The recently-released Defense Department Inspector General's report on the Pentagon's prewar intelligence effort has dragged a name back into the public debate regarding the justification for the invasion of Iraq - a name we haven't heard for awhile:  Douglas Feith.  And Feith's obtuse response to the report speaks volumes about where waging war fits within his personal concerns.

In a telephone interview with The Washington Post, Feith, now a professor at Georgetown University, made the point that while his activities were characterized by the IG's report as "inappropriate" they weren't illegal.  He went on to state that what he presented in lighting the fuse of war was merely "a criticism of the consensus of the intelligence community," and in presenting it he "was not endorsing its substance."

In other words, the whole drill was an exercise in semantics - a game.  And in this game the playing field was bounded by lines between things that were technically "legal" and "illegal."  Missing from this game was any sense of the gravity and consequences of committing American forces to war.

In the end we found no WMD.  And the tie between the Baathists and al Qaida was, as the IG report states, "not a mature symbiotic relationship."  A neocon's response?  Professor Feith shrugs and tweaks his pedagogy.  After all, regardless of what he did to reverse engineer the evidence into what the Vice President wanted to hear, his efforts weren't "illegal."

So the neocons fade into the woodwork only to emerge occasionally to let us know the whole thing was a lark in the first place.  The war is no skin off Douglas Feith's tenure-protected nose.  What does that mean to the rest of us?  More importantly, what does that mean to those in harm's way, those brave American servicemembers who continue to put duty over self?

In his State of the Union address a few weeks ago, President Bush said, "Hindsight alone is not wisdom, and second-guessing is not a strategy."  True, indeed.  We are in the middle of a conflict we must not lose.  By our presence our enemies have revealed themselves in ways we did not anticipate.  To a large degree we're fighting a foe unforeseen when our forces stepped off the line of departure on March 20, 2003.

Nonetheless, it is a foe that must be defeated. But the way to victory includes a wide-eyed assessment of what got us here.  To do other than that is to perpetuate denial - a denial that in turn perpetuates the cavalier methodology employed by the likes of Douglas Feith. 

American history is littered with foreign policy missteps (to put it mildy) due to bad intel or, worse, intel that was morphed into fiction.  Admiral James Stockdale, famed Vietnam POW and Medal of Honor recipient, was a classic example of a warrior with this sort of wide-eyed approach.  Both in person and in the book he co-wrote with his wife Sybil, In Love and War, he was quite candid with his disdain for how the Johnson administration used half-truths and bogus facts to justify America's entry into the war.  (He was airborne during the supposed patrol boat attacks on two American destoyers and saw nothing of the sort.)  But he carried out his orders convinced that the North Vietnamese were his enemy - and, arguably, history has validated his motivation.  Stockdale always fought to win, even throughout his years of captivity.

American history is also littered with doctrines