@@ White House cabal - dumb, but smart Feith @@
Arash
October 24
Dumb, but smart Feith
By Arnaud de Borchgrave
UPI editor at large
adeborch[AT]csis.org
international[AT]upi.com
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Arnaud_de_Borchgrave
Washington -- What has Douglas Feith
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/feith/feith.php), the former No. 3 at the
Pentagon, done to deserve so many high-ranking public hoots of derision? First he was
lampooned by General Tommy Franks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Franks), the
commander of both the 2001 Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Iraqi
Freedom in 2003. "The stupidest guy on the face of the earth", General Franks was
quoted as saying.
The latest surprise sally came from Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's chief
of staff when he was secretary of state. "Seldom in my life", said Wilkerson, "have I
met a dumber man". Wilkerson was Powell's most trusted adviser for almost 16 years.
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/001020.html
Feith was a key cog in what Wilkerson calls the "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal" that hijacked
U.S. foreign policy and marched the country to war in Iraq with disinformation about
Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. The "cabal" is code for the neo-cons.
Wilkerson is a former associate director of Policy Planning at the State Department
and ex-director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College.
With 1600 people who reported to him as undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas
Feith was anything but stupid when he set up the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group
and the Office of Special plans to find evidence of WMD and of links between Saddam's
regime and al-CIA-duh (al-Qaida). This new rump adjunct to the intelligence community
was charged with finding what the CIA couldn't. The neo-cons were determined to
develop a credible rationale for the war.
Immediately following 9/11, Feith began agitating for retaliation against Iraq, not
Afghanistan. After resigning from the Pentagon last spring, he wrote an op-ed that
conceded he favored an invasion of Iraq as that would have taken Osama bin Laden and
cohorts by surprise. Bin Laden would have been delighted to see Douglas Feith
prevail on this score and doubtless would have concluded U.S. retaliation was
unrelated to al-Qaida.
Several prominent journalists were encouraged to discredit former Ambassador Joseph
Wilson who had investigated reports of Niger exporting yellowcake uranium to Iraq and
concluded they were groundless. Cheney's chief of staff, Irv Lewis "Scooter" Libby
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/libby/libby.php) told The New York Times' Judith
Miller that ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame
Wilson(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair), was the CIA agent who had sent
ambassador Joe Wilson to Niger in order to embarrass the administration. In so doing,
he had blown the cover - deliberately is what a federal prosecutor believes - of a
secret operative, which is a violation of federal law.
In the run-up to the Iraq war, Judith Miller
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller_%28journalist%29) wrote several stories
that purported to prove the existence of WMD in Iraq. In 1998, Feith signed an open
letter to President Clinton calling for the administration to work with Ahmad
Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress to oust Saddam. Both Douglas Feith and Chalabi
supplied Miller with WMD disinformation that the Times published under her byline.
According to Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, then Secretary of State Powell
called Feith's operation the "Gestapo office". Powell opposed - and Feith rammed
through - the authorized reinterpretation of the Geneva accords to permit tougher
interrogation methods of prisoners of war. Judge Advocate General officers were also
shut out of interrogation sessions at Guantanamo Bay, Bagram in Afghanistan, and Abu
Ghraib in Iraq.
Colonel Wilkerson, a military academic, broke his silence on his years with Powell in
the Bush administration in a speech at the New America Foundation last week. He
blamed President Bush, "not versed in international relations and not too much
interested", for allowing the Cheney-Rumsfeld "cabal" takeover. Wilkerson also blamed
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for abdicating her role as "honest broker" when
she was national security adviser in order to keep building on "her intimacy with the
president".
The Cheney-Rumsfeld team's end run around the bureaucracy, he said, has left the army
in bad shape and stalled nuclear diplomacy with Iran and North Korea.
Richard Perle, the former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, and his protégé,
Douglas Feith, co-authored in 1996 a white paper for The Institute for Advanced
Strategy and Political Studies (http://rightweb.irc-online.org/org/iasps.php), an
Israeli think tank that called for the ousting of Saddam as a means to transform the
balance of power in the Middle East in such a way that Israel could ignore pressure
to trade land for peace with the Palestinians or Syria.
The document was titled "Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm"
(http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1438.htm) and was designed as a
policy manifesto for the then incoming Binyamin Netanyahu government. The think
tank's principal thrust was to generate support for the confluence and inseparability
of Israeli and American security policy.
"Only the unconditional acceptance by Arabs of our rights, especially in their
territorial dimensions...is a solid basis for the future", said the American authors
referring to Israel's rights, which must include the West Bank, which is "our land to
which we have clung for 2000 years".
It was also the document that led Brent Scowcroft
(http://groups.google.ca/group/soc.culture.iranian/msg/38a87c77196a87bc?hl=en),
President George H.W. Bush's national security adviser and close friend, and opponent
of the war on Iraq, to conclude a year ago that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's peace
plan was to evacuate Gaza and four tiny hilltop settlements in the northern West
Bank - and call it a day.
In "Breaking Ranks: What Turned Brent Scowcroft Against the Bush Administration",
Jeffrey Goldberg in the current New Yorker (October 31, 2005) documents a convergence
of views with Wilkerson's salvos. He clearly does not believe the promotion of
American-style democracy abroad is a sufficiently good reason to use force.
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/001024.html
"You encourage democracy over time", said Brent Scowcroft, "with assistance, and aid,
the traditional way. Not how the neo-cons want to do it".
* Arnaud de Borchgrave is a senior adviser, director, transnational threats project
of Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
http://www.upi.com/InternationalIntelligence/view.php?StoryID=20051024-090713-3995r