from: [Eric LC]
to: [Douglas Feith]
date: May 12, 2022, 1:32 AM
subject: Reaction to your Wikipedia profile regarding Iraq
Mr. Feith,
Your Wikipedia profile's criticism of your reexamination of the intelligence on Saddam's terrorism on the grounds it "included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community" is strikingly at odds with the criticism that the Bush administration should have elevated outlying dissenting views on Saddam's WMD and questioned the majority intelligence view on Saddam's WMD.
By the same token, your Wikipedia profile strikingly omits that, whereas the Iraq Survey Group's post-war investigation does not actually prove pre-war estimates overestimated Saddam's WMD, the Iraqi Perspective[s] Project's post-war investigation clearly shows pre-war estimates did in fact underestimate Saddam's terrorism, which included "considerable operational overlap" (IPP) with al Qaeda.
You know better than I who's responsible for the fatally flawed pre-war "consensus" on Saddam's terrorism. As I've expressed to you before, those responsible should be held to account. You were right to reexamine the intelligence on Saddam's terrorism. If pre-war analysts had done their job to your standard, perhaps the Saddamist terrorist insurgency would have been better anticipated and prepared for.
Also, your Wikipedia profile's statement that "Feith was responsible for the de-Ba'athification policy promulgated in Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) Order 1 which entered into force on 16 May 2003" is misleading insofar the concept of de-Ba'athification did not originate from you nor the CPA in 2003. It was consistent with the standing humanitarian policy on Iraq pursuant UNSCR 688 and its "strong commitment to the objective of removing Saddam Hussein from power, and to bringing him and his inner circle to justice for their war crimes and crimes against humanity" (Vice President Gore, 26JUN00).
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PREFACE: I responded to Mr. Feith's encouragement to edit his Wikipedia profile.
from: [Eric LC]
to: [Douglas Feith]
date: May 12, 2022, 8:18 PM
subject: Re: Reaction to your Wikipedia profile regarding Iraq
Mr. Feith,
I won't be editing your Wikipedia profile in the foreseeable future. I have no problem doing it. Rather, when I clicked on the edit tab, a notice replied that every IP address from my internet service provider is blocked from editing any Wikipedia page. Not because of me. Apparently, I share an ISP with serial Wikipedia abusers.
If I had been able to edit your Wikipedia profile today, I would have followed my original e-mail in this thread. That is to say I would have posed your reexamination in the light of the Iraqi Perspectives Project report and criticism of the pre-war estimates of Saddam's WMD, emphasized that the "Intelligence Community" underestimated Saddam's terrorism, and highlighted the law and policy pursuant UNSCR 688 that preceded OIF.
Keep in mind the OIF FAQ purpose is clarifying the Iraq issue according to the controlling law, policy, precedent, and determinative facts that define OIF's justification, not rehabilitating any individual's reputation. If I edit your Wikipedia profile, it would be to serve the OIF FAQ purpose. The two purposes overlap, of course, but they may not entirely coincide. For instance, the OIF FAQ includes corrective criticism of President Bush's memoir regarding Iraq, notwithstanding that clarifying the Iraq issue inherently rehabilitates his reputation.
Conversely, mindful of the opportunity provided by the
FYI, my frame of reference for your Wikipedia profile regarding Iraq is based on Kyle Orton's [A Myth Revisited: “Saddam Hussein Had No Connection To Al-Qaeda”], which cites your work, the material posted at http://www.dougfeith.com/iraqintelmatters.html, particularly [Statement by Douglas J. Feith on Release of Defense Department Inspector General Report on Pre-Iraqi War Activities of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy February 9, 2007] and the 09FEB07 SASC [Senate Armed Services Committee] transcript [Briefing on the Department of Defense Inspector General's Report on the Activities of the Office of Special Plans Prior to the War in Iraq], and of course, [9-11 Commission: "Phase Two" and the Question of Iraq].
The IPP report was published in November 2007. I wonder how the IPP findings that confirm the "Intelligence Community" underestimated Saddam's terrorism and ties to al Qaeda might have influenced the IG report, SASC hearing, and their political presentation.
...
Add: "I do realize it’s important" [Feith] -- Yes, it is.
Wikipedia is the go-to convenient, easy, free, virtually universal one-stop shop on-line for casual learning. Its exponential reach is more than enough reason to correct your Wikipedia profile.
But its value is more profound than that. While students don't normally cite Wikipedia as a source in their formal academic products, it's common practice for students to use Wikipedia to informally begin browsing, plotting, and sketching for their eventual academic products. At least that's how students use Wikipedia for school at my alma mater, Columbia University in NYC.
