intelligence,” Feith said. “It was known to anyone who read newspapers and knew history. Saddam had used nerve gas, he had invaded his neighbors more than once, he had attacked other neighbors, he was hostile to us, he supported numerous terrorist groups. It’s true that he didn’t have a link that we know of to 9/11. . . . But he did give safe haven to terrorists.”

...

Feith said, “The common refrain that the postwar has been a disaster is only true if you had completely unrealistic expectations.” The thesis of Administration critics, Feith continued “is that we were a bunch of people intent on going to war with Iraq no matter what. September 11th was a pretext. We believed that it would be easy, that we were linked up to Chalabi”—Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the pro-invasion Iraqi National Congress—“who was arguing that it would be easy and there would not be problems in the aftermath, and so for that reason nobody planned for anything hard, and when it turned out to be hard we were left without a plan.” (Chalabi’s chief sponsor in Washington has been Richard Perle, Feith’s mentor. Chalabi’s group told Senate staff members that it had passed intelligence to one of Feith’s subordinates in Special Plans; the subordinate has denied it.)

Feith points out how many people were wrong about Afghanistan early in the war.

There’s a difference between Iraq and Afghanistan: it has been more than two years since the invasion of Iraq; Afghanistan was somewhat pacific a year after the overthrow of the Taliban. But Feith would not yield on that point. When I asked, for instance, if the Administration was too enamored of the idea that Iraqis would greet American troops with flowers, he argued that some Iraqis were still too intimidated by the remnants of Saddam’s Baath Party to express their emotions openly. “But,” Feith said, “they had flowers in their minds.”

Via Wretchard.