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Douglas J. Feith

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War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism Hardcover – March 1, 2008

by Douglas J. Feith (Author)

4.4 54 ratings

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In the years since the attacks of September 11, 2001, journalists, commentators, and others have published accounts of the Bush Administration's war on terrorism. But no senior Pentagon official has offered an inside view of those years, or has challenged the prevailing narrative of that war—until now.

Douglas J. Feith, the head of the Pentagon's Policy organization, was a key member of Donald Rumsfeld's inner circle as the Administration weighed how to protect the nation from another 9/11. In War and Decision, he puts readers in the room with President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, General Tommy Franks, and other key players as the Administration devised its strategy and war plans. Drawing on thousands of previously undisclosed documents, notes, and other written sources, Feith details how the Administration launched a global effort to attack and disrupt terrorist networks; how it decided to overthrow the Saddam Hussein regime; how it came to impose an occupation on Iraq even though it had avoided one in Afghanistan; how some officials postponed or impeded important early steps that could have averted major problems in Iraq's post-Saddam period; and how the Administration's errors in war-related communications undermined the nation's credibility and put U.S. war efforts at risk.

Even close followers of reporting on the Iraq war will be surprised at the new information Feith provides—presented here with balance and rigorous attention to detail. Among other revelations, War and Decision demonstrates that the most far-reaching warning of danger in Iraq was produced not by State or by the CIA, but by the Pentagon. It reveals the actual story behind the allegations that the Pentagon wanted to "anoint" Ahmad Chalabi as ruler of Iraq, and what really happened when the Pentagon challenged the CIA's work on the Iraq–al Qaida relationship. It offers the first accurate account of Iraq postwar planning—a topic widely misreported to date. And it presents surprising new portraits of Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, Richard Armitage, L. Paul Bremer, and others—revealing how differences among them shaped U.S. policy.

With its blend of vivid narrative, frank analysis, and elegant writing, War and Decision is like no other book on the Iraq war. It will interest those who have been troubled by conflicting accounts of the planning of the war, frustrated by the lack of firsthand insight into the decision-making process, or skeptical of conventional wisdom about Operation Iraqi Freedom and the global war on terrorism—efforts the author continues to support.

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“Indispensable. . . . The best account to date of how the administration debated, decided, organized and executed its military responses to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Much of what makes War and Decision so compelling is that it is, in effect, a revisionist history.” (Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal)

“Extraordinarily frank and persuasive. . . . [O]ur first in-depth look at the inside of the Bush administration’s national security top leadership from one who was there. [Feith] has been criticized harshly and, I think, unfairly.” (Michael Barone, U.S. News & World Report)

“Meticulous. . . . A convincing refutation of unfair allegations about the author [and] a balanced analysis of policy debates about Iraq inside the administration. . . . Will be studied for years by journalists, historians and aspiring political appointees.” (National Review)

“Extraordinary. . . . I was unprepared for the thoroughness of the documentation, the sweeping nature of the narrative and the highly readable prose. It is the first attempt by a serious student of history to lay out the myriad, challenging choices confronting a president. . . . Splendid.” (Frank J. Gaffney Jr., Washington Times)

“If you want to read a serious book about the origins and consequences of the intervention in Iraq in 2003, you owe it to yourself to get hold of a copy of Douglas Feith’s War and Decision.” (Christopher Hitchens, Slate)

“One would have expected, as in the case of all the other Iraq exposés, that [Feith] would use the memoir genre to get even. Instead, he is selfcritical, even admits to occasional hubris, but, more importantly, also chronicles the contortions and reinventions of many post2003/4 critics of the war.” (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review Online)

“As Americans turned on the Iraq war, anti-war forces tried to portray the war as not only a mistake, but the result of a neoconservative coup. . . . In his new memoir, War and Decision, Mr. Feith does an admirable job in dispelling this hokum.” (Eli Lake, New York Sun)

“By far the most balanced, detailed, and lucid account of this story that’s come out yet. . . . Feith makes the first intellectually serious attempt to explain how the government tried to answer that question [of settling post-9/11 defense strategy] in the years after 9/11.” (“The Corner,” National Review Online)

“What’s needed now? More memoirs, more data, more information, more testimony. More serious books, like Doug Feith’s. More ‘this is what I saw’ and ‘this is what is true.’ Feed history.” (Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal)

About the Author

Douglas J. Feith served as U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from 2001 to 2005. He is the Director of the Center for National Security Strategies at the Hudson Institute and a Belfer Center Adjunct Visiting Scholar at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He lives near Washington, D.C., with his family.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper; First Edition (March 1, 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 688 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0060899735
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0060899738
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.15 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.5 x 9.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,468,512 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,572 in Terrorism (Books)
- #7,324 in Political Leader Biographies
- #11,784 in United States Biographies

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4.4 54 ratings

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Customers find the book very informative.