Then consider the reputable scholars and scholarly resources that obfuscate the Iraq issue. You can't count on them to correct misrepresentations of the Iraq issue that students assimilate from Wikipedia. Their teachers are more likely to approve them.
from: [Eric LC]
to: [Douglas Feith]
date: Apr 3, 2022, 12:36 AM
subject: Fair to blame Clarke and Byman et al for the "major error", not Feith et al
Mr. Feith,
Recently, while trying to explain to a new Substack writer that the 20JAN03 formation date for the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance did not mean the Bush administration's post-war planning for Iraq only began on 20JAN03, I revisited your War and Decision "Selected documents on Post-War Planning for Iraq" and "Did the Administration fail to develop plans for post-war Iraq?" pages. (The archived copy is a handy resource, but again, I urge you to restore the valuable content on a live website.)
That meant revisiting this passage:
But the crippling disorder we call the insurgency was not anticipated with any precision, by either intelligence analysts or policy officials. Whether by plan or improvisation, the Baathists-in cooperation with the jihadists-managed to organize, recruit, and finance a highly damaging quasi-military campaign. Across the board, Administration officials thought that postwar reconstruction would take place post-that is, after-the war. That turned out to be a major error. (pp. 274-6)Which made me recall this passage from my 15JAN22 Critique of the Iraq-related portions of Miller Center's revised "George W. Bush: Foreign Affairs":
[T]he "Sectarian violence [that] racked the country" and "chaos with increasing instability and violence" were not caused by "the United States toppled the government" or "power vacuum left by the dismantling of the Iraqi army". Rather, based on what "The international community later learned" about the Saddam regime's governance, they were caused by Saddam's extreme corruption of Iraqi society, exploited by Saddamists who smoothly converted their radical sectarian terrorist rule of Iraq and "regional and global terrorism" (IPP) to their radical sectarian terrorist insurgency against Iraq.The corollary of the ethical maxim of giving credit where credit is due is assigning blame where blame is due.
Inasmuch "the Bush administration did not have an adequate plan for Iraq", that was not due to lack of planning. Rather, the initial post-war plan was overwhelmed by the surprising terrorist insurgency in part because pre-war analysts like Richard Clarke and Daniel Byman severely underestimated Saddam's radical sectarian turn, extreme corruption of Iraqi society, and deep domestic, regional, and global terrorism.
But the latter has failed to happen in the corrupted politics of Iraq. It upsets me that aggrandized experts like Clarke and Byman who severely underestimated Saddam's terrorism and radical sectarian terrorist rule of Iraq shamelessly blamed Bush officials like you for the consequences of their own harmfully flawed analysis.
I'm also moved to send you this e-mail because I happened to come across Paul Krugman's 2004 book, "The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century", on a used book rack yesterday. I only needed to read Professor Krugman's 1st few paragraphs on Iraq to recognize the kind of obfuscation I criticized in James Fallows's commentary on Iraq: basic omission of the law, policy, precedent and facts that define the Iraq issue, replaced with an expert patchwork of conjecture, distorted context, and misinformation.
from: [Eric LC]
to: [Douglas Feith]
date: Apr 7, 2022, 7:49 PM
subject: The 20th anniversary of OIF is an opportunity to clarify the Iraq issue
Mr. Feith,
The upcoming 20th anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom is an opportune landmark date to set the record straight on Iraq.
However, it's less than a year away. The competitive actions that are needed to seize the opportunity must ramp up ASAP. Or else the brazen fabulists who dominate the politics of Iraq will exploit the landmark anniversary to further entrench the prevailing false narrative on Iraq in the political zeitgeist.
Correcting the prevailing false narrative on Iraq, discrediting its purveyors, and curing their essential harm to our politics, policy, and social culture are a standing public need.
That being said, I'm bringing up the opportunity of the 20th anniversary of OIF with you in particular because, of course, you wrote a book whose supplementary webpages I reference.
I also have in mind the passings of Secretaries Rumsfeld and Powell in 2021. Their legacies were degraded by the false narrative on Iraq, whose hold is such that the calumny was validated by their putative friends. For reference, see Matt Latimer and similarly Marc LiVecche on Rumsfeld and Richard Haass on Powell.
At best, their ostensible defenses upheld the false narrative on Iraq and excused the departed as historically incompetent and fecklessly "mistaken" rather than intentionally malicious. As I explained to Mr. Latimer, their legacy defense, if sincere, should have clarified OIF's actual justification to the public instead of conceding the otherwise readily correctable false narrative on Iraq.
