So I Started Reading the Feith Book...

[SteveMetz]

War and Indecision - Book Review by Bing West, Small Wars Journal Blog.

War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism. Douglas J. Feith.

Hardcover: 688 pages
Publisher: Harper (April 8, 2008)

West seems to have wholly bought Feith's description of himself as a fighter for truth and reason against nefarious liberals. People I know inside the system (who are not ideologues of either end of the spectrum) tell me that the accusations against Feith were more often true than not, and that any leaking done by CIA and State Department was more than matched by organizations like the VP's office. I, of course, don't really know, but am just reporting what I've heard.

[wm]

The SWC has many appropriate threads for the following. I am not sure why I chose to post it here. Anyway, here is an interesting quotation submitted for consideration.

It is always a bad sign in an army when scapegoats are habitually sought out and brought to sacrifice for every conceivable mistake. It usually shows something very wrong in the highest command. It completely inhibits the willingness of junior commanders to take decisions, for they will always try to get chapter and verse for everything they do, finishing up more often than not with a miserable piece of casuistry instead of the decision that could spell release. The usual result is that the man who never does more than supinely pass on the opinion of his seniors is brought to the top, while the really valuable man, the man who accepts nothing ready-made but has an opinion of his own, gets put on the shelf.

This paragraph was written as an aside in the middle of a discussion about the Axis leadership far from the scene telling Rommel to stand in tactically/operationally poor positions during his retreat across Libya in Dec 1942--Jan 43.

Here's the bibilographic data:
Erwin Rommel, The Rommel Papers, as translated by Paul Findlay, edited by B.H. Liddell-Hart, p382 of the DaCapo Press paperback edition.

[Tom Odom]

West seems to have wholly bought Feith's description of himself as a fighter for truth and reason against nefarious liberals. People I know inside the system (who are not ideologues of either end of the spectrum) tell me that the accusations against Feith were more often true than not, and that any leaking done by CIA and State Department was more than matched by organizations like the VP's office. I, of course, don't really know, but am just reporting what I've heard.

La meme chose pour moi, mon amis.

[bourbon]

Fault Lines: Inside Rumsfeld's Pentagon, by Andrew J. Bacevich. Boston Review, JULY/AUGUST 2008.

Professor Bacevich's review of Feith and Sanchez's books.


The Return of the Neocons: Bush Hawks Aggressively Working to Rewrite Accepted Iraq War History, by James Risen. The Washington Independent, 06/19/2008.

In a series of lengthy interviews over several weeks, Feith explicitly stated that his objective in writing his book was to start the process of altering the accepted history of the Iraq war, to adjust the Rumsfeld team’s place in history. He wants to change the narrative -- before it is too late.

Feith sees his book as nothing less than the opening salvo in what he and many of his allies hope will be a major and prolonged campaign by Bush administration hawks to develop a new school of revisionist history of the early 21st century, in which they will be heroes, rather than the villains. They see this fight for historical dominance as the last battle of the war in Iraq.