Introduction

For people looking to get a deeper understanding of the War in Iraq and the decisions that led up to it there are plenty of books out there that provide a multitude of opinions of what they think happened, but there is one book that has an exhaustive list of endnotes and even the actual scanned copies of official memorandums and PowerPoint slides to backup the facts and opinions presented in the book. The book I am referring to is War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, written by the former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas J. Feith.

Feith’s name is enough to turn off many people from even bothering to read the book due to the demonization of the guy as a “neocon” in the media. Don’t let this stop you from reading the book because he extensively documents his facts and opinions.  However, I do have to say that Feith’s opinions at times while reading the book seemed whiny, but overall were quite interesting and definitely worth reading.

Post 9/11 Actions

The book starts out with Feith talking about how Bush was trying to start a new relationship with Russia. President was aware of Islamic terrorism, but Russia was actually his major foreign policy initiative, which is interesting since the Obama Administration has made it one of their premier foreign policy objectives as well with all the “restart” rhetoric. Anyway Feith was actually in Russia when 9/11 happened and from there the book continues with Feith describing some of the inside discussions with key government leaders in the aftermath of 9/11. It was interesting to read what some of these leaders thought about what should be done in response to 9/11.

Douglas Feith

What was really interesting was reading how the tension between Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld began in the aftermath of 9/11. Feith in the book describes how Rumsfeld was upset that Powell was making decisions with military implications such as arranging overflight routes over Pakistan without consulting with the Pentagon.

It was also interesting to read how much striking Iraq was discussed right after 9/11. Rumsfeld and other administration officials were debating whether the US should just strike back at Al Qaeda terrorist targets or launch a wider war against other terrorist networks and the states that sponsor them. Iraq was being considered as a target because the potential to pass weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. The Pentagon even advised the President that two wars at once in Afghanistan and Iraq were actually doable. Bush decided to focus on Al Qaeda first before deciding to take any action against Iraq.

The Afghanistan Campaign

From there the book goes into some of the inside baseball in regards to the planning and strategy for the Afghanistan campaign. Most interesting in this portion of the book is the conflicts that Rumsfeld was having with European allies. In one instance Feith said he felt Rumsfeld would set relations with the British back to 1812. The biggest problem that Rumsfeld had with the Europeans was that they were tasked with specific objectives in Afghanistan and they expected the US to fund and assist them while they took all the credit. This was the model that the Europeans had used in the Balkans for years and Rumsfeld was motivated to change this mind set and make the Europeans do their fair share.

For example the British were in charge of counter-narcotics operations in Afghanistan, but their government did not give them enough helicopters and they never deployed enough people to train the Afghani counter-narcotics force they were responsible for forming. The British requested that the US to give them cash to buy helicopters with and augment their training operations with US forces. Italy was responsible for organizing the judicial branch and failed to send one person to do this. The other European countries were doing the same thing in the areas they were responsible for such as establishing local police departments, government agencies, or the judicial branch.

This caused more conflict between the State Department and the Pentagon because Rumsfeld wanted the State Department to push these allies to fund and execute the responsibilities they said they would do and State resisted doing this.  Here is a book excerpt about this conflict:

State Department officials generally resisted suggestions to pressure Afghan aid donors publicly or privately. They explained that its often difficult to obtain pledges for multilateral aid projects. If those who are willing to pledge are later embarrassed by American complaints about their subpar performance, they may stop contributing altogether. Our diplomats generally took the view that if another country failed to deliver on an important promise, the United States should simply serve as the default provider.

This became clear early on when a State Department official at a Deputies Committee meeting proposed spending more than $20 million for Afghan police training. It had taken substantial work to identify US funds available to help train the Afghan Army, a commitment we had already undertaken. And we all knew that the US government would need funds to do other important and costly reconstruction tasks in Afghanistan. When I questioned State’s $20 million plus proposal, on the grounds that police training was Germany’s obligation, the State official responded that Germany wasn’t going to do it, so that was that.

The mess with the coalition forces in Afghanistan has gotten much better all these years later as the US is now deploying more combat troops to Afghanistan to do the jobs the Europeans won’t.  However, expect the Europeans to take credit afterwards if the US is successful.  Overall, the Afghanistan portion of the book was interesting, but was too short. It felt like a section that Feith just wanted to get out of the way so he can get into the real meat of the book, which is about Iraq.

The War in Iraq

Feith goes on at length explaining the various threats Iraq presented over the years to include funding terrorist groups and the WMD threat. He doesn’t come out and say it, but the impression I got from reading the book was that the White House decided to go to war in Iraq to send a message to State Sponsors of Terrorism that the US was no longer going to stand for their activities and Iraq was the easy target to do this.

The lead up to the war featured more fighting between the Defense and State Departments. The State Department wanted an occupation of Iraq while the Pentagon wanted a small footprint like they used in Afghanistan and leave a caretaker government of mostly Iraqi exiles in place in order to not bog down the military with occupation duties. Feith even has declassified Defense Department memos scanned and published in the appendix of his book for readers to see for themselves that the Pentagon was against an occupation force in Iraq while the State Department was adamant about having a Coalition Provisional Authority to occupy Iraq with. This all helps explain why the Pentagon did such a poor job with planning for an occupation of Iraq because the Pentagon leadership never wanted to do it in the first place.

Colin Powell briefing the United Nations on Iraq's WMD threat.

So basically what you have is the Pentagon eager to go to war in Iraq with the State more hesitant to do so. When the decision is finally made, State wanted to run a full-scale occupation, which Bush agreed to over Pentagon objections. If you read the book you will see how messy the relationship between the DOD and State was becoming and Bush probably felt this was a good compromise to keep both agencies happy and on board with the war effort. However, Bush’s compromise was doomed to failure from the start because he authorized a Pentagon war plan that did not account for troops or training for the occupation plan the State Department wanted to implement.

