A Pathology of the Iraq War

Douglas Feith’s book tells us the origins and course of the war in Iraq.

By Fred C. Iklé
Monday, April 20, 2009

Just as the Obama administration has been settling in — in other words, at exactly the right time — the book that Douglas Feith wrote in 2007 has been issued as a paperback. Fortunately, Iraq seems to have recovered after five years of a costly and disorganized struggle to establish law and order, avert a civil war, and open the door to a legitimately elected government — perhaps even a democracy.

Yet this recovery is not guaranteed. Iraq might well suffer a serious relapse. As President Obama put it in his speech at Camp Lejeune, “Iraq is not yet secure.” Therefore he phased the withdrawal of our forces. “By August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end,” he said; but added, “we will retain an additional force” of 35–50,000 U.S. troops.

Pathologists study the origins and course of diseases, and reevaluate their findings after the patient died by dissecting the corpse in the laboratory. So what should we learn from the pathology of the Iraq War? Feith offers a fascinating collection of lessons in the last chapter of his book. These lessons have become even more valuable in the paperback edition, because we have gained distance from the acrimonious debates and recriminations. As Raymond Aron, the highly regarded French philosopher and strategist, put it: “From a closer view one sees only individuals; from afar, broad outlines appear.”

Feith explains both. He gives us a picture of the individual strengths and idiosyncrasies of a Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, or George Tenet. And amazingly, he has been able to grasp the “broad outlines” Raymond Aron had in mind.

For instance, Feith distills into useful maxims the many errors the CIA made under Tenet: Don’t pretend you know more than you know. Don’t scorn information from scholars, exiles, and other open sources. Yet his maxim “don’t be wedded to preconceptions” required some qualification. One will lose credibility if one shifts too easily from one rationale to another one. As Feith shows, President Bush shifted from the threat of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction to the goal of promoting democracy in Iraq. This damaged the president’s credibility. Feith concludes: “The emphasis on building a stable democracy in Iraq redefined success in such way that many Americans stopped believing that success was either possible or worth the sacrifice.”

War and Decision became a bestseller when it was published, and rightly so. Douglas Feith did not have to write a history of the Iraq War based on archival materials and newspaper reports. He wrote his balanced story as an insider who participated in the inter-agency quarrels, witnessed serious insubordinations, and saw endless conflicts between the state and defense departments that President Bush tolerated and his national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, could not control.

To top it all, the reader is given the tools to act himself as the historiographer. Though depicted as a stealth figure in the media, Feith got dozens of revealing internal memoranda declassified, and his rich endnotes lead the reader to a plethora of web links for additional government documents. Feith’s book also reminds the reader of important antecedents to the Iraq War. Critical discoveries before 2003 revealed that Saddam Hussein had acquired weapons of mass destruction, and demonstrated he was willing to use them. In 1988 he ordered the use of chemical weapons against his own Kurdish population. In 1995 Saddam’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamil, who was the head of the WMD program, defected from Iraq and told the United Nations inspectors that Iraq had a biological-weapons program. Saddam had also started a program to build nuclear weapons.

Feith not only clarifies the Iraq War from hindsight, he teaches us the importance of foresight. Our military forces almost won the war in two months — mission accomplished! But President Bush and most of his principal officials lacked the foresight to anticipate the difficulties of pacifying the conquered country.

Foresight is hemmed in between fears of future disasters and wishes for happiness. As Sigmund Freud put it in Civilization and Its Discontents, “man’s judgments of value follow directly his wishes for happiness. . . . They are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments.” The guiding star for America’s foreign policy is the promotion of democracy throughout the world. But is the spread of democracy an illusion? Sigmund Freud concludes his essay by warning of “the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. It may be that in this respect precisely the present time deserves a special interest. Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man.” Astonishingly, Freud wrote this essay in 1930 — 15 years before the atomic bomb was used.

After the two atomic bombs that were employed to end World War II, nuclear weapons have never been used. This stellar accomplishment is increasingly fragile, although Iraq’s nuclear program is gone. Keep in mind, Pakistan’s large arsenal is only some 200 miles from the frontier region facing Afghanistan, where the Taliban are becoming more powerful while the Pakistani government becomes weaker. That is a compelling reason for President Obama’s recent decisions to strengthen our forces in Afghanistan and to assist the Pakistani government.

And to help him keep making good decisions on U.S. “contingency operations” abroad, Obama should put Feith’s book on his reading list.