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| War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism | 
 enlarge | Author: Douglas J. Feith
Publisher: Harper
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  41 reviews
Sales Rank: 90202
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 688
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.1
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6 x 1.7
ISBN: 0060899735
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.931
EAN: 9780060899738
ASIN: 0060899735
Publication Date: March 1, 2008
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| Customer Reviews:
Articulate Vindictive Oblivious but Ultimately Necessary Reading April 11, 2008
44 out of 186 found this review helpful
This book is essential reading for historians and those concerned with national security reform. It is not recommended for normal people, including those that have strong political views one way or the other. You will get much better value simply by reading reviews of a 100 related books starting with the ten below, and buying the book Fixing Failed States and checking out the reviews of the books I recommend there.
I read the Index after the Table of Contents and before I actually read the book. It became immediately evident to me that:
1) The index stinks in not including place names like Jalabad, Tora Bora, Kandahar, etcetera.
2) The author has written a personal account that opens with a concise (even impressive) summary of the high points of "alleged" criticisms and conspiracy claims, but with the exception of Bob Woodward, I could not find a single other reputable author in the index (see my list of ten books below, a token of the 100+ books that generally refute most of what this author has to say at the external level). I have no doubt this author is honest and credible on the details he knows, but as with the Viet-Nam rejoinder, "so what", I really question whether the author--good man that he is--is at all in touch with reality. Baer, Bamford, Clarke, Ritter, etc. do NOT appear in this book's index or footnotes that I could find.
Getting into the book, I am immediately impressed by the existence of a supporting website (waranddecision.com just add the www) and I am generally very impressed with the level of detail, the sequencing of information, the able reference to those he talked with by name. There is no question in my mind about the authenticity of this book. The author speaks from his mind and his heart, he is not dumb, just self-centered.
As the book progresses, I am astonished by several factors:
1) Dick Cheney appears only 28 times in this book, and not before page 53. The Cheney-Rumsfeld relationship is one that was evidently not shared by the author. He consequently is oblivious to the reality that Dick Cheney orchestrated 935 distinct documented lies in the rush to war; and committed 25 distinct impeachable offenses, not least of which was leveraging the nine advance warnings of the plans to attack the World Trade Center to allow a Pearl Harbor.
2) I had to go forward to read Chapter 6 ("Why Iraq") because of the prominence of the author's claim of the many "proven" instances in which Iraq trained, supported, or financed terrorism, but I quickly note that the author makes no reference at all the many proven open sources, including the former President of Czechoslovakia, who totally trashed this assertion.
3) The author is actively deceptive on more than one occasion. He cites the New York Times as "evidence" while casually neglecting to mention that he is citing the notorious Judith Miller, a fellow traveler at least, if not an active agent of influence for Israel.
4) The author is critical of the CIA throughout the book, including Milt Bearden whom I happen to respect greatly, and while I myself think CIA needs to be burned to the ground, I do not respect the manner in which the author manages to completely disrespect by omission of three major facts:
+ CIA got it right on WMD. Between the son in law that defected and the 30+ legal travelers that Charlie Allen orchestrated, CIA established without a shadow of a doubt that they kept the cookbooks, poured the stocks into the river (something that will have downstream impacts for decades), and were bluffing for regional sake. Since Rumsfeld and Cheney delivered the original WMD supplies and the joke is they kept the receipts, what I see here is an elegant concealment of the reality that the Pentagon was not about to listen to the CIA no matter what. The fact is that the professional CIA got it right, George Tenet sacrificed his integrity, and the White House was able to ignore secret intelligence because both the CIA professionals and the Pentagon's flag officers drank the koolaid and confused loyalty with integrity to their Constitutional oaths of office. ALL of our checks and balances failed us.
+ The author infuriates me with the manner in which he blatantly misleads the reader about how he and Rumsfeld triumphed in pushing for both early precision targetting inside Afghanistan, and the push to Kabul prior to the winter. He is maliciously evil in failing to credit the CIA teams that are described in "First In" and "Jawbreaker" and he can be excused for not being told that Putin told Bush he could take Kabul before the winter. Obviously the author does not read widely, and one can understand how immersed he might be in the reality of his own creation.
