War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism

This is a must-read for anyone who wants to get a firsthand view of the origins of the State/CIA war on Defense and eventually Bush 43. According to Feith, it began because Rumsfeld vehemently objected to Gen. Jay Garner hiring a staff composed nearly entirely of State Dept. officials. If you've only gotten your accounts of the war behind the war from the major media, you need to read this book. If you've followed it via the alternative media, you're probably familiar with many of the anecdotes and facts related herein (such as State wanting a long-term American presence in and dominion over Iraq, while Defense wanted something like the eventual Iraqi temporary administration years before it finally happened; or State's willingness to sacrifice American lives just so long as they could have any possibility of Chalabi not gaining power). Even so, you'll find it a good read. Perhaps the most interesting correction to the record (one that was new to me) is the idea that Garner was not fired, but was always intended to be a stop-gap, and that the disastrous reign of Paul Bremer was at Rumsfeld's recommendation. Only after his appointment did Bremer apparently forget he reported to the SecDef and became infatuated with pursuing State's policies rather than those of the administration. Bringing an end to Bremer's megalomania only happened after a self-aggrandizing editorial in the Washington Post, run without any apparent clearance from anyone in his chain of command. Feith does a good job portraying most of those he was able to observe closely. Rumsfeld is brusque, brilliant, and difficult. Rice is always looking to triangulate and please everyone. Powell consistently is reported as saying one thing in the media and then denying it to Feith and his colleagues. Armitage uses the media to wage a near-coup against the President. The lone cipher in all this is Wolfowitz; he's nearly a ghost in the book, and you'll learn nothing about the man from it. All in all, a solid read, and highly recommended.

The sheer magnitude of misinformation concerning the run-up to and the current U.S. policy in Iraq is simply withering. FINALLY, an insider not only lays everything out for anyone seriously interested in looking and understanding (which doubtless will exclude much of the dominant, old-line media), but one who provides significant documentation for everything he says! That fact alone is worth the price. Barak Obama, et al, should take a break, and read this book! Unlike the fact-free, free-standing assertions of many (most?) books (and, significantly, of politicians from both Parties) on this subject, Secretary Feith thoughtfully has provided a web site (www.waranddecision.com) containing easy (one-click) access to the unclassified versions of the documents upon which his tome relies. One may disagree with Iraq policy, in comfortable reflection based on a degree of knowledge concerning past events, but this book sets forth in engaging, easy-to-read narrative, what was happening and when. It leaves no excuse for the sort of ignorance that is so pervasive in discussions of these issues. Yes, yes, sometimes the presentation can be tedious; but isn't that in the very nature of policy? Especially Middle East Policy? Far from being an "Apologia-Pro-Vita-Sua" exercise, Secretary Feith frankly sets forth where and when he could have made better "calls." This, alone, is refreshing -- especially if one has slogged through, or is familiar with the vacuous, ego-driven volumes of Zinni and McClelland (Franks is another story). All in all, this is The Essential Read on this subject. It should be on every serious history reader's shelf. It is an unparalleled single point of reference on the matter.

Like many of my neighbors, I scraped the faded American flag decal off my back window in, oh, about 2005 when I became disgusted with the war in Iraq. Two questions kept popping up in my mind: "Why are we still in this?" and "Why didn't the planners see this mess coming?" Like many, I had forgotten (or perhaps had never really understood) the purpose of the war which I think Feith summarizes best in one of his chapter titles: "Change the Way We Live, Or Change the Way They Live". His explanation took care of my first question. Feith's book takes long strides to answer the second question, and it was well worth my time. Without a doubt this book is from Feith's viewpoint, as it should be. As he recounts, others disagreed with his views. But even if you disagree with Feith's viewpoint, you should read this book. After reading it, I am grateful to Doug Feith for this book, not to mention his service to this nation.

From http://www.slate.com/id/2192696/ A Tale of Two Tell-Alls IF YOU WANT TO READ A SERIOUS BOOK ABOUT THE INTERVENTION IN IRAQ, LOOK TO DOUGLAS FEITH. By Christopher Hitchens Posted Monday, June 2, 2008, at 11:40 AM ET When Bush's Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill defected from the Cabinet in 2002 and Ron Suskind told O'Neill's story of being surrounded by fools, Michael Kinsley observed that the president deserved all he got from the book. Anyone dumb enough to hire a fool like O'Neill in the first place ought to have known what to expect. So it goes with the ludicrous figure of Scott McClellan. I used to watch this mooncalf blunder his way through press conferences and think, Exactly where do we find such men? For the job of swabbing out the White House stables, yes. But for any task involving the weighing of words? Hah! Now it seems that he realizes, and with a shock at that, that there was a certain amount of "spin" or propaganda involved in his job description. Well, give the man a cigar. Beyond that, the book is effectively valueless to the anti-war camp since, as McClellan says of the president, "I consider him a fundamentally decent person, and I do not believe he or his White House deliberately or consciously sought to deceive the American people." Bertrand Russell's principle of evidence against interest--if the pope has doubts about Jesus, his doubts are by definition more newsworthy than the next person's--doesn't really justify the ocean of coverage in which the talentless McClellan is currently so far out of his depth. For one thing, he doesn't supply anything that can really be called evidence. For another, having not noticed any "propaganda machine" at the time he was perspiring his way through his simple job, he has a clear mercenary interest in discovering one in retrospect. If you want to read a serious book about the origins and consequences of the intervention in Iraq in 2003, you owe it to yourself to get hold of a copy of Douglas Feith's War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism. As undersecretary of defense for policy, Feith was one of those most intimately involved in the argument about whether to and, if so, how to put an end to the regime of Saddam Hussein. His book contains notes made in real time at the National Security Council, a trove of declassified documentation, and a thoroughly well-organized catalog of sources and papers and memos. Feith has also done us the service of establishing a Web site where you can go and follow up all his sources and check them for yourself against his analysis and explanation. There is more of value in any chapter of this archive than in any of the ramblings of McClellan. As I write this on the first day of June, about a book that was published in the first week of April, the books pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe have not seen fit to give Feith a review. An article on his book, written by