Doing Their Own Things War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War On Terrorism

...It is largely about the “fabled bureaucratic battles between the Defense and State Departments” that produced the Bush administration’s garbled foreign and defense policy...

...Rather than bring divergent options to Bush for authoritative resolution, Rice would combine pieces of opposing positions into (illusory) consensus positions—just like the “groupthink” by which the CIA homogenizes intelligence estimates...

...On the contrary, the government’s various parts brought their favorite recipes up through an interagency process that, in this Administration, culminated in what National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice called “bridging proposals...

...government’s actions have been the sum and resultant of the several bureaucratic vectors of which it is composed...

...Patrick Buchanan told us in The Death of the West that the breakdown of religious, cultural...

...And the Rest Also Rise T T he european powers that for centuries had created and defined Western civilization were bled white at the end of the First World War...

...Driven by the contradictory desire to do what they want but to appear to be doing something that will draw less criticism, the bureaucrats simply dissimulate...

...Making an example of them, Feith argues again and again, would have a salutary effect...

...The pettiest but most pervasive of the officials’ concerns angelo codevilla is professor of international relations at Boston University, a Claremont Institute fellow, and a senior editor of The American Spectator...

...By this, State and CIA managed to denature, then kill, then virtually erase from memory (including apparently Bush’s memory) that the U.S...

...But he is no stranger to this practice...

...The Indian-born, American-educated editor of Newsweek’s international edition previously argued provocatively in his best-selling The Future of Freedom that too much democracy too soon can actually be a danger to individual liberty, lending itself to thuggish abuse...

...To call what the Bush administration has done since 9/11 the result of “decisions” abuses the word...

...We are living on borrowed time and borrowed dimes...

...This is so because, as This book includes, among other interesting things, some memos written by Donald Rumsfeld that describe the deadly possibility that occupying Iraq would lead to more or less what happened...

...Feith rightly accuses his rivals at State and CIA of never arguing their fundamental positions in a straightforward manner...

...The war pushed the young American nation, with its vast, raw potential and rambunctious energy, onto the world scene in 1918, even though Americans, as Teddy Roosevelt lamented, had no “stomach for empire...

...No one, it seems, was immune to this disease...

...70 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR sePTeMbeR 2008 booKs In RevIew Whether President Bush realized it or not, when he appointed Paul “Jerry” Bremer to be Iraq’s viceroy in May 2003, he committed to “occupation in the name of liberation...

...The State Department, backed by the CIA, opposed overthrowing the Taliban and especially Saddam...

...If we did we could find ourselves declaring war against all countries that gave safe haven, funds, and ideological and other types of support to terrorists—a list that would include Afghanistan, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Syria...

...Goldman Sachs issued its so-called BRIC report showing that Brazil, Russia, India, and China are coming on strong...

...This was clearly an unrealistic idea...

...should not impose them on Iraq...

...government acted to disempower Iraqi politicians who tried to govern the country, then imposed a 14-month formal occupation, followed since June 30, 2005, by every imaginable interference in the country’s affairs...

...not only dictated the rules of the game, it was the game...

...More recently, Robert Kagan’s The Return of History and the End of Dreams gave us a stiff dose of reality with its warning that international competition and conflict were alive and well...

...Meanwhile, the spectacle of American troops driving around and dying in the replenished minefield that much of Iraq had become told America’s enemies that American military power is not to be feared...

...role in Iraq is about “liberation, not occupation...

...Feith’s account is backed further by a website (www...

...applies always and everywhere, no exceptions...

...Given the “this but also its opposite” character of the “bridging proposals,” the substance was inherently elusive...

...But that vision of history and our place in it contradicted what philosophers and historians had long been telling us: sic transit gloria mundi Joseph a. Harriss is an American writer in Paris whose latest book is About France (iUniverse...

...forces and take on the task of writing a constitution and holding elections...

...sePTeMbeR 2008 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR 71 The Post-american World By Fareed Zakaria (w.w...

...Some said it was a permanent new world order, the end of history...

...And throughout the of the War on Terrorism book he shows that he advoBy Douglas J. Feith cated measure after mea (Harper, 674 pages, $27.95) sure to force the states of the Middle East to police themReviewed by angelo codevilla selves to our satisfaction, or be overthrown...

...booKs In RevIew Doing Their Own Things D D ouglas feith, who served as undersecretary of defense for policy between 2001 and 2005, wrote this memoir “to make a contribution to history, extensively documented and as accurate as one person’s account can be...

...But Rumsfeld no more than Feith broke with the Bush team’s folkways by forcing the president to decide what he really meant by his so-called decisions, if necessary by resigning...

...That impression was reinforced when the Cold War ended, creating an anomalous unipolar world: suddenly the U.S...

...All this makes Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World something of a latecomer to declinology...

...Thus Feith tells us that on September 12, as he began grappling with how to secure America against terrorists, logic led him to the conclusion that “states providing them with haven and support were also responsiWar and Decision: inside ble for the spread of terror the Pentagon at the Dawn ism...

...government’s efforts to give the Sunni minority more power than their fellow Iraqis thought wise fed the violence...

...So though the book is unlikely to correct misimpressions in the short term, its solidity augurs future success...

...The occupation legitimized the insurgency, and the U.S...

...That evidence flatly contradicts what the NewsHour’s audience or the New York Times’s readership thinks it knows...

...It also found that 31 percent of Americans think the same thing...

...Oswald Spengler’s elegiac, monumental The Decline of the West, appropriately published in 1918, argued that the creative period of our culture was over and it was downhill from there...

