Two points in the book were particularly illuminating. One was that the motive for invading Iraq was NOT to take revenge, but rather to prevent further attacks — possibly but not necessarily from al Qaeda but from any one of the many groups in the network of Islamo Fascists that had since 1973 demonstrated their enmity to the United States and the West. For example, the truck bombing of the US marines at Beirut that killed 241 of them was not by al Qaeda, but by the Hezbollah. The invasion of the US Embassy grounds in Teheran was not by Sunni al Qaeda, but by Iranian Shi-ites under Khomenei. There are many terrorist groups around the world motivated by Islamic extremism.

The mainstream media has fostered the view and it is widely believed that the Bush motive was solely to “spread democracy in the MIddle East”. Feith explains this was perhaps an ancillary benefit but would not have, by itself, justified the invasion. Feith shows that what was of great concern following 9/11 was the development of WMD by a state terrorist and the use of one of the many non-state terrorist groups to carry out its use against the United States. Three or more states, e.g. Iran, Iraq, North Korea, might have filled that role but Iraq was the only one where diplomacy had been fully tried and had failed.

His second major point: Feith believed that if the US had quickly turned over governance of Iraq to Iraqis in a matter of two or three weeks following the fall of Baghdad, a policy that he had advised and Rumsfeld and President Bush had accepted, the problem of insurgency would not have developed in the strength that did occur. His policy had been followed in Afghanistan where no little insurgency occurred until recently and that is principally by foreign Arabs not Afghanis. But because of the Department of State and the CIA’s antagonism toward Chalabi, and because of Bremer’s own predilections that externals such as Chalabi would not be accepted as legitimate by internal Iraqi leaders, US governance continued for some 14 months as the insurgency developed and grew.

Feith also shows that Defense also demonstrated to the CIA that the CIA discounted many contacts between Iraq and terrorist groups the CIA had itself reported because of the CIA preconception that a secular state such as Iraq would not cooperate with religious radicals even against a common enemy. Feith suggested to the CIA that this displayed poor professionalism. This was played up in the mainstream media as an effort by Defense to get the CIA to change its “official views”. That this view is wrong is demonstrated by the Iraq under Saddam Hussein awarding a $25,000 fee to the families of suicide bombers and by Iran, a country dominated by Shi-ites financing and providing weapons and training to both the Shi-ite Hezbollah and the Sunni Hamas.

Finally Feith suggests that the President’s speechwriters failed to inform the public of the motive for invasion and did not even attempt to correct the wildly erroneous contentions raised by the left. His book is the first attempt to do so.

To date no major newspaper has published a review of the book. It is clear that his points diverge greatly from what has been printed in the mainstream media. He supports his points with contemporaneous notes and memoranda. The royalties from his book have been assigned to charities for wounded veterans of the Iraq war.

Feith has been driven from teaching at Georgetown by a faculty of left wing professors who objected to his views. Georgetown, however, gratefully received a check for $20 million from Saudi Prince Talal for its Middle Eastern center headed by John Esposito, a long time apologist for the Islamic radicals.

Doug Feith showed a committee of Congresss with contemporaneous memoranda that he had favored giving even the Taliban enemy combatants the benefit of the Geneva Convention Common Article 3 but was against providing them with the benefits of POW status which prohibits the US from interrogating them on anything beyond their name, rank and serial number. He showed that under President Reagan the US specifically objected to the insertion of a protocol that would have awarded POW status to enemy combatants who dressed like civilian noncombatants and who committed terrorism by targeting cvilian non-combatants. He said that rewarding them with POW status when they were terrorists and not lawful enemy combatants would promote more terrorism.

~Matt