+ He misleads the reader in parroting Ahmed Chalabi's accusations against the CIA, while failing to point out that CIA fired Chalabi for stealing and lying; that Chalabi was convicted in Jordan for embezzlement; and that Chalabi is almost certainly a very well paid agent of influence for Iran, one reason most in Iraq's leadership circles want nothing to do with him.
In passing, there is no mention in this book of our love fest with 42 of 44 dictators; there is active (virulent) hatred for Colin Powell and Rich Armitage (I would follow either over any hill), nor is there any mention, as the book draws to a close, that ignorant treasonous rendition and torture aside, the score for nailing terrorists right now is CIA 40+, DoD zero (I may not know of one or two).
I bought and labored through this book because James Schlesinger recommended it and because it may be the only book among the 100 or so I have read circling the sordid regime from 2000-2008, that comes from one of the avowed "insiders." I give the author high marks for his homework, his documentation, and his writing.
Doug Feith is what you get when you agree to elect one man who picks a few cronies that pick other cronies who in turn orchestrate their kind of crony in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere. In Singapore, I am told, one must have a Master of Business Administration before being qualified to run for Parliament. We don't need to go that far. I believe that in the General Election, we must demand that Presidential candidates appoint a Cabinet in advance of election, at least three of whom must participate in the debate process (State, Defense, Attorney General), *and* they must produce a balanced budget proposal for public scrutiny at least 90 days before Election Day. It's time to put Citizen Wisdom back into the Republic.
See also, apart from my lists on Dick Cheney, impeachment, strategy, emerging threats and so on, the following ten books:
DVD Why We Fight
Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025
9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Fourth Edition
A Pretext for War : 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies
State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III
Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA's Key Field Commander
First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Book mentions (on page 188) Saddam's little remembered but important 1994 attempt to reinvade Kuwait! April 14, 2008
36 out of 61 found this review helpful
This attempt of his showed he was still internationally dangerous years after Desert Storm. It is also mentioned in the 2008 New York Times Almanac (in the Kuwait section).
On other points, there is a mention of how the US seized a ship in 2003 (a ship which was carrying centrifuge parts) to Gadhafi's Libya! This book explains how the ship's seizure lead Libay to disarm wmd-wise! True and so did the very occupation of Iraq by the US and allies (see books like Shopping for Bombs, Surrender is not an Option and former CIA-head Tenet's own memoir book 'At the Center of the Storm' plus a webpage called "How Gadhafi lost his groove" for more on this).
PS The ship's name, not given on the page the seizure was mentioned on, is the BBC China!
 self-serving and narcissistic April 24, 2008
36 out of 139 found this review helpful
This book is Feith's attempt to recover his reputation in the aftermath of the Iraq war by throwing almost everyone else under the bus. The pattern of the book follows the usual neocon line. Feith was the faithful underling carring out the wishes of the president and therefore anything that was wrong with the war is Bush's fault. There is also the usual pattern of blaming the CIA (i.e. Clinton holdover George Tenant).
An example of Feith's reasoning. Feith says he personally had nothing to do with claiming that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. His claim of blamelessness starts with with Wolfowitz who decided for Feith that Iraq had to investigated because the CIA was run by the incompetent democrat George Tenant. Then he blames their own investigators for being incomptent. In the end, he manages to blame and hold responsible everyone around him except himself.
So what according to the author went wrong in Iraq? Feith is still a fanatical believer in his London Iraqis. If the US had simply handed over all power to Chalabi, Iraq would have become a pro-western model democracy with no conflict at all. Feith of course stays with the traditional story. Every policy of his is really the President's policy and when Feith's policies don't end up being implemented, its the fault of sinister forces who have somehow defeated the will of the president.