"This is an essential fact book for every person curious about the U.S. government's decision making that led to the Afghan and Iraq wars and their..." Read more

"...actions as extreme as the "war on terror," he has written an extremely comprehensive and surprisingly guarded take on what happened...." Read more

"...with Douglas Feith on the issue of deception, this book is filled with information you should probably know...." Read more

"...The Lessons Learned are invaluable and applicable to leaders in many other realworld contexts.The final chapter is a must read...." Read more

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Customers find the book well-written, lucid, and cogent.

"...Feith is to be commended for producing a very readable book that contains a great deal of important history of the Washington decision making for..." Read more

"...Feith is a reasonably good writer, but he appears utterly unreflective and arrogant...." Read more

"...of Douglas Feith's thinking about Iraq, but this is still a reasonably well-written book, so I will suppress the instinct to give any book by a..." Read more

"...his enunciation of the reasons for going to war in Iraq is lucid and cogent...." Read more

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Donald N. Anderson

One hopes for more books of this type about the Iraq war.

Reviewed in the United States on August 18, 2008

Verified Purchase

This is an essential fact book for every person curious about the U.S. government's decision making that led to the Afghan and Iraq wars and their pursuit in the early years.

Douglas Feith's memoir includes the period in which he served as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. He covers discussions in which he was personally involved and clearly identifies information that he did not personally observe. As such, important pieces of the puzzle are left to the observations of the actual participants. One hopes that more books will provide additional first-hand information about the Iraq war and avoid the imaginative judgments of the uninformed. Michael Yon does well on the ground in Iraq, but all too many have built a big scaffold on which to hang President Bush and ignored their own limited perspective.

Feith provides appendices in which he outlines the Washington decision apparatus, shows the memos that provided outlines of decision options, a series of charts used to brief the President on the Iraq transition, the implementation outline for the President's March 2003 policy for an Iraq Interim Authority, and a policy briefing on training the Iraqi opposition. All told good evidence for the decision process used.

Feith explains that the chain of command goes from the President to the Secretary of Defense to the regional commander (Centcom's Tommy Franks handled the invasion of Iraq). The Centcom commander can (and regularly did) react negatively to any suggestions for change that did not come directly from the President or the Secretary of Defense.

The Pentagon staff and the Joint Chiefs provide support and advice only, and are not in the chain of command. Thus Wolfowitz (the Deputy Secretary of Defense), Feith and General Myers (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) in the Pentagon made suggestions to Rumsfeld and the President. These advisors supported the President's vision of the terrorist threat as a world-wide phenomena. They noted many separate organizations, but recognized their common goal of injuring America and their deadly danger to Americans. They shared the President's view and designed policies to reduce that threat, deter terrorism around the world, and did not narrow their vision to only Afghanistan, as many recommended.

Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld appears as a very demanding boss who was trying to refocus this largest of American bureaucracies into a leaner more flexible force. When the secretary's vision collided with officials who disagreed with him, he met a great deal of foot dragging. Never-the-less, he did move the army's divisional structure farther along the path toward brigade organization.

Mixed into the debate were multiple opinions about the force levels necessary in Iraq. In retrospect it is very clear that the force levels in Iraq were too small to permit a traditional occupation. Feith suggests the President's selected occupation policy might have made a large force less necessary, but it never had a chance. Head of the Coalition Provisional Authority Paul Bremer III caused shock across the administration when, without consultation, he published an article in the 08 September 2003 Washington Post headlined "Iraq's Path to Sovereignty." The seven steps Bremer outlined effectively aborted the President's plan for early and piecewise transfer of sovereignty to Iraq. The planned Iraq Interim Authority was not to be.

In retrospect it is easy to fault the President and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld for not immediately replacing Bremer. They must have felt "the man on the ground" had better information and in any event the shockwave from replacement would have been too high.

