U.S. Air Force AIM Points: A little learning
History serves another purpose, Feith suggests: it provides solace to leaders who are misunderstood by their peers. “When history looks back,” he told me, “I want to be in the class of people who did the right thing, the sensible thing, and not necessarily the fashionable thing, the thing that met the aesthetic of the moment.”
Feith, who announced earlier this year that he will be leaving his post by this summer—he said he hopes to write a book about his experiences—has not often met the reigning aesthetic of Washington. It has been Feith’s job, as the top policy adviser to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his departing deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, to help build the intellectual framework for the Bush Administration’s campaign against terrorism. His detractors see him as an ideologue who manipulated intelligence to bring about the invasion of Iraq. His main nemesis on Capitol Hill, Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who serves on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told me that Feith deceived not only the White House but Congress as well. Yet the criticism of Feith in Washington goes beyond his ideology, to his competence. Even some fellow-neoconservatives, who have been lacerating in their criticism of Rumsfeld for his management of postwar Iraq, have asked whether Feith is better at reading history than at shaping it. “I don’t know whether Feith deserves more praise for supporting George W. Bush’s foreign policy or more criticism for being an agent of Rumsfeld,” William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, said.
Fifteen hundred people report to Feith in the Pentagon, where he is known for the profligacy of his policy suggestions. Tommy Franks, who led the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, has been much quoted as calling Feith “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth,” apparently for ideas he proposed to Franks and his planners.
Franks’s view is not universally shared by the military. Marine General Peter Pace, who has just been nominated to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says of Feith, “Early on, he didn’t realize that the way he presented his positions, the way he was being perceived, put him in a bit of a hole. But he changed his ways.” Apparently, he became more consultative, particularly with his counterparts on the Joint Chiefs. Pace, who calls Feith a “true American patriot,” said he did not understand Franks’s attack. “This is not directed at any individual,” Pace said, “but the less secure an individual is in his thought processes and in his own capacities, the more prone they were to be intimidated by Doug, because he’s so smart.” (A spokesman for Franks, Michael Hayes, said in an e-mail that the General would not comment for this article: “What do you think he has to gain by talking about Feith?”)
Feith’s most prominent defender is Rumsfeld, who told me that Feith is “one of the brightest people you or I will ever come across. He’s diligent, very well read, and insightful.” Rumsfeld explained Feith’s trouble with Franks this way: “If you’re a combatant commander and you’re in the area of operations and you’re hearing from people in Washington, what you’re hearing is frequently not on point to what you’re worrying about at the moment, just as the reverse is also true.”
In conversation, Feith is not often on point. The first time we met, I was prepared to ask about his role in the management of postwar Iraq. Feith, though, preferred to discuss the influence on his thinking of Edmund Burke, the political philosopher who feared instability as much as neoconservatives seem to embrace it. I asked Feith to imagine what Burke would have thought about the Bush Administration’s experiment in Iraq. “Burke warns in his writings about the danger of political abstractions put forward as universal principles,” Feith said. Burke, he continued, “wrote brilliantly and bitterly about the French Revolution and the danger to a society of a bunch of people thinking they could remake society rationally and get rid of all the institutions that have grown up over centuries and reflect the distilled wisdom of numerous people.” But the Bush Administration, Feith added, did nothing of the sort.
To draft Burke into the Bush Cabinet is typical of Feith: counterintuitive and clever, maybe too clever. He rejected the idea that Bush was seeking to remake Iraq in America’s image: “I believe that what makes President Bush’s policy of democracy promotion better, wiser, more careful than what one could describe as starry-eyed Wilsonianism is precisely the recognition that we should not be taking the particulars of our political views and our institutions and trying to impose them in places where there is not fertile soil.” He also said that the idea of “Shiite democracy,” a system in which clerics would play a large role, does not frighten him. “In different parts of the world, clerics play a larger or smaller role in the political process. The idea that there may be a country where clerics play a larger role in the political process than they do in America is not inherently antidemocratic or alarming,” he said. “What the President talks about is that it is the nature of man to want to be free. I don’t think that violates Burke’s warnings.”
Feith says that he is confident of the Administration’s ultimate vindication in Iraq. But he is not indifferent to his current reputation, and during three long interviews and several telephone conversations he was indefatigable in his own defense. “I’m not going to be making some Oprah-like confessions,” he told me at the start.
