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Douglas Feith: War and Decision (Uncommon Knowledge, 2008)
Douglas Feith on camera about which countries were targets after 9/11.
War Policy with Douglas Feith · Hoover Institution · uploaded 2008-09-22 · 35:35
Original: youtube.com/watch?v=93i9wI76Xtw · IPFS QmS2vW9wgy5Dvi3hXM7Gmuei6MDyF2KM42rXEUoWXUfp6v
What this video is evidence for
Douglas Feith was Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from 2001 to 2005, the number-three civilian at the Pentagon, reporting to Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. He ran the policy shop that set up the special office re-examining intelligence on Iraq and al-Qaeda. In this 2008 Uncommon Knowledge interview (Hoover Institution) about his book War and Decision, he gives the insider's version.
His framing is that no decision on a new Iraq policy had been made before 9/11, and then:
"The entire issue of Iraq, along with problems in Iran, North Korea, and elsewhere, was reexamined in light of the 9/11 attack."
This is the official account from the man at the center of it. Iran is on the list of "problems" reopened after 9/11, alongside Iraq. Compare it with General Wesley Clark's account that the decision to hit Iraq came within days, and that a memo from the Secretary of Defense's office named seven countries ending with Iran. The Pentagon Inspector General's 2007 report found that his office's alternative Iraq–al-Qaeda intelligence assessments were "inappropriate."
Where this fits: see Pentagon Greater Israel Wars for the full explanation and sources.
Transcript
Machine transcription (apple-speechanalyzer) of the full 00:35:35. It can mishear names and words, so check exact wording against the video before quoting it.
Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson. Douglas Fyfe is a professor at Georgetown University and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. From 2001 to 2005, he served as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, reporting directly to the Secretary of Defense. Now Douglas Fythe is the author of War and Decision.
Inside the Pentagon at the dawn of the war on terrorism. And it's worth noting that every penny Dr. Feith makes from this book, he is donating to charities that support veterans and veterans families. The decision to go to war. How was the decision made?
In Warren Decision, you note a number of the critics' assertions, really accusations that, in some quarters, have by now acquired the weight of accepted fact. Let me give you a couple. You reply. Quote, and I'm quoting your characterizations of these. Critics have argued that U.
S. officials manipulated intelligence to persuade the public to support the war. That's the way you put it in Warren Decision. The colloquial version, as you know, is Bush lied, people died. Your response.
It's a very widely believed charge, but it's not true. The I think the record makes it quite clear that the key elements of the rationale for the war were believed by administration officials. And even the famous error about whether we would find biological weapon stockpiles in Iraq. That was the intelligence community's assessment. The intelligence did not change from the Clinton years to the Bush years.
I think that when Secretary Powell presented that to the UN, he was sincere, he believed it. So the CIA believed it under Bill Clinton, the CIA believed that Saddam Hussein had or could quickly acquire weapons of mass destruction under President Bush, correct? Yes. The British intelligence services believe the same, correct? Yes.
The French intelligence services believe the same. Yeah, I don't think there was a single serious Israelis service in the world that dissented from that. Or the United Nations. I mean, this was a pretty universally held view. It's interesting, by the way, Saddam's own generals believe that he had chemical and biological weapons.
Isn't that one of the things that in the debriefing before he got hanged? He admitted to questioners when he was in prison that he actually, he did indeed intentionally mislead some of his own generals. Is that now on the record? Yes, there's a report that was done by the Joint Forces command based on the interrogations of Saddam and all of his top civilian and military officials. It's called the Iraqi perspectives project.
And that report makes clear that Saddam was doing a complex deception where he wanted to make sure that the people against whom he had used WMD in the past, the Iranians and his own Kurds and Shiites believed that he had it. And so he persuaded people throughout his own government, and he persuaded people around the world that he had it, but at the same time, he wanted to be able to have an inspection that would not find the stockpiles so that he could eventually get out from under the UN sanctions, which were crumbling at the beginning of the Bush administration. For Warren decision, quote, President Bush and his hawkish advisors came into office intent on launching a war against Iraq. They wanted to go to war before 911. Well, I present that as a myth, not as a...
And I'm giving it to you to respond to that. And the what the record shows is that the administration inherited a major Iraq problem from the Clinton administration. And there were debates in the 1st months of the Bush administration about what to do, given that the UN containment strategy was crumbling. And there was a lot of consideration given to various means short of war to handle the Iraq problem. No decision was made on a new Iraq policy when 9/11 occurred.