Bremer's dismantling of the Iraq Interim Authority had serious repercussions. Feith quotes Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari in his chapter title "from liberation to occupation;" a very brief summation. Our support in Iraq dwindled. Our casualty figures soared to new records in November 2003, April 2004, and November 2004 before easing back and then running up again to May 2007.

On the other hand Rumsfeld's continual insistence on careful written arguments for and against many policies should help produce a wonderful historic record of his thinking as Secretary of Defense. Would that the Secretary of State would create such a record. Many government departments try to impose their policies with leaks and innuendo. Right or wrong Rumsfeld was clearly working very hard to produce a policy that was in the country's best interest and not necessarily just his turf. He regularly suggested that State be given more budget to handle some to the work that had fallen to Defense by default.

It appears that both the President and the Secretary of Defense over-reacted to the disastrous experience of a President and Secretary of Defense micromanaging the Vietnam War. Possibly because of this unfortunate history they were extremely reluctant to reverse decisions made at the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and Regional Command (Centcom) level. They can be faulted for failing to push the Army to adopt a counterinsurgency strategy at an earlier date.

Early mistakes in a war are a foregone conclusion since your enemy has studied your previous tactics and made adjustments to counter them. We usually bumble along, adjust and eventually get tactics that work inside the enemy's decision-response envelope.

Adjusting strategy must be done more slowly, with much greater care, and requires careful communication to all levels. This takes time and can be seriously impeded by unclear or unrealistic goals. Rumsfeld did his best to generate clarity but some subordinates in Iraq were not able to operate at his level.

Feith is to be commended for producing a very readable book that contains a great deal of important history of the Washington decision making for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was indeed refreshing to read an account of the Washington decision making by an actual participant that is not clouded by wild suppositions or accusations.

Our present success in Iraq has built on the best efforts of a large number of men including the main characters of Feith's book. This success may not have been possible several years ago even if the troop surge had occurred then and General Petraeus had been the boss.

This reviewer considers it unfortunate that the President's many critics do not share his vision of the war's scope, but it is a point on which reasonable men can fail to agree. To me the debate closely parallels the European debate in the mid 1930's, but this time Churchill was in power.

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John Ames

How to, or not to, start a war

Reviewed in the United States on January 8, 2013

Verified Purchase

Douglas Feith was the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from 2001 to 2005. He is currently a professor at Georgetown University and is associated with the Harvard Kennedy School and the Hoover Institution. His book is based on detailed contemporaneous notes he took in meetings at the Pentagon, with the National Security Council, and on memos and briefing slides, some of which are included at the end.

He starts with some insider "war stories" of how he became aware of the 9/11 attacks while at a meeting in Moscow, and of the informal deliberations with other officials on the way home by military cargo plane. The sense of being under attack and not knowing when and where the next attack would occur is palpable, as is the feeling of being responsible for action. While interesting, these accounts are probably not much different from what other conscientious officials would relate.

An early decision was to recognize that this attack, and the several others preceding it (p 503), were not isolated criminal activities but part of a loosely coordinated world wide jihadist movement informally and covertly supported in part by governments. Simply finding, arresting, and prosecuting those responsible would not suffice. Rather, preventing future attacks was seen as the prime objective. The reason for this was not only to prevent additional loss, but to avoid the severe changes to American society that would result from the inevitable national response to future, possibly more damaging, attacks. We would have to disrupt terrorist operations generally, and pressure terrorism's state supporters to recalculate their options.

The value of Feith's book is in its description of how the different individuals and institutions of our government worked with and against each other to achieve this general objective. I will concentrate on these aspects, rather than the top level history itself.

Several themes run through the story. One is the inability of the Bush administration to either explain clearly its policies or to respond adequately to distorted press accounts. An early example was the Policy Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group, which was two Pentagon officials tasked with extracting strategic insights from intelligence reports prepared by the CIA and others, which is exactly what a policy office is supposed to do. This effort morphed in the press into a "secret" cell trying either to create its own intelligence or manipulate that of others to support an unwise policy. (p 116-119)

Another failure of communication was the ability of critics to invent an unrealistic standard of success and then declare the administration's efforts disappointing for not having met that standard. An early example (p 125) was characterizing the slow progress in the first month in Afghanistan as a "quagmire" akin to Vietnam.