...Hence, disregarding the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, State had tried to diminish the Iraqi National Congress of exiles, and had promoted CIA’s longtime Iraqi agents whose vision of change in Iraq was limited to a turnover of the Ba’ath Party’s top cadres...

...This and no other was Feith’s reasoning for overthrowing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein...

...considered “important friends” were and are supporting terrorists against us is indeed “a problem...

...Yet the reality turned out to be the opposite...

...Nor, alas, does shying away from the problem in general but getting at it via incremental steps justified in immediate operational terms...

...Feith claims that his account is so different because whereas others are grinding axes he is simply recounting facts...

...The book is “thoroughly at odds with the conventional wisdom provided by recent books on President Bush, terrorism, and Iraq...

...But defining the problem away does not solve it...

...Feith describes a corrupt bureaucratic culture...

...They did so because they discounted doctrinally that states are significant contributors to terrorism (State and CIA had held the same position with regard to the Soviet Union), as well as because they supported the Sunni Arab states’ desire to keep Iraq’s Shia majority under the Sunni minority’s dominion...

...sePTeMbeR 2008 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR 69 booKs In RevIew That governments the U.S...

...seems to be to avoid being held responsible for any act or thought that superiors might find unacceptable...

...And in fact the book provides documentary evidence for what each of the persons involved in the decisions said and wrote to whom, when...

...Feith documents and as Bob Woodward’s trilogy had already pointed out, President George W. Bush did not set policy and delegate its pieces to subordinates...

...the Pew Global Attitudes Project found last spring that majorities in Western Europe believe either that China will replace America as the leading superpower or already has...

...This invited officials so inclined to look at whatever Bush approved as containing only the elements that they themselves approved of, and to proceed as if the other parts of the presidentially approved “bridging proposals” did not exist...

...Rightly, the book’s principal illustration of this is the campaign— “subversive” describes it literally— that Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage waged to obviate and then to undermine President Bush’s desire to undo the regimes of Afghanistan and Iraq, without ever arguing explicitly for their position...

...Apparently, this is what Bush preferred, and Rice played to his tastes for doing what all the experts together presumably wanted done...

...and moral values threatened our collective soul...

...Not that this matters...

...waranddecision.com) where he placed reams of memos and notes...

...But in 2002, as President Bush became more and more inclined to move against Iraq, State and CIA did not argue explicitly against regime change, only that “the externals,” meaning the anti-Ba’athists of whom the Saudis disapproved and whom they did not control, were of questionable legitimacy, and that the U.S...

...Rather, the U.S...

...At any rate, neither Feith’s book any more than Woodward’s three gives reason to believe that Bush understood or cared about the substance of what he was approving, certainly not to the extent of demanding that his subordinates stick to the decisions made...

...It further complicated matters that the United States considered some of these states important friends...

...By 1945 the Europeans were on their knees, kaput as international powers, thanks to one last irrationalorgy oftribal bloodlust...

...government’s position before, during, and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq was and remains that Iraq belongs to the Iraqis and that the U.S...

...From Bush on down, the U.S...

...Suddenly it seemed that this was indeed the American century...

...T T he occupation of iraq is the most consequential consequence of this bureaucratic chienlit...

...Though Feith was considerably more forthright, he too refrained from speaking what he thought was good sense simply because it might have shocked others...

...This book includes, among other interesting things, some memos written by Donald Rumsfeld that describe the deadly possibility that occupying Iraq would lead to more or less what happened...

...Declinism went into high gear two decades ago with Paul Kennedy’s much-discussed The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which developed the concept of relative politico-economic decline due to constantly shifting patterns of wealth, innovation, and military strength, with its obvious implications for the erosion of America’s dominance...

...In short, this book sets the standard for history on the subject...

...norton, 292 pages, $25.95) Reviewedby Joseph a. Harriss...

...The substance of the book’s tale, however, augurs badly for America’s future...

...Nevertheless, on September 12 Feith concluded: But here was a problem: The United States could not simply define the enemy as a set of terrorist organizations together with states that helped them in one way or another...

...Feith hopes that perhaps after passions have cooled, historians will use the book as a guide to understanding what happened and assessing responsibility...

...Feith knows that the very partisan animus that led the mainstream media and academe to publish uncritically the narrative emanating from officials at State and CIA to the effect that “Bush lied, people died” will keep them from paying attention to the meticulous corrections of the record that the book contains...

...Before the invasion, the U.S...

...These and others of Rumsfeld’s writings show him to be intellectually far above other top officials...

...It was the talk of Davos at this year’s World Economic Forum...

...Inspired by ominous events like the tanking dollar and the credit crisis, the storyline of America’s decline has become today’s new orthodoxy, with the likes of Thomas Friedman opining that “We are not who we think we are...

...Bush never reined in subordinates, and subordinates never took their cases against one another to Bush...

...By staying in it too long he became part of the problem he describes...

...had formally committed to creating an interim Iraqi administration that would cooperate with U.S...

...But late-comers often have an advantage, and his is that he can build on the others and do some summing up...

...How this happened is surely the most fascinating part of Feith’s book...

...But Bush’s approval of these “bridging proposals” was more of a submission to the pretense of consensus than a commitment to the substance of the decision...

...Arnold Toynbee’s Study of History showed the rise and fall of civilizations and the nations that produced them to be the inevitable norm...

...It is a tale of an overgrown government consisting of semi-sovereign pieces led by high-level bureaucrats whose actions and recommendations, though formulated in the idiom of the national interest, most often reflect office prejudices, partisan commitments, and personal rivalries...