| feith |
[Mar. 25th, 2009|02:43 pm] |
So, as I mentioned before, last night we had Doug Feith give a guest lecture in my Arms Control class. I restrained myself and did not call him a war criminal. However I did accuse him of cherry-picking intelligence to support his conclusions and therefore negligently getting the US into a quagmire in Iraq that's killed over a million people. His basic argument in response was that the opinions of intelligence experts were no more informed that his opinion was, so when they disagreed with him it was natural for him to conclude that they were wrong and he was right.
One example he used was this report that an Al-Qai'da agent had met an Iraqi diplomat in Prague. Feith said that the intel experts had dismissed the report because 'in their opinion' al-Qa'ida and Iraq were ideological enemies and so they wouldn't be conspiring together. Feith dismissed the opinions of these professionals who had spent years and years studying radical Islam, terrorism, and Iraq, and instead substituted his personal judgment (as a political appointee with no background in the subject) and analogized that since the Nazis once worked with Stalin (who were ideological enemies), the intel experts were wrong to discredit the report. So he used it as evidence for why we should invade Iraq. When it turned out that the report wasn't true, Feith simply threw up his hands and said, "hey it's not my fault, the intelligence was wrong!" He isn't regretful in the least about his culpabilty for what happened.
I guess this is illustrative of the Bush administration. It's not that they were maliciously, actively evil, it's just that they were arrogant, incompetent, and negligent. They thought they knew better than the professionals, substituted their erroneous judgment, and got us into a needless war that's bankrupted the government, ruined a country, and killed over a million people. Pathetic.
The other interesting thing Feith said was that the decision to invade Iraq was not based on any connections between Saddam and al-Qa'ida (which seems to conflict with the example he cited above). I told him that the Bush Administration sold the connection to the media. He got very defensive and said that wasn't true. He said he had done research for his book and couldn't find a single instance in the media where that happened. I guess he's not very good at research, because all he had to do was look at Colon Powell's speech to the UN. Maybe Feith just figured that in his judgment the connection was not sold to the media, so why bother actually doing research. |
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