It appears that Douglas Feith's book War and Decision is being ignored by the mainstream media. The Observer's Leon Neyfakh reported that the Washington Post failed to review the book after running a news story off the book's publication, and that following from that Post news account, the Times spiked its own news piece on Feith. No reviews in either paper, apparently. Christopher Hitchens has bonded with Feith over the issue. The rightwing Powerline has also taken up Feith's cause, speaking of a blacklist.
I'm with the right wing here. I think Feith's book should be reviewed. He was an important actor, an Under Secretary of Defense. I believe the media blackout has to do in part with its own shame at buying Feith's line of b.s. about Iraq's imminent threat. The papers don't want an open accounting, they want this guy to disappear back behind the baseboard. Marginalizing Feith is also a way to justify marginalizing the antiwar realists, like Walt and Mearsheimer. When the real answer is: More discussion.
Another reason Feith should be reviewed is that it’s important to contest his account. The great negative achievement of Feith’s book is his insistence that there was no ideological component to the Iraq War. In essence, he says, we went to war for one reason: because the Bush Administration justifiably feared that Iraq, which had been at war with the U.S. since ’91, would give chemical/biological weapons to Al Qaeda, with whom it had connections, and that Al Qaeda would then carry pandemonium and murder to the U.S.
This claim is highly suspect. Not least because Feith insists that he was some gopherish underling merely raising honest questions about the CIA’s demurrals on the crazy intelligence and decisionmaking. Well the CIA was right, as Linc Chafee’s book demonstrates. The decision to go to war was a reckless one, and Feith was in fact an ideologue.
That is the most amazing thing about Feith’s book: in his desire to make himself out to be a sane apparatchik serving Rumsfeld and Bush as they soberly sought to protect American families, he utterly cleanses his own record of the extremism that has long characterized his political activities. He does note that he helped to found the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, at 23, and that he advised Bob Dole on Middle East policy in ’96. But as I have already pointed out, he fails to say that he served Netanyahu in trying to demolish the peace process in ’96, when he penned the notorious Clean Break paper (along with the feverish David Wurmser and Richard Perle).
In his forthcoming book, The Transparent Cabal, Stephen Sniegoski more fully relates Feith’s record:
He [Douglas Feith] was closely associated with the right-wing Zionist group,
the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA). Living in Poland during the
1930s, Feith’s father, Dalck Feith, was active in Betar, the youth wing of
the right-wing Revisionist Zionist movement founded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky. In
1997, Douglas Feith and his father were the Guests of Honor at the 100th
anniversary dinner of the ZOA in New York City. Dalck Feith received the
organization’s special Centennial Award at the dinner for his lifetime of
service to Israel and the Jewish people. Douglas Feith received the
prestigious Louis D. Brandeis Award.
Feith co-founded One Jerusalem, a group whose objective was “saving a
united Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel.” Feith was quite open
about the Jewish exclusivism of the Israeli state. In an address he
delivered in Jerusalem in 1997, titled “Reflections on Liberalism, Democracy
and Zionism,” Feith denounced “those Israelis” who “contend that Israel like
America should not be an ethnic state – a Jewish state – but rather a ‘state
of its citizens.'” Feith argued that “there is a place in the world for
non-ethnic nations and there is a place for ethnic nations.”
Before entering the Bush administration, Feith ran a small Washington-
based law firm, Feith and Zell, which had one international office – in
Israel. And the majority of the firm’s work consisted of representing
Israeli interests. Feith’s partner, L. Marc Zell, was an American who became an
Israeli citizen living in a Jewish settlement on the West Bank.
Here’s Zell’s settlement. On Wikipedia, Zell comes across as a zealot. In his book, Feith doesn’t mention Zell, that settlement, or One Jerusalem; fails to describe the law firm in any specificity. His acknowledgements do mention a bunch of big-money neocon Zionist Republicans Mel Sembler, Richard Fox, Roger Hertog. Hertog is also a nut about the West Bank and has funded Nakba denial at Commentary magazine. Former ADL boss Ken Bialkin is also mentioned in Feith’s acknowledgments.
My point is that the core of Feith’s political engagement has been zealous support for an expansionist Israel that characterizes neoconservative ideas. But his book removes all reference to this activity in attempting to put himself forward as a sane broker of intelligence and of the decision to go to war. This is self-laundering at a stupendous scale. Now and then the extremist Feith leaks through here. Here, for instance, is a memo that Feith touches on in his book, saying it was merely informational–while taking care not to print it in his appendices. Of course he doesn’t want us to read anything from this memo; for it is not the voice of this book, but a hysterical voice, reciting 50 highly-tendentious and scary points allegedly tying Iraq to Al Qaeda.
Feith the ideologue repeatedly said that Saddam must be removed because he was exporting terrorism to other countries–invariably that other country was Israel. Well, I don’t think that was a reason for us to go to war, not while Israel is occupying Arab lands. It was in the American interest to stop the settlements a long time ago, as even Nixon and Bush I understood. But Greater Israel zealots like Feith have continually nullified that policy, with support from the big-money Semblers and Foxes and Hertogs.
One last point about Feith: He is donating all the proceeds of his book to a charitable foundation that will give the money to veterans and their families. Glory to you for that, Feith!