And then the entire issue of Iraq, along with problems in Iran, North Korea, and elsewhere, was reexamined in light of the 911 attack. But you say inherited an Iraq problem from the Clinton administration. Really, isn't it accurate to say there was an Iraq problem dating from the administration of George H.W.? That is to say, Saddam Hussein flouted the agreements that ended the first Gulf War.
He began flouting those from the get go, and by the time 9/11 occurred, He'd been doing so. He'd been violating the No Fly Zone and firing on American aircraft for a decade, right? Well, the firing on the, yeah, the firing on the aircraft, the British and American aircraft who were patrolling the no fly zones came more the end of the 90s. I see. But, no, I was not suggesting that it was a problem created by the Clinton administration.
But it was well recognized. It went back, as you rightly said, to the Bush senior administration. There had been a problem for a dozen years. By the time we went to war in 2003. There had been a problem for a dozen years that Saddam was defying the ceasefire arrangements that were put in place after Desert Storm.
Now you mentioned several times, just to close out this segment. You mentioned several times, the record shows, the record shows. One of the things that's remarkable about Warren Decision, is that you have got lots of documents here. And furthermore, I want to let you give the website, even more documents you have available on the web at... It's WarrenDecision.
com. warndecision.com. So people who want to see the documents, memoranda that the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, the President himself, were looking at, uh, the decisions they on which they were basing their decisions, you've got a lot of this stuff, and now forced it out into the public readily available. Yes, what I did is the book has about 100 pages of footnotes, and all of the end notes, and all of the end notes are on this website, and people can easily access the underlying documents by just clicking on links.
All right. Two blunders. War and decision. I'm quoting you to yourself. Quote, the problems we have faced in this war were aggravated by shortcomings of policy and performance, 2 mistaken decisions were of greatest importance, close quote.
Let's discuss each. Mistake number one, the failure to provide for adequate security force after the fall of Saddam. It was clear you write, and again, I'm quoting you, that a sizable force would be required to establish law and order, close quote, and that there were only two possible sources for these large forces, the armed forces of the United States, or the Iraqi military. As to the United States, again, I'm quoting you, Abazade Myers, Abazade the General on the ground, Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, back in the Pentagon and Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, did not support bringing in more U.S.
troops. And as to the Iraqi military, It was a principle with Paul Bremer, who was, what was his title? He was the head of the coalition provisional authority. Okay. that the Iraqi army should not have responsibility for internal security.
All right. Explain that impasse. Well, the problem was that there was a difference in view on training Iraqi forces between the CPA, headed by Ambassador Bremer, and Sentcom, the Central Command, and the Central Command, General Abizade, was stressing that he wanted to keep the U.S. footprint light.
There was concern that if we increased the footprint too much of U.S. forces, we would be playing into enemy propaganda that we were trying to dominate the country and run people's lives, and the Rumsfeld agreed with that. And Rumsfeld agreed with that. Douglas and Doug Fyfe agreed with that.
Right. All right. And but what that meant was if you're going to have the forces that you need for security, then you need to be rapidly training up Iraqi forces, but that ran into the problem that Ambassador Bremer was objecting that Iraqi forces should not have a major role in internal security, which is an understandable position if there weren't a big insurgency problem. In other words, in our society, for example, we don't have our military playing a role in internal security, and generally, you know, in a democracy, you don't want your military playing a role in internal security. And if Iraq did not have an insurgency, it would have been better to have a military that doesn't play a role in internal security.
But given the insurgency, it was quite important that we get the Iraqis trained up to fight it. Okay, one more question on that line, but on the way to that question, a comment about the book, it is readable, and far from what some critics seem to have supposed, it is the farthest thing from a whitewash for the administration. As to wit, you point out this impasse, and let the reader form in his mind the following question. One man could have broken that impasse. Where was the President of the United States?
Well, it's... It is unfortunate that that impasse was not broken. What I do throughout the book. When it comes to questions like the question you've just posed, you know, who's responsible? What I've done in the book is I've laid out an enormous amount of information and I decided it's better to write a book that's long on information and somewhat short on judgment.
