Such boilerplate, redolent of the worst instincts of the administration, points toward Feith's true role, which was to furnish not plans for war or its aftermath, but convenient rationales for it. For in seeking to allay the notion of a neocon conspiracy, Feith somewhat inadvertently raises the nagging question of how influential he actually was. Within his book, memoranda are reprinted at length and discussions reproduced to show that debate really did take place in the Bush administration, that the Defense Department did, in fact, try to prepare for the aftermath of the Iraq War-and the State Department and CIA didn't-and that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was a capital fellow.

But as Feith himself notes, Rumsfeld kept him at arm's-length early on. Feith was Paul Wolfowitz's man, not Rumsfeld's. In Feith's own words, "Rumsfeld had not brought me in on any of his discussions with Tommy Franks about operational plans." As with all good courtiers, Feith ascribes the loftiest motives to his own attempts to ingratiate himself with Mr. Big: "the burdens on him were increasing, and he needed the sort of help I might be able to provide." But did he? Nominally, Feith was in charge of postwar planning in Iraq, which is why he hopes to clear his name with this compendious volume. But Rumsfeld never was interested in a postwar plan for Iraq; it was supposed to be a modern form of blitzkrieg warfare, followed by assaults on other Middle Eastern countries such as Iran or Syria. Regime change was the new domino theory, but the dominoes never toppled. Instead, the United States got mired in Iraq, and the war was transformed into one for democracy and the American way of life. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates himself has put paid to the Rumsfeld Doctine, observing that too much attention was paid to bogus shock-and-awe theories and not enough to the nitty-gritty of fighting house-to-house battles.

No doubt Feith is right to protest, as he does at some length, that Iraq was not supposed to be about democracy. It was supposed to be about terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. But Feith ends up protesting a little too much. What choice did Bush have but to package it as a battle for spreading the American dream throughout the Middle East once the war went south? In addition, it was Vice President Dick Cheney, the chief promoter of the neocons, who originally asseverated in a speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 2002 that overthrowing Saddam Hussein would lead to a wider spread of democracy in the region.

Feith goes to some lengths to show that it wasn't just neocons who wanted to oust Saddam. He's right. Many liberal hawks, convinced that Kosovo had demonstrated the efficacy of American power in the service of human rights, signed on to the war. Opportunists such as Hillary Clinton, who reckoned that failing to support the war would scuttle her chances for the presidency, jumped on board the Iraq War train. But this does not mean that the neocons were not instrumental in making the administration's case for war. This Feith can dispute but not disprove.

Nor does Feith come to terms with his own relationship with the crafty Ahmad Chalabi, who had been the neocons' pet for the better part of a decade. Personal observations about Chalabi would have been welcome, but Feith is so focused on policy that his book never comes alive with character portraits.

Perhaps the most distressing part of Feith's book is his contention that Rumsfeld didn't deserve any blame for Abu Ghraib. In Feith's view, "From the outset, Rumsfeld grasped that the scandal could have strategic effects-even if we would learn that it amounted only to the depraved, criminal behavior of an isolated handful of soldiers." A handful of soldiers? As Jane Mayer has shown in her bestseller The Dark Side, maltreating prisoners has been the policy of the Bush administration-a policy that Feith himself helped advance through pettifoggery about the Geneva Conventions.

When it comes to the war itself, Feith, in a stab at even-handedness, suggests that historians, who "face a mountain of ifs," will sort it all out some day. But they don't face a mountain of ifs. Rather, Feith has created them out of thin air.

It's a pity that Feith doesn't simply dispense with the obfuscations and pieties about the verdict on the war still being up for grabs. Feith would be better off acknowledging more fully that he was a vital part of a more general effort to make the case for war, and that he thought it was a good thing. He contests, for example, the notion that he "rejected" the CIA's work and wanted to have his own intelligence unit. But of course he did. Former-CIA chief George Tenet, in his memoir At the Center of the Storm, devotes ample space to detailing Feith's efforts to show an operational link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Tenet notes that when CIA analysts stated that a "much stronger case could be made for Iran's backing of international terrorism than could be made for Iraq's," Feith would have none of it. According to Tenet, "They recall Doug Feith saying that their objections were just ‘persnickety.'" Tenet also pours scorn on Wolfowitz's and Feith's support for Chalabi, noting that the Iraqi Freedom Force (IFF), touted by the two, was airlifted into Iraq and

as a fighting force, the IFF proved to be totally feckless. Some of its members, however, evolved into a private militia for Chalabi, and set about commandeering property, vehicles, and wealth for the use of his Iraqi National Congress.

As Tenet vividly puts it,

You had the impression that some Office of the Vice President and DOD reps were writing Chalabi's name over and over again in their notes, like schoolgirls, with their first crush. At other times, so persistent was the cheerleading for Chalabi, and so consistent was our own opposition to imposing him on Iraq, that I finally had to tell our people to lay off the subject.

Like Wolfowitz, Feith held no brief for the CIA. Its record under Tenet was, in fact, a sorry one. Like Feith, Tenet cites documents, with little context, to show that he had it right all along. But at the time, Feith's efforts to circumvent the CIA didn't help. He had deputed David Wurmser and Michael Maloof to collect information on terrorist groups. Wurmser himself told Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman that the spiderweb chart of links between Saddam and terrorist groups that he made with Maloof ended up resembling something out of the film A Beautiful Mind, which featured a shack covered with mad scribblings. Feith, in short, was part of the original effort to drum up a bogus connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. But here is how Feith describes his deputy: "Wurmser, a quiet, even diffident Middle East scholar with a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University, was an intelligence officer serving in the Naval Reserve." Somehow Feith neglects to mention that Wurmser was a protégé of Richard Perle's at the American Enterprise Institute, that he wrote a book called Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein, and that he had also coauthored a paper with Feith and Perle titled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," which was reprinted in Commentary magazine. The paper advised then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to declare war against Arab despotisms. It served as a kind of blueprint for the Bush administration's own war on terrorism-for what it touted as "regime change."

Feith is on stronger ground in lamenting the Bush administration's lack of interest in taking on jihadist ideology. Feith complains that "many officials simply had no interest in ideological warfare: They considered it impractical to try to influence the way millions of people thought." He goes on to cite a speech that he drafted focusing on the intellectual atmosphere that incited terrorism. But once again, no one was much interested in what Feith had to say. And they still aren't.

 

MICHAEL GERSON is very much a different matter. Where Feith and Tenet try to defend the indefensible and become mired in useless detail, Gerson is direct and forceful. In Heroic Conservatism, Gerson, who was Bush's chief speechwriter, has no patience for skeptics of the war on terror or for small-government Republicans. He regards them as antediluvian, pitiful remnants of the past who have no business intruding upon the deliberations of a new and missionary elect that seeks to transform the GOP. Gerson, a devout Roman Catholic, seeks to temper conservatism with a more idealist, charitable streak.

As a result, he has produced rousing stuff. As he notes, George W. Bush has always had meliorist instincts. Gerson begins his book with an account of the president sitting in his blue-and-yellow-striped chair at the right of the fireplace in the Oval Office in November 2002, determined to help provide AIDS treatment and prevention to Africa. For Gerson, this is true heroism-the president staring down the niggling advisers who worry about profligate outlays to Africa, when Bush should instead be burnishing his budget-cutting credentials. But evil is averted. Bush stays the course.

Essay Types: Book Review