Posts have been slack because I’m reviewing Douglas Feith’s War and Decision. It’s an important book, well-written yet complex as it leads the reader the bureaucracy of planning and conducting war. If nothing else, it puts to rest the notion that the war was a hasty decision based on lies.
In case you missed it, here’s the 60 Minutes interview with Feith, not an easy one, as you can imagine.
And for what it’s worth, here’s a quote in the book from former President Bill Clinton who, Feith writes, chose not to slide into historical revisionism (insert Bubba voice, just for fun):
After 9/11, let’s be fair here, if you had been President, you’d think, Well, this fellow bin Laden just turned these three airplanes full of fuel into weapons of mass destruction, right?….Well, my first responsibility now is to try everything possible to make sure this terrorist network and other terrorist networks cannot reach chemical and biological weapons or small amounts of fissle materials. I’ve got to do that.
That’s why I supported the Iraq thing. There was still a lot of stuff unaccounted for. So I thought the President had an absolute responsibility to go to the U.N. and say, ‘Look guys, after 9/11, you have got to demand that Saddam Hussein lets us finish the inspection process.” You couldn’t responsibly ignore (the possibility that) a tyrant had these stocks. I never really thought he’d (use them). What I was far more worried about was that he’d seel this stuff or give it away….When you’re the President, and your country has just been through what we had, you want everything to be accounted for.
Of course this quote is from 2004, a full four years before his wife (among others) began obscuring her support for the war during her run for the presidency.