Right? Uh, and, and the reason I did that is not that I'm trying to protect people, but I, we're still in the war that I'm writing about. And my sense is as much information as I'm bringing forward in that book, there's going to be even more, I hope, as other people write books, and as more of the record gets exposed. And there's time, 1st of all, anybody who wants to come to judgment quickly, there's ample material in the book to allow people to come to their own judgments, but the grander judgment of history, I think, is gonna have to await a certain number of years when we have more information and more distance. I accept every word of that very happily, because one of the things about the book is the sense of integrity.
You are writing about what you saw, and you're writing in a certain sense, you contain your own judgments within your pay grade. You were an undersecretary. I accept all of that. Mistake number two, and again, I quote you, the chief mistake, the one about the too few troops, or insufficient security forces, was a subsidiary mistake, the chief mistake, was maintaining an occupation government in Iraq for over a year. Why was that such a bad mistake?
I... I tell the story. It's kind of the main topic of the latter part of the book. I tell the story of how the president set a strategy for Iraq. that was a strategy, as he put it, of liberation, not occupation.
And there was a widely held understanding in the U.S. government that if we set ourselves up as occupiers as opposed to liberators of Iraq, we would generate an insurgency. Right. And so there was a plan developed, and it was developed within the Pentagon and approved by the President, to give the Iraqis substantial authority for running their own country very soon after the overthrow of Saddam, as indeed we did in Afghanistan.
Right. In Afghanistan, we did not set up a U.S. occupation government. We overthrew the Taliban, and then put the Afghans in charge of their own country quickly.
Now, in Iraq, there was somewhat different circumstances, and we wanted to do a variation on what we did in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, though, because of interagency differences over how we should work with the Iraqi externals, the external opposition to Saddam. The leadership in the State Department and the CIA opposed turning substantial responsibility over to the Iraqis early. And Ambassador Bremer went along with the state CIA view. Let me quote you, again, from Warren Decision.
Bremer developed a program that would have deferred Iraqi self rule for at least a couple of years. Due to Rumsfeld's intervention. The occupation ended earlier, but it still lasted 14 months. Where was the president? I have to ask, again, give me at least your provisional historical judgment.
Where was the President of the United States, again, an impasse that needs to be broken? Well, one of the problems was that Rumsfeld finally wrestles Bremer on the ground, but where's the chief executive? Well, the president endorsed the termination of the CPA, in line with the recommendation that Rumsfeld made in October of 2003, endorsed the idea of ending the CPA by June of 04. But the problem was that Ambassador Bremer was actually over in Iraq for a number of months before it became clear that he envisioned keeping the CPA in office as the occupying government of Iraq for more than two years. When Ambassador Bremer went over, one of the things that I think is one of the more fascinating things I deal with in the book is, There were problems of communication, problems of misunderstanding, problems of crossed wires.
And we wound up paying a very serious price for this because we had an occupation government for 14 months. And one of the points I make is at the beginning of that 14 month period, we had problems in Iraq, but at the end of that 14 month period, we had a full-blown insurgency. Next segment, intelligence. Both the mistakes we just discussed, you write, quote, had their roots in poor intelligence. This, to me, I'm about to quote this simple declarative English sentence, and it stopped me cold.
It is one of the most arresting sentences in the entire book. Quote, The CIA actually knew very little about Iraq, close quote. Saddam Hussein had been in flagrant violation of the No Fly Zone since the end of the First Gulf War a decade earlier. In 1998, during the Clinton administration, it became the official policy of the United States to effect regime change sooner or later in Iraq. But again, quote, the CIA knew very little about Iraq.
How come? Well, this was a major focus of the Silberman Rob Commission, which was set up... Former Senator Chuck Robb and Judge Larry Silverman, right? And the Silberman Rob Commission was a bipartisan commission. I believe their mandate came from the Congress, and they produced a report after lengthy, they were specifically mandated to look into intelligence failures.
Right, right. Right. And one of the things they pointed out in their report was, The CIA did not have, I believe, a single agent, dedicated to the WMD issue in Iraq, before the war. I mean, not one. And and the Silberman Rob Commission criticized severely the CIA for not devoting the resources to this problem that it clearly warranted for the reasons that you just outlined.
Well, when you were at defense, did you sense... that the CIA was had simply let you down? Well, there were, we had, we had differences of view. I must say you are Again, I find this completely admirable. But you don't, what I don't find anywhere in this book is anger.
You have right to be furious with any number of people, but particularly the intelligence operations, no? Well, I mean, I think I'm pretty critical of the CIA, and I catalog errors that they made. a better human being than I am. Anger's not the most useful way to approach this. right.