When reading the book you realize how hap hazard the planning for post-war Iraq was when DOD and State a month before the war are still squabbling over who would fill adviser posts in the new Iraqi government much less an actual strategy. This fight over filling these posts between DOD and State actually enraged Colin Powell, “beyond anything that anyone had seen before.” The guy stuck in the middle of all of this was former General Jay Garner who had been tasked to put together a reconstruction plan. Form this book and other I have read, I get the impression that Garner really was trying to put a plan together, but was brought on board with so little time to prepare a plan and what time he did have was greatly compromised by turf wars between the DOD and State. To say that DOD and State were dysfunctional in their relationship between one another is putting it politely. What I kept wondering when I was reading about all the nonsense going on between these two agencies where was President Bush? He had to have heard about what was going on, why didn’t he bring in Powell and Rumsfeld and try to solve these issues instead of letting them fester and become as poisonous at they did?

Jay Garner

Feith even admits in his book that the Baathist insurgency was not planned for:

What was not anticipated – by any office, as far as I know – was the Iraqi’s regime’s ability to conduct a sustained campaign against coalition forces after it was overthrown. (……..) The Administration’s postwar plans did anticipate that the environment in Iraq after regime change would be tumultuous and possibly violent. Officials did not assume, however, that the coalition would be reconstructing the economic infrastructure and its political system while the war against the Baathists still raged. The assumption was that the post-war work would be done post-after-the war.

I actually find this passage incredible because I served in Operation Iraqi Freedom and many of us at the small unit level spent lots of time talking about a possible insurgency before we even deployed. How could all these smart people in the Pentagon not anticipate that the Baathist may try and launch an unconventional campaign against US forces when plenty of lower ranking people in the force were? It is mind boggling to me.

As committed to war as Rumsfeld was, he actually felt it was his responsibility to warn the President of all the things that could go wrong in Iraq. A memorandum was addressed to the President on this topic that Feith dubbed “The Parade of Horribles”. Look at some of these things in the memo that actually did come true:

- The United States might fail to win support from the United Nations and from important other countries, which could make it harder to get international cooperation on Iraq and other issues in the future.

- The United States could become so absorbed in its Iraq effort that we pay inadequate attention to other serious problems ………………

- The war could cause more harm and entail greater costs than expected …………..

- Post-Saddam stabilization and reconstruction effort by the United States could take not two to four years, but eight to ten years, absorbing US leadership, military, and financial resources.

- Terrorist networks could improve their recruiting and fundraising as a result of our being depicted as anti-Muslim.

- Iraq could experience ethnic strife among Kurds, Sunnis, and Shia.

Rumsfeld actually argued that these possibilities would become more likely if the US did not wage a quick war with a light footprint. Here is probably Rumsfeld’s most ironic premonition from this memo:

- US could fail to find WMD on the ground in Iraq and be unpersuasive to the world.

Pretty incredible how many of the things Rumsfeld predicted could happen did come true. As far as what happened to Saddam’s WMD, Feith provides a good explanation from interviews with captured regime officials and Saddam Hussein himself:

As for the risk that pretending to possess WMD might provoke the United States, Saddam discounted it because he considered the United States a paper tiger. Though Americans, in his assessment, might bluster about regime change, they would prove unwilling to take the heavy casualties he thought would be inevitable in an invasion of Iraq (and especially in a march to Baghdad).

This bizarre jumble of self self delusions and too clever by half machinations helps to explain Iraq’s policy on WMD. But this is an explanation that our intelligence agencies could not have obtained before Saddam’s overthrow, and that would certainly have met with disbelief if they had. Imagine trying to argue that Saddam was only pretending to have stockpiles, even though he had in fact destroyed them and that Saddam was doing this because he Iran and not the United States.

Actually Scott Ritter did advocate this and he was met by disbelief by administration officials like Feith and everyone else in general.

Scott Ritter

The rest of the book continues to dig into the failed assumptions and planning of post-war Iraq. It is really sobering to read how incompetent the people sent to administer post-war Iraq really were starting with both heads of the State and Pentagon efforts there, Paul Bremer and General Ricardo Sanchez. These two did not get along and the chain of command between the two and the interagency partnership in Iraq was never very clear and continued to lead to more conflict between the DOD and State.  Neither the DOD or State come out looking good by the end of this book.

To make matters worse Bremer was extremely dismissive of the Iraqis. Here he is quoted in the book as saying:

You guys don’t seem to understand how ineffective the GC (Governing Council) is turning out to be. I chose my words, but did not mince them. Those people couldn’t organize a parade, let alone run a country.

Paul Bremer

As history has shown Bremer and those around him couldn’t run a country either and ironically many of the Iraqi Governing Council members he was critical of, are now part of the current Iraqi government.

Conclusion

Like I said at the beginning of this review, this book is a must read no matter what you think about the person that wrote it. This book is written less to convince someone of the justification of the war in Iraq, but to document what key officials in the Bush administration were thinking during the run up to the war. In none of their thinking was the decision to invade Iraq related to seizing Iraqi oil or Bush getting payback at Saddam for trying to kill his father as is popularly believed in many quarters.

These people made a decision that they felt was in the best interest of the country, but failed to formulate a comprehensive plan to assure the success of such a war because of all the interagency conflicts that was allowed to persist due to the lack of Presidential leadership in my opinion. This governmental dysfunction ultimately cost the lives of US soldiers left to execute a failed occupation plan. That is why a better title for the book would have been War and Indecision, but still a great read nonetheless.