Table Of ContentWAR AND DECISION
Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn
of the War on Terrorism
Douglas J. Feith
To my mother, Rose Feith,
to the memory of my father, Dalck Feith, and
to the men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces.
CONTENTS
Map . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .v
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .vii
1 This Means War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
2 Personal Trajectory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
3 Change the Way We Live, or Change the Way They Live . . . 47
4 Steady in Afghanistan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
5 Easier to Topple than Rebuild . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
6 Why Iraq?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
7 Risks of Action and Inaction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
8 Discord in Washington . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
9 Iraq Planning—The Who and Why . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274
10 United Nations Bound. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299
11 Losing Ground on the Diplomatic Front. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 338
12 Final Preparations for War and Its Aftermath . . . . . . . . . . . . 360
Photographic Insert
13 Saddam’s Regime Falls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 391
14 “From Liberation to Occupation” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 427
15 The Taint of Occupation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 457
16 Lessons and Debate. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 504
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 529
Appendices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 531
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 566
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 654
About the Author
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
Map
INTRODUCTION
This memoir is a window into the Bush Administration’s decisions—
on how to fight the war on terrorism, whether to overthrow the Iraqi
regime, and how to deal with post-Saddam Iraq. It does not attempt to
persuade the reader that the President decided these issues correctly. I
have aimed not to write a polemic, but rather to make a contribution to
history, extensively documented and as accurate as one person’s account
can be.
The war on terrorism, an unconventional conflict, challenges us to
answer even the most basic questions: When did the war start? Who is
the enemy? Are we winning or losing? How will we know when it is over?
Does it make sense to say we are at war with terrorism, which is an activ-
ity, not an enemy? How can we fight an enemy whose troops are scattered
around the world, many of them living in countries with which we are not
at war?
These questions can be debated at length from many angles—but 9/11
left little time for elaborate deliberation. Terrorists had attacked Ameri-
cans on American soil, obliterating the World Trade Center, destroying
the west side of the Pentagon, and causing an airliner to crash in Pennsyl-
vania. More than three thousand people had been killed within an hour
and a quarter. President George W. Bush and his national security team
took action, with one main goal: to prevent another such attack.
viii INTRODUCTION
I was a member of that team. As Under Secretary of Defense for Pol-
icy, I reported to the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, advising
him on national security policy and defense strategy. My colleagues in
Rumsfeld’s wartime inner circle included Deputy Secretary of Defense
Paul Wolfowitz and the Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, Generals Richard Myers and Peter Pace.
I headed the Defense Department’s Policy organization of approxi-
mately fifteen hundred staff members. Its main tasks were, first, to help
Rumsfeld develop strategic guidance for the department, including the
National Defense Strategy and the instructions the Secretary of Defense
issues to his combatant commanders. Second, to manage the department’s
relations with all foreign countries: The Policy office is sometimes called
“the State Department within the Pentagon.” And, third, to represent the
Office of the Secretary of Defense—that is, the civilian side of the depart-
ment—in the interagency process for making national security policy.
This was the arena of fabled bureaucratic battles between the Defense
and State Departments, the subject of voluminous—and occasionally cor-
rect—journalistic stories. Those battles are an important part of the history
recounted in this book.
The narrative here, particularly on the decision to overthrow Saddam
Hussein, is thoroughly at odds with the conventional account provided
in recent books and articles on President Bush, terrorism, and Iraq.
The now-standard story portrays the President and his supporters in the
Administration as militaristic and reckless, closed-minded and ideological,
thoughtless at best and even dishonest—and hell-bent on war with Iraq
from the Administration’s inception.
The record—much of it presented here for the first time—paints
a different picture. Historians will find that President Bush and his top
advisers wrestled analytically and seriously with difficult problems, many
of them without precedent. Officials devised a comprehensive approach
to disrupting terrorist networks—targeting terrorist leadership, finances,
and movement, and striking at the terrorists’ state sponsors. Regarding
Iraq, we looked closely at the dangers of war, weighing them against
the dangers of leaving Saddam Hussein in power. We heard and consid-
ered the arguments of our political opponents and critics, domestic and
foreign. We developed sensible plans to deal with a range of contingen-
cies—from humanitarian crises to creation of post-Saddam governmen-
tal institutions.