Two quotations. Daniel Dresner in the New Republic, writing in 2003, quote, the CIA is an open revolt against the White House, close quote. William Crystal of the Weekly Standard just a year ago, quote, a small group of unelected bureaucrats from the CIA, including some close to CIA director George Tennant, leaked almost daily against the White House, close quote. Question. Is it not the case that it wasn't just that the CIA didn't know much about Iraq, but that, as the war got underway, the CIA engaged in a persistent and determined campaign to justify itself, and to undermine the policy of the President of the United States.
Yeah, I think that's correct. I lay out in my book the many articles that cite anonymous senior CIA and state department sources, saying things that are extremely harmful to the administration and to our policy in Iraq. And, uh, I mean, it appears that the leadership, certainly in the State Department, and I don't know exactly who was doing it in the CIA, but the press reports kept citing senior intelligence officials, were campaigning. in the press against the president's policies. And one of the main criticisms that I make in the book is that If there were people who really wanted to be voices of caution and reluctance, it would have been much more constructive and proper and honorable, if they had made arguments in the situation room when the president was meeting with his National Security Council, and explained that there were alternatives to the president's policies.
They didn't do that. And the president wound up getting the worst of both worlds. He didn't get a vigorous debate in the National Security Council. before his very eyes. before his very eyes, and before he made his decision.
He didn't get a vigorous debate with an alternative strategy proposed by people who had a different view. Nor did he get loyal, wholehearted implementation of his policy after he made his decision. And I think that vigorous debate is a very useful thing up to a and then you need teamwork to implement. Because after all, the president makes decisions, and he's the only one elected, and everybody should implement his policies if they can in good conscience. And if not, they should resign.
The man who presided over the CIA is repeated shortcomings, George Tennant. Appointed by Bill Clinton, continued by President Bush until George Tennant himself chose to step down in 2004 and later in 2004. President Bush awarded tenant the presidential Medal of Freedom. What was the president thinking? In continuing him in office and then awarding him?
Well, I think in continuing him in office, he was probably thinking that it's, that the CIA should not be a political organization. And as... Well, it was a political organization. Well, you asked me, what do I think the president was probably thinking? I don't know.
Here's what's going on. I read this book. And I think to myself, Fife is an honest man. He's an intelligent man, and Lord knows he has, the work ethic was all of this reflects well on Rumsfeld. It reflects well on a number of people.
But over and over again, well, we've just, the impasse over troops, troop strength, the impasse over the length of time of occupation, and the CIA is becomes in virtual open revolt, it just occurs to me over and over again that you lead the reader up to... I'm not suggesting that there's anything sly or coy about the way you're writing, but this book, at half a dozen points, the unasked but obvious question is, where was the President of the United States? Well, I mean, this is a book that basically says that the president deserves credit for having come up with an important new strategy for dealing with the terrorism problem after 9/11. He did a serious job in analyzing the risks of removing Saddam from power versus the risks of leaving him in power. But there is no question the war didn't go well, and there were major problems.
And these are problems that occurred within his administration, and he had problems of divided government. He had problems of poor intelligence. He had problems, disastrous problems of strategic communications. And there were procedure communications. Let's just, let's, a segment onto itself, the failure of strategic communications, from war and decision.
Again, I quote you to yourself, Doug, when US officials began to despair of finding WMD stockpiles in Iraq after Saddam's overthrow, their embarrassment apparently caused a radical shift in administration rhetoric about Iraq. Now, in a couple of sentences, explain what you mean. Before the war, what the president explained to the public in speech after speech, as the rationale for the war in Iraq, was a range of threats, that the Saddam Hussein regime posed, threats of aggression, threats of support for various terrorist groups, threats of WMD, an element of the WMD threat was the belief that we would find chemical and biological weapon stockpiles, as the CIA said, we would, after the overthrow of Saddam. The critical point you're making there, which you document in the book, is that the threat of WMDs was one item on a list. There was a basket of reasons why Saddam Hussein's regime was intolerable to the United States.
Exactly. And they all related, essentially, to different kinds of threats to our interests. What happened was, when we failed to find the WMD stockpiles, which was an aspect of one aspect of the broader rationale for the war, there was a stunning shift, and I have a chart that actually shows numerically, the shift in the president's rhetoric, how many paragraphs he devoted in each of his speeches on Iraq to the different subjects. There was a shift from discussing the threats that the Saddam Hussein regime posed to discussing only the future and the promotion of democracy. And I think there were some terrible consequences that flowed from that shift in rhetoric.
