How Iraq War was planned, executed

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WAR AND DECISION: INSIDE THE PENTAGON AT THE DAWN OF THE WAR ON TERRORISM

By Douglas J. Feith

HarperCollins, $27.95, 674 pages

REVIEWED BY JOHN WEISMAN

There is a lot to recommend "War and Decision," Douglas J. Feith's apologia of his 2001-2005 tour as Donald Rumsfeld's under secretary of defense for policy. Few books have chronicled the labyrinthine, cutthroat process of policy-making from the inside in as detailed a manner as has Mr. Feith. Mr. Feith is also a fine writer. But the most important contribution "W&D" makes to the growing body of literature about Afghanistan, Iraq, and the war on terror and why it should be required reading in schools of public service and government was probably inadvertent on Mr. Feith's part.

"W&D" should be widely read so we never again make the mistakes Mr. Feith and his fellow Pentagon, State Department, CIA and White House senior political staffers made during their planning and execution of the Iraq war, or their tunnel vision abandonment of a successful Afghan campaign that has condemned us to near stalemate and a rejuvenated, opium-funded Taliban. It is obvious Mr. Feith is bright. His vacuity about the real world, however, is shocking.

But not unexpected. Mr. Feith's entire professional life has been spent either in the practice of law or the development of public policy. Thus, he comes off as the textbook example of someone to whom process is more important than victory. Mr. Feith loses sight of the real battlefields — the ones on which soldiers die — in favor of the paper wars fought between competing factions of bureaucrats.

This is a fatal flaw during wartime. Winston Churchill — one of Mr. Feith's heroes — understood this truth. To Churchill, victory meant everything. And if it took head-cracking and tossing process out the window to achieve victory at all costs, so be it. Mr. Feith doesn't think that way. For Mr. Feith, process is all.

There are also some gaps in "W&D." But then Mr. Feith, like the lawyer he is, is prone to buttressing his position with pointillist details and citations while leaving out anything that might give aid and comfort to opposing counsel. He is hugely antagonistic toward CIA. Thus, CIA's many flaws get ample verbiage in "War and Decision." Its accomplishments do not. Even when they deserve to.

Take for example Mr. Feith's timeline "Afghanistan and the War on Terror, September 2001-December 2002." He cites October 7 as the beginning of the Afghan war and October 19th as "First entry into Afghanistan of U.S. Special Ops Forces." Neither Mr. Feith's timeline nor his prose mention the fact that CIA's JAWBREAKER team led by veteran CIA operations officer Gary C. Schroen hit the ground in Afghanistan at 2:45 PM (Local time) on 26 September, 2001, more than three weeks before the first Green Beret.