In page after page, the thing that comes across is an idealism that deals in absolutes and doesn't concern itself with the hard work of turning policy into results. Feith seems to be better suited to writing papers and speaking at conferences than making things happen.
At the end if the book, what you have is an account of Feith's arrogance. Iraq isn't his fault, its the CIA, the uniformed army, the state department, his boss, the people who worked for him, the DIA, Paul Bremer, Colin Powell and the list goes on. It was as if it was him, Rumsfeld, Ahmed Chalabi and G.W. Bush with their "plan" against everyone else.
The book isn't enlightening about how policy for Iraq was made. But it is very enlightening as to the bad personality of Feith and why he was a bad choice for a critical role at the defense department. Taking a country to war requires having a team in government who can work with each other. Feith quite obviously was the wrong person for the job.
 Hitchens on Feith June 3, 2008
31 out of 32 found this review helpful
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 the excellent James Risen for the news pages of the New York Times, has not run. This all might seem less questionable if it were not for the still-ballooning acreage awarded to Scott McClellan.
Feith was and is very much identified with the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party, and he certainly did not believe that Saddam Hussein was ever containable in a sanctions "box." But he is capable of separating his views from his narrative, and this absorbing account of the interdepartmental and ideological quarrels within the Bush administration, on the Afghanistan and Guantanamo fronts as well as about Iraq, will make it difficult if not impossible for people to go on claiming that, for instance:
1.There was no rational reason to suspect a continuing Iraqi WMD threat. Feith's citations from the Duelfer Report alone are stunning in their implications.
2.That alternatives to war were never discussed and that the administration was out to "get" Saddam Hussein from the start.
3.That the advocates of regime change hoped and indeed planned to anoint Ahmad Chalabi as a figurehead leader in Baghdad.
4.That there was no consideration given to postwar planning.
It's also of considerable interest to learn that the main argument for adhering to the Geneva Conventions was made within the Pentagon and that the man who expressed the most prewar misgivings concerning Iraq was none other than Donald Rumsfeld. Feith doesn't deny that he has biases of his own. One of these concerns the widely circulated charge that his own Office of Special Plans was engaged in cherry-picking and stovepiping intelligence. Another is the criticism, made by most of the neocon faction, of Paul Bremer and the occupation regime that he ran in Baghdad. In all instances, however, Feith writes in an unrancorous manner and is careful to supply the evidence and the testimony and, where possible, the actual documentation, from all sides.
Without explicitly saying so, Feith makes a huge contribution to the growing case for considering the Central Intelligence Agency to be well beyond salvage. Its role as a highly politicized and bewilderingly incompetent body, disastrous enough in having left us under open skies before Sept. 11, 2001, became something more like catastrophic with the gross mishandling of Iraq. For these revelations alone, this book is well worth the acquisition. (I might add that, unlike McClellan, Feith is contributing all his earnings and royalties to charities that care for our men and women in uniform.)
I don't know Feith, but I can pay him two further compliments: When you read him on a detail with which you yourself are familiar, he is factually reliable (and it's not often that one can say that, believe me). And his prose style is easy, nonbureaucratic, dry, and sometimes amusing. If a book that was truly informative was called a "tell-all" by our media, then War and Decision would qualify. As it is, we seem to reserve that term for the work of bigmouths who have little, if anything, to impart.
A Quartet; Terrorist, CIA, Dept State & Media May 12, 2008
26 out of 44 found this review helpful
Wow this is an important definiton of managed major media news -- as well ad the agenda driven, risk adverse CIA and Department of State -- "Let's go along and get along, we will pay the consequences some other time" and "My mind is made up, don't confuse me with the facts.
I marvel at the detail of notes and memory of the author -- some times a bit more than needed to make the point. So, we are required to do a bit of digging through the meetings and conversations to get to the meat. But so be it.
The author also defines that one of the unfortunate points in the Iraq war coverage is the administration's lack of P.R. capabilities, leaving the public to the twisted interpretation of the initiation and conduct of the war to the major news media.
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