Who asked for Doug Feith's opinion anyway?

Assume, for the sake of argument, that you think the U.S.-Iran Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) just signed by President Donald Trump in Versailles is a disaster for both the United States and especially for Israel. Who would you want to be in the forefront of the campaign to persuade American public opinion that it should be abandoned or killed off altogether?

There are any number of candidates, but I, for one, would NOT choose anyone who bore major responsibility for the debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So, it was with great surprise that I found today that Douglas Feith, a key architect of both disasters ab initio, emerged from near-total obscurity at the hardline neoconservative Hudson Institute to publish an op-ed in the Washington Post assailing Vice President J.D. Vance (and indirectly Trump) for dangerous naivete in dealing with Iran.

I don’t want to get into his argument, which asserts that democracies can never trust “bad actors” like Iran to comply with their undertakings (an ironic point given the history of Iran’s compliance with and Washington’s unilateral abandonment of the 2015 JCPOA). You can read it yourself.

But to illustrate why I was so surprised that it was Feith, who hasn’t published an op-ed in the Post, the New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal since 2016, taking a public role in what will be a major PR campaign to kill the deal I will do what we strongly discourage on RS: I’ll quote from AI.

I asked Microsoft’s Co-Pilot’s the following question:

“Why is Douglas Feith the last person opponents of Trump’s deal with Iran would want to publish an op-ed on the deal’s alleged weaknesses?”

The answer:

“Because Feith is widely associated with the flawed intelligence, strategic misjudgments, and disastrous outcomes of the Iraq War, his criticism of any Iran policy risks undermining the anti-deal position by linking it to the same neoconservative thinking that produced the Iraq debacle. His involvement makes opponents look less credible, not more.”

I couldn’t have put it better or more succinctly, and, while Co-Pilot offered to elaborate at length, I’ll cite my own abbreviated list of why Feith is such a terrible messenger.

Feith, who served as undersecretary of defense for policy, the third-ranking post in the Pentagon, during President George W. Bush’s first term, was a long-time protégé of Richard Perle, the “Dark Prince” and the dean and impresario of hardline, Washington-based neoconservatives dating back to the early 1970’s. Feith followed Perle from his first job after law school in Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson’s office, which served as the hatchery of Washington-based neoconservatives in the 1970s, through Perle’s service as a senior Pentagon official during the administration of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

In 1996, the two men worked with several others who would later serve in the Bush II administration in a “study group” that produced the notorious “Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” paper for incoming Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Among other things, the memo called for Netanyahu to take steps that would ensure Israeli control of the occupied Palestinian territories in part by working for regime change in Syria and “removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.”

But Feith is best known for his Pentagon service under George W. Bush, and, as Co-Pilot noted, his roles in the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Gen. Tommy Franks, the CENTCOM commander in both campaigns found working with Feith particularly frustrating, complaining at one point to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, “I have to deal with the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth almost every day.”

Part of that frustration was due to Feith’s clear determination to shape or search for or even possible invent intelligence that would justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq and rally public opinion behind that enterprise. Indeed, Feith created offices in the Pentagon, most notoriously the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Unit, whose job was to collect and disseminate any information that might suggest a cooperative relationship between Saddam Hussein’s regime and Al-Qaeda despite the judgments by the U.S. intelligence community that such a relationship did not exist.

As part of his efforts to shape the intelligence, he and his team worked with Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress which provided “informants” who concocted evidence of alleged advances by Saddam’s alleged nuclear weapons program that also did not actually exist.

Even more damaging was the Office of Special Plans (OSP), which was charged with planning the occupation after the invasion, plans which included “de-Baathification,” a program long promoted by Chalabi, Perle, and other neoconservatives, that virtually overnight created the largely Sunni insurgency and that eventually resulted in a bloody sectarian civil war that not only devastated the country, but exhausted the occupation forces.

Besides his work with the OSP, Feith was also responsible for establishing the short-lived Office of Strategic Influence, which was closed down after creating a furor in Congress because of its purported aim of “providing news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations as part of an effort to influence public sentiment and policy makers.”

But those examples are really just some of the most salient examples. “Undersecretary of Defense for Fiascos,” as Slate once described him, may have been a more appropriate title.

Six months into Bush’s second term, he was out, but, unlike his nominal boss, Deputy Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz, he didn’t get a consolation prize like the presidency of the World Bank. He retreated to write his 800+-page memoir in which he made what most critics described as a lame attempt at evading responsibility for the most disastrous “war of choice” in U.S. history.

It may be significant that the word “Iraq” did not appear once in Feith's new attempt at a comeback.