One of them was the president undermined his own credibility, because he was seen to be changing, you know, apparently the rationale for the war, and the public noticed it. And so I think it hurt the president's credibility. Secondly, by making it clear that he wanted to focus only on the future. He induced the critics of the war to focus exclusively on the past. And so the critics of the war knew that if they attacked the president on things relating to pre war intelligence or the post war planning done before the war, they would not be contradicted by the White House.
And so, it had the opposite of the effect that the White House intended. It focused the public debate, which was steered by the critics of the war, almost entirely retrospectively. Someplace in the White House. But thirdly, and most important, what the shift of rhetoric did was it changed the definition of success in Iraq, and it changed it in a way that moved the goalposts away from us. The original rationale for the war was to end these threats.
And When the president changed his rhetoric, he effectively changed the definition of success, not at removing the threats, but in creating a stable democracy in Iraq. Okay, so under the 1st rhetorical framework, it's good enough to get a government in Iraq that no longer is trying to do damage to the internet. No longer launching aggressions against its neighbors, supporting terrorism, pursuing WMD. And under the second rhetorical framework, our job isn't done until Iraq turns into Belgium. Peaceful, democratic, everyone...
I'm thinking chocolates. And given the fact that the war went badly and was bloodier than we had hoped and costlier than we had hoped and more protracted than we had hoped. When a lot of people in America and elsewhere looked at this new newly stated goal of stable democracy in Iraq, they said, why is that worth our while to continue to invest, it both implied a longer and deeper involvement in Iraq, and a more tenuous relationship to the security of the United States. Right Okay. Let me read to you from President Bush's 2nd inaugural address, excerpt.
From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights and dignity and matchless value, because they bear the image of the maker of heaven and earth. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our nation. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time, close quote, advancing ideals. Did that statement help or hinder our effort in Iraq? Well, I think what's important about this statement is that there is, I think, a strong national security argument that U.
S. interests are promoted when democracy is growing and spreading in the world. And I explained that argument in the book. But I emphatically say in the book, that spreading democracy is not a justification for going to war. And so the point that I'm trying to make, I do not oppose the president in saying that the United States has an interest in the world becoming more democratic.
I think the American people benefit. I think their own civil liberties are more secure. I think it's good for our prosperity, and it's good for our security, if more countries in the world are democratic. But I do not believe that we should be launching wars to spread democracy by the sword. I do not believe we did that in Iraq.
And when our critics argue that the reason we went to war in Iraq was to spread democracy by the sword and launch a political experiment in the Middle East, I think they're wrong, and the record, which I, you know, some of which I reveal in the book, doesn't support that argument. Give me two or three sentences of what the president should have said. Well, I think the president should have kept the focus. The argument was right, but the tone was wrong, wasn't it? It was too airy fairy to fit the actual circumstances of a very dangerous bloody war.
Well, I don't think he was specifically talking about Iraq here. He was talking more broadly about the American interest in promoting democracy, which is fine. But I think he should he should also have reminded the American people why we went to war in Iraq. And the basic point is we went to war in Iraq to remove a set of threats. Once we removed the Saddam Hussein regime, it was clear that we were going to have to put some government in its place.
And it was clear that we were going to try to encourage the Iraqis to build democratic institutions. But that is not the reason that we went to war. We didn't go to war because we wanted to bring democracy to the Iraqi people. Where we stand now. In October 2003, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld wrote a memo to you and several others, in which he asked a number of very pertinent questions.
The memo caused a little bit of a sensation in the press when it was leaked. I myself thought, I'm very happy to see the Secretary of Defense asking such questions. In Warren Decision, you explain how you answered Rumsfeld's questions at the time. I wanna know how you'd answer them now. So let me quote from that couple of items, couple of questions that the Secretary of Defense put to you 5 years ago, quote, is DOD, the Department of Defense, changing fast enough to deal with a new 21st century security environment, is the United States government changing fast enough.
When you ask a question like that, the answer has to be no. There are numerous changes that the United States governments should make, if we're going to deal with national security problems around the world, We have a structure in the U.S. government that was created in the 18th century. Right.
And we essentially have a department of diplomacy. We have a Department of War. We have a Department of Money, and we have our intelligence agencies. They're all in separate offices. None of the major problems we have in the world are purely diplomatic military intelligence or financial.
