I'm reading Douglas Feith's book War and Decision. As I said the other day, Feith is afraid of the rageful spirit directed toward him and other people who got us into this war, and that fear is written throughout this book, whose basic idea seems to be: George Bush went to war because Iraq had been at war with the United States for 10 years and was going to attack us again, sooner or later, with nerve gas. And neocons had nothing to do with it. We were just along for the ride. And democratizing the Middle East was not a real reason for the war, though yes we thought about it a lot. Oh and by the way, Israel/Palestine had nothing to do with it either.
The fascinating thing about this book is that it is written to attack the alternative narrative that is to be found on the blogosphere, and among realists like Walt and Mearsheimer and Lawrence Wilkerson. Written to attack ideas like mine. Feith is afraid that these ideas are going to come into the mainstream. So his book is this bizarre denial that anything we say is true. Bizarre because he never directly addresses us, lest he give us power. Neocons? They were just a strong brand of conservative.
Feith's book is deceptive and lawyerly (he's a lawyer) for a number of reasons. First of all, Feith is a Zionist. If anyone has legitimate reason to be a Zionist, it's Douglas Feith. His father barely survived the Holocaust, he informs us in the mingy "personal trajectory" section of the book. Escaped a concentration camp.imprisonment by the Nazis. But his whole family was murdered. His whole family. Three brothers, four sisters, and both parents. Unbelievable. Dalck Feith then went to serve in the Merchant Marine, helping defeat the Nazis. Great man. He raised his son in Philadelphia. So I understand why Douglas Feith is a Zionist. The whole point of Zionism is that Jews are unsafe in western lands. Feith has all the reason in the world to believe this, based on his family's experience in eastern Europe 60 years ago. I think he's wrong, but the point is, He's a Zionist for good personal reasons. When Jeffrey Goldberg visited him for the New Yorker years ago, Goldberg pointed out the portrait of Theodor Herzl hanging on the wall of Feith's study.
And then there's Feith coauthorship of an infamous paper for rightwinger Israeli P.M. Netanyahu a few years before he came into the Bush Administration called "A Clean Break," that advised Netanyahu to turn his back on the peace process and hinted that when Iraq falls, Jordan can have Iraq and the Palestinians can have Jordan.
I bring all this up to say that I believe that Zionism and love of Israel are at the bottom of Douglas Feith's political beliefs. And fine, that's what he believes. When he was in his teens he was writing letters to the New York Times on behalf of Israel (as Jacob Heilbrunn reported) and at 23 he was helping to found the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a branch of the Israel lobby, which Colin Powell has said was behind the Iraq war plans. But though he honors the Holocaust background of his family (and acknowledges his role in JINSA's formation), Feith gives no indication at all of these deeply-held views in the book. In fact, when Richard Armitage of the State Department basically explodes at Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby during a strategy meeting re Iraq, saying that we have to deal with the Palestinian problem first, the sphinx Libby pipes up for once and tells Armitage to cool off, and Feith implies in this book that Armitage is guilty of anti-Jewish feeling. Our feelings about the Arab-Israeli problem, he says, repeatedly describing it in terms of the Arab world, had no bearing on the Iraq war. Yes and Armitage is sitting in a war planning session with three Jewish neocons.
I don't believe Feith. I think that his feelings about Israel played an important part in his thinking about the war. In fact he quotes Wolfowitz saying that knocking out Saddam is going to help the peace process. Not that Wolfowitz and the neocons were hellbent on knocking out Saddam. Oh no, that was just the last option. We are peaceful people. George Bush made the determination to go to war. I don't believe Feith because I've known a neocon or two and I've read Jacob Heilbrunn's book, They Knew They Were Right, and I know how deep ethnic/religious feelings go in these rightwingers. Heilbrunn said the neocons had resentment as outsiders in the American establishment and crashed in under Scoop Jackson and Ronald Reagan. Feith clearly had similar feelings. He hired rightwing hotheads like David Wurmser, and he told Goldberg, sitting under the portrait of Herzl, that most American Jews ought to support the Iraq war because it had helped Israel, or words to that effect. Nothing about that meeting in this book either.
Feith is also deceptive about how he got into government. He had worked for Reagan till '86, when he was a neocon wunderkind, and then been a managing partner at a law firm for 15 years. His only American political activities were chairing "a Middle East policy team" for Bob Dole in '96. Middle East again. Wonder why Dole even hired him. Did money have anything to do with it? Fundraising. Nothing about his work for Netanyahu. Then as soon as Bush got the presidency, "I began receiving feelers, direct and indirect, from the Defense Department." The next thing we know he's Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, a big job. How did this happen to a gopherlike managing director of a law firm? Feith gives no window at all on the real political forces in American society that have lifted him up: the neocon connections in Washington, the think tanks, the huge donors. His book draws the curtain on all this.
Feith is a hurt and angry man. That comes through in his lawyer's letter to the House Judiciary subcommittee the other day, refusing to testify because Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, has accused Feith of being pro-Israel. Feith is outraged at the dual-loyalty suggestion. He sputters and fumes and walks off. No; he has no desire to soul-search about the fact that so many rightwing Jews, who rationalize everything Israel does to destroy the future of Palestinian Arabs, played such important roles in the greatest disaster of the last 50 years. He wants the issue to go away by writing a 650-page book that all but erases the Israel angle and suppresses his own Zionist inclinations. War and Deception.