Like the slandered Secretaries of Defense and State, you're a prominent Bush official who was instrumental in the President's determination on Iraq. OIF for either better or worse defines your legacy as much as it does theirs. You couldn't hide from it if you wanted to: You wrote a book.
You'll be 69 years old by the 20th anniversary of OIF. If you and your colleagues would compete with the fabulists to relitigate the Iraq issue for the public, the 20th anniversary landmark may be your best, and maybe last, opportunity to make the difference that's needed.
Excerpt from Regarding pundits and David Brooks's "Saving the System":
In the narrative contest for the zeitgeist, the truth is just a narrative that must be competed for like any other in the political arena. As a layman, I can help model the substantive piece in the narrative contest but not compete the political piece; for example. Subject knowledge is not the same thing as public expert authority, and both attributes are needed to effectually clarify the Iraq issue for the public against the revisionists and acquiescers. Therefore, pundits are needed to set the record straight.
Correcting the popular narrative of the Iraq mission is necessary to reestablish the sure American leadership of the free world under President Bush. Whereas the revisionist anti-OIF narrative, if allowed to stand, lays the foundation and sets the frame for a paradigm shift antithetical to American leadership of the free world. For public expert authorities who know the truth, their choice in the arena to correct or concede the OIF stigma is an ethical test with long pervasive consequences.
from: [Eric LC]
to: [QH]
date: Jun 8, 2022, 4:16 PM
subject: 20th anniversary of OIF ...
[QH],
This recommendation revisits and adds to the corrective criticisms of Douglas Feith's War and Decision that I've already shared with you.
The purpose of War and Decision, like the OIF FAQ, is to clarify the Iraq issue. Feith's work is the best expert material source on the Iraq issue that I know of and a valued resource for the OIF FAQ. Which makes it all the more important to correct Feith's basic errors.
Feith's case also serves as an avatar for like-minded experts whose own misconceptions have exacerbated the prevailing false narrative on Iraq. The fundamental flaws in Feith's work are representative in that regard. Before they compete for the 20th anniversary of OIF, their misconceptions need to be corrected, or else they'll unwittingly make the problem worse like the Republican presidential candidates did in 2015-2016.
War and Decision's Misconception 9 begins with "U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 distorted public discourse on the Iraq issue, focusing the debate narrowly on WMD disclosures and inspections-and therefore on whether the inspectors would find contraband stockpiles."
In fact, UNSCR 1441 did not "focus...on whether the inspectors would find contraband stockpiles". Feith's characterization of UNSCR 1441 is a fundamental, even diametric, misrepresentation of UNSCR 1441 that is a keystone premise of the prevailing false narrative on Iraq.
To correct Feith's misconception of UNSCR 1441, consult the OIF FAQ answer to "Did Bush allow enough time for the inspections".
War and Decision's Misconception 3 begins with "I did not think that a U.S. president could properly decide to go to war just to spread democracy, in the absence of a threat requiring self-defense."
That's a false dichotomy. The policy on Iraqi democratic reform that President Bush carried forward from Presidents HW Bush and Clinton was a UNSCR 688 enforcement measure, and any UNSCR 688 enforcement measure was by definition a "self-defense" measure. As President Clinton reminded on August 2, 1999, "The human rights situation in Iraq continues to fall far short of international norms, in violation of Resolution 688. That resolution explicitly notes that the consequences of the regime's repression of its own people constitute a threat to international peace and security in the region."
To correct Feith's misconception of OIF's democracy element, consult the OIF FAQ answer to "Was Operation Iraqi Freedom about WMD or democracy".
In his commentary, Feith makes important points justifying OIF, but they're fractured and scattered. And, Feith's commentary is too often misaligned with the law and policy that define OIF's justification, the UNSCR 678, Gulf War ceasefire compliance enforcement, which is the necessary frame to properly valuate and tie together his points.
In other words, as hard as it is to believe, Feith's commentary in War and Decision implies he doesn't understand OIF's legal basis and justification. He nor any expert can clarify the Iraq issue to the public if he or she has misconceived it themselves.
To clarify OIF's legal basis and justification, consult the OIF FAQ answer to "Was Operation Iraqi Freedom legal".
Experts like Feith normally dismiss correction from laymen like me. My hope is they'll be receptive to the substantively same correction coming from a fellow expert like you. Because if they don't correct their own misconceptions, then the movement to set the record straight on Iraq for the 20th anniversary of OIF will fail at the premise level and make the problem worse.
Related: How Republicans should talk about the Iraq issue.