And that's why the concept of national security got invented after World War II, and the National Security Council got invented, because the idea was, the nature of the problems of the world required... these things to fit together, and the president needs to look at multiple tools to handle these problems. That's even more so now. We're not structured right to handle the problems that we have. It's not easy to restructure the U.
S. government. It relates to, I mean, you've got constitutional considerations. You've got to revise the way Congress does business. These are very difficult problems.
I think that Secretary Rumsfeld was doing a service by calling attention to this, but when he asks the question, are we adapting quickly enough, the answer has to be no. All right. quote, today we lack met. this is Rumsfeld again. Today we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror.
Absolutely basic point. Are we capturing, killing, or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the Madrasas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training, and deploying against us, close quote. How do you answer that question today? Well, there, one of the consequences of this memo was, we developed a strategy that ultimately got incorporated in what was called the national military strategic plan for the war on terrorism, and the joint staff, the staff that works for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then developed a system of metrics to try to measure elements of our work in the war. And that's a useful exercise.
Ultimately, though, part of the problem with metrics is you don't always have the data to be able to, you know, conclusively answer a question like that. That doesn't mean it's not helpful to pose the question. It just means you pose the question with an understanding that your data are never going to be adequate. What I would say in the big picture is what we have seen in very recent days, in the report, for example, of the CIA director, just Hayden last week, about the status of Al Qaeda in Iraq, where he was saying that they've been severely set back. What we're seeing, and is that Al Qaeda actually is has been repudiated by not just the Shiite Arabs in Iraq, but by the Sunni Arabs.
And it's very possible that at the end of the day, as useful in some ways for recruiting and anti-Americanism, as the Iraq war has been for the anti-Americans and the jihadists in the world, it may wind up becoming a major setback for them because of their defeat in Iraq. Very, very briefly. CIA has gotten better. I've been out of the government for the last 2.5 years.
If they've gotten better, I don't know it. I know that they. you just quoted the CIA's report. Please tell me you reposed some confidence in the CIA's report issue just last week. It sounded right, but you know, it's the CIA needed a lot of help.
I mean, they were they had some major problem. I mean, if you want to see, you know, like, if I could make you dictator for 30 minutes. Would you simply say the central intelligence agency was so specific to the Cold War, to an era which is now passed, and so difficult to reform that really what we should do is just abolish it and come up with a new intelligence agency altogether. Would you just wipe out the CIA? Well, it's a...
If I were in charge of this, that is a suggestion I would take very seriously. I mean, I don't know definitively that it's the right answer, but it's a serious, it's a serious question to ask because the CIA has made, uh, it's just made terrible errors and missed major phenomena in the world over recent decades. Doug, final questions to close out our interview here. Clairbooth Luce used to say that history would a lot even the greatest figures, only a single sentence. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.
Winston Churchill defeated Hitler. Let me give you a handful of names and ask you to give me one sentence. I mean, asking you to engage in an enormous act of compression here. One sentence on each. Donald Rumsfeld.
He... he tried heroically to... to... change the bureaucracy in the Pentagon to focus on the future. Alright.
Paul Bremer. I have a mixed, a mixed view of Ambassador Bremer. I think that he, uh, from you, Doug, those are fighting words. He made, he's been criticized, I think, unfairly, on a number of important points regarding deep edification, dissolution of the Iraqi army, and I defend him on those points in the book. But I do think that he was instrumental in the single biggest error that we made in Iraq, which was the maintenance of a protracted occupation.
David Petraus. I think he's doing brilliantly. George W. Bush. If you're talking about the kind of perspective of, you know, history 20, 30, 50 years from now, looking back on the one sentence on George Bush, in the national security field, that one sentence may be, the United States got hit on 911 in a way that was extremely serious and boded very ill for American security going forward.
And he put in place a very vigorous, ambitious, unprecedented strategy, aimed at preventing the next attack. And here we are coming up on 7 years after 9/11. And the main goal that he set in the hours after 911, preventing the next attack, he's achieved so far. Douglas Feis, thank you very much. Doug Fife is the author of War and Decision inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism.
I commend it to you. The website where the documents are available, again, is in www.warrendecision.com. I'm Peter Robinson at the Hoover Institution for uncommon knowledge.
Thanks for joining us.
Last Updated: 2026-09-27