Douglas Feith
Posted at 9:45am on May 13, 2008 Reading War and Decision: Part One
Chapters 1-3: The First Days
By Mark I
From its very first pages, War and Decision, Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, by former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith, takes the conventional wisdom about the war on terror and throws it out the window. Nothing, literally nothing you know about the way that the Bush Administration planned, decided, and executed the United States’ strategy for fighting and ultimately winning the war can stand up to the scrutiny imposed by this consequential book. In twenty years, when historians start to write a dispassionate history of the Bush Administration and its actions, they would do well to start with Feith’s careful, detailed, and surprising account of the issues, decisions, mistakes, and triumphs that America experienced in the early stages of its war against fundamentalist Islamic extremists.
Throughout her history, America has been fortunate to have great leaders at decisive times: George Washington and the Founders; Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War; Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression and World War II; Ronald Reagan after the decline of the 1970s. America’s democracy, by design or by Providence, always seems to produce a man for his times to steer the nation through turbulence. In the case of the war on terrorism, there was not so much one man--although George W. Bush will ultimately be judged kindly by history for his principled leadership--as there was a particularly important plane trip. On the day after September 11th, 2001, when America had been brought low from the skies by hijacked airplanes used as weapons, it is both ironic and entirely fitting that the germ of the battle plan that would ultimately bring the terrorists to their knees, would begin to take shape in the belly of a military cargo plane en route from Europe to Andrews Air Force Base.
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Posted at 4:53pm on Apr. 25, 2008 A Conference Call With Douglas Feith
By Pejman Yousefzadeh
I had the opportunity to be on a call for about an hour with former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith, whose book, War and Decision has now come out. Feith spent the time talking about his book and the observations he makes in it.
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