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Location: Pantego, Texas, United States

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Frank Gaffney has reviewed the new book War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terror, by former Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith:

Particularly interesting are the many points on which earlier tomes and conventional wisdom are mistaken. For instance, Mr. Feith demonstrates that the record simply does not support claims that: “Bush and his hawkish advisors” were intent on waging war on Iraq from the get-go; Rumsfeld and his “neo-cons” failed to prepare for post-war Iraq and that the State Department had, only to have its plans spurned by the Pentagon; and Feith’s office tried to manipulate pre-war intelligence about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. Given how central many of these myths are to the current criticism of the Iraq war, the contradictory evidence deserves attention.

Even more critical to this week’s congressional testimony – and what follows on Capitol Hill, on the hustings and, not least in Iraq – are Mr. Feith’s insights into problems that continue to afflict America’s execution of the war. For example:

* On issue after issue, George W. Bush’s decisions on Iraq were undermined by subordinates who opposed the president’s policies. As Feith charitably puts it, Mr. Bush “could…justly be faulted for an excessive tolerance of indiscipline, even of disloyalty from his own officials.” This pattern continues with members of the intelligence community, senior diplomats and even, until recently, a top military officer routinely flouting presidential direction – sometimes openly, on other occasions through malicious leaks to the press.

* There has been an abject failure to address competently and comprehensively the ideological nature of our Islamofascist enemies and their enablers. “…In the fight against terrorism, the effort to counter ideological support remains a gaping deficiency. No one in the Administration…is currently developing and implementing a comprehensive strategy beyond public diplomacy.” Congress has not helped matters, by failing to confirm Jim Glassman or reconstituting a dedicated organization like the U.S. Information Agency to do this work.

* Most importantly, the costs of failures to act – or win in Iraq – continue to be underestimated. “If and when major new terrorist attacks occur in the United States, the public will reexamine the Bush Administration’s strategy for the war on terrorism. The likely criticism then will not be that the President was too tough on the jihadists, the Baathists and other state supporters of terrorism, but that the Administration might have fought the terrorist network even more intensely and comprehensively.


Much of the above has been recognized by careful observers, but Democrats and the MSM have wanted to cast everything in negative terms with regard to Bush. I fault Bush for not summarily dismissing the people who sabotaged his plans, and for not formulating a policy for engaging Islam in the long war that we are in. Should a Democrat be elected President this year, whatever gains Bush has achieved will be lost, and it is almost certain that we will sustain more severe attacks in the future. Bush has also not been able to stop the Democrats from preventing the US from implementing an effective plan for reducing our dependence on foreign oil. (If you listen carefully you can sometimes catch a Democrat saying that they would like to raise the price of energy so high that consumption is dramatically reduced; they say they will save our standard of living by funding "green" technology. Apparently there are no engineers in the Democrat camp who point out that wind power and solar power are not viable substitutes for our current energy infrastructure. They are, of course, adamently opposed to nuclear power.)

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