A far more serious example is the continuing claim that our inability to create a modern liberal democracy in Iraq represents a failure. Such an outcome has never been essential US policy. Rather, our aim has been to create a government that is not a threat to us or our allies. This in fact is being done.

The "free Iraq from tyranny" objective arose when our forces were unable to locate the stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that the CIA expected to find. (Feith makes several comments about the CIA implying that they knew more than they did.)

There was and is no doubt that Saddam Hussein had been working on various WMDs, that there had been stockpiles of such weapons, that he intended to develop this capability when, not if, the international sanctions were removed, and that he had had supportive if not directive relations with various terrorist groups. These were the actual reasons we invaded and replaced his government. President Bush, however, effectively changed the rationale for the war starting in late 2003 and formalized in a speech in 2004 in which he gave little attention to the actual reasons for going to war, and instead emphasized the goal of creating democracy in Iraq. This in Feith's view was a major error against which he argued forcefully at the time, but was unable to prevail. (p 490-493).

The reason Feith gives for considering this shift of objective a mistake is the difficulty of fully achieving it. I see another problem with this rationale in that we not only can't remove every tyrannical dictator but should not unless he is a real threat to our security. He offers no good reasons for the change. He suggests that the White House fell prey to the lure of revealing "secret" intelligence reports as a supporting argument, when in reality the reasons were there for all to see, and then was embarrassed when the expected stockpiles did not materialize.

Another major theme is the battle over how to use the Iraqi exiles in the invasion and subsequent government of that country. The Pentagon Policy Office, and Secretary Rumsfeld, concluded that a quick devolvement of power to Iraqis, including integrating them as available into the invasion force, would yield positive results in attenuating the inevitable resistance of Saddam's followers. This was the policy in Afghanistan, where it seemed to work, and was adopted by the President and National Security Council as the official policy for the Iraq operation.

Unfortunately the policy was not followed. From the beginning, the State Department and the CIA distrusted the Iraqi exiles in general and Ahmed Chalabi in particular. They went out of their way to exclude them from pre-war planning and post war governing. The US formally occupied Iraq for over fourteen months after major combat operations concluded. We never did this in Afghanistan. In the end, with the Iraqi political process at least starting to work, the "externals", as the exiles and Kurds were called, have risen to the positions of prominence that they should have been allowed to take from the beginning. If we had followed this course from the first, there is a good chance that most of the turbulence in Iraq following the invasion could have been averted.

The reasons for making this mistake are not clear, though Feith provides lots of detail of how it happened. He doesn't say so directly, but I sense that the failure to follow the adopted policy was largely a failure of the President to monitor the activities of his top level appointees.

One interesting observation on the top people is how Condoleezza Rice, during most of this time the National Security Advisor, often tried to bring harmony to the members of the leadership group by crafting policy positions that were a compromise between conflicting views, but the result of which was to provide unclear directions to those carrying out the policies.

We often hear complaints that policy people, either in the Pentagon or White House, distorted intelligence information to further their policy aims, usually unstated ones. Feith, of course, refutes this. What he warns of instead is the danger of non-policy people, in intelligence or otherwise, who obstruct or ignore decided policy with which they personally or institutionally disagree. The problem with this is that it dilutes and obscures responsibility. It also allows individuals to change effective policy on their own without rigorously making their arguments up the chain of command to where the policy makers would have to consider them.

A major issue NOT covered in the book, at least as far as I can recall, is the matter of congressional authorization of the Iraq war. Feith covers the development of presidential speeches on the subject, but I would have liked to know of the conversations with congress members. Were they focused on just the classified WMD stockpile "secrets", or more broadly on open-source geopolitical information about the Iraq threat? I would assume that this sort of political exchange would be just what the Pentagon policy office is for.

If this lack of inclusion is not just a literary or reporting oversight, but reflects an actual non-existence, then I would fault President Bush for not doing more along these lines. I am sure that the president worked to convince members of congress of the necessity of the war at a high level of abstraction, or perhaps at a low level of anecdote; but if he did not enlist the aid of his military policy professionals, that would be an indication of a failure to appreciate either the constitutional or political role of congress.

More generally, I am uncomfortable with the increasing use over the past 50 years of ambiguous congressional resolutions to authorize military force without declaring war.

I come away from Feith's book with the belief that our invasion of Iraq was necessary and fairly well executed, though serious mistakes were made in managing the post war activities and in doing the political work necessary to allow the American public to understand what we were doing.

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