History serves another purpose, Feith suggests: it provides solace to leaders who are misunderstood by their peers. “When history looks back,” he told me, “I want to be in the class of people who did the right thing, the sensible thing, and not necessarily the fashionable thing, the thing that met the aesthetic of the moment.”
Feith, who announced earlier this year that he will be leaving his post by this summer—he said he hopes to write a book about his experiences—has not often met the reigning aesthetic of Washington. It has been Feith’s job, as the top policy adviser to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his departing deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, to help build the intellectual framework for the Bush Administration’s campaign against terrorism. His detractors see him as an ideologue who manipulated intelligence to bring about the invasion of Iraq. His main nemesis on Capitol Hill, Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who serves on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told me that Feith deceived not only the White House but Congress as well. Yet the criticism of Feith in Washington goes beyond his ideology, to his competence. Even some fellow-neoconservatives, who have been lacerating in their criticism of Rumsfeld for his management of postwar Iraq, have asked whether Feith is better at reading history than at shaping it. “I don’t know whether Feith deserves more praise for supporting George W. Bush’s foreign policy or more criticism for being an agent of Rumsfeld,” William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, said.
Fifteen hundred people report to Feith in the Pentagon, where he is known for the profligacy of his policy suggestions. Tommy Franks, who led the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, has been much quoted as calling Feith “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth,” apparently for ideas he proposed to Franks and his planners.
Franks’s view is not universally shared by the military. Marine General Peter Pace, who has just been nominated to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says of Feith, “Early on, he didn’t realize that the way he presented his positions, the way he was being perceived, put him in a bit of a hole. But he changed his ways.” Apparently, he became more consultative, particularly with his counterparts on the Joint Chiefs. Pace, who calls Feith a “true American patriot,” said he did not understand Franks’s attack. “This is not directed at any individual,” Pace said, “but the less secure an individual is in his thought processes and in his own capacities, the more prone they were to be intimidated by Doug, because he’s so smart.” (A spokesman for Franks, Michael Hayes, said in an e-mail that the General would not comment for this article: “What do you think he has to gain by talking about Feith?”)
Feith’s most prominent defender is Rumsfeld, who told me that Feith is “one of the brightest people you or I will ever come across. He’s diligent, very well read, and insightful.” Rumsfeld explained Feith’s trouble with Franks this way: “If you’re a combatant commander and you’re in the area of operations and you’re hearing from people in Washington, what you’re hearing is frequently not on point to what you’re worrying about at the moment, just as the reverse is also true.”
In conversation, Feith is not often on point. The first time we met, I was prepared to ask about his role in the management of postwar Iraq. Feith, though, preferred to discuss the influence on his thinking of Edmund Burke, the political philosopher who feared instability as much as neoconservatives seem to embrace it. I asked Feith to imagine what Burke would have thought about the Bush Administration’s experiment in Iraq. “Burke warns in his writings about the danger of political abstractions put forward as universal principles,” Feith said. Burke, he continued, “wrote brilliantly and bitterly about the French Revolution and the danger to a society of a bunch of people thinking they could remake society rationally and get rid of all the institutions that have grown up over centuries and reflect the distilled wisdom of numerous people.” But the Bush Administration, Feith added, did nothing of the sort.
To draft Burke into the Bush Cabinet is typical of Feith: counterintuitive and clever, maybe too clever. He rejected the idea that Bush was seeking to remake Iraq in America’s image: “I believe that what makes President Bush’s policy of democracy promotion better, wiser, more careful than what one could describe as starry-eyed Wilsonianism is precisely the recognition that we should not be taking the particulars of our political views and our institutions and trying to impose them in places where there is not fertile soil.” He also said that the idea of “Shiite democracy,” a system in which clerics would play a large role, does not frighten him. “In different parts of the world, clerics play a larger or smaller role in the political process. The idea that there may be a country where clerics play a larger role in the political process than they do in America is not inherently antidemocratic or alarming,” he said. “What the President talks about is that it is the nature of man to want to be free. I don’t think that violates Burke’s warnings.”
Feith says that he is confident of the Administration’s ultimate vindication in Iraq. But he is not indifferent to his current reputation, and during three long interviews and several telephone conversations he was indefatigable in his own defense. “I’m not going to be making some Oprah-like confessions,” he told me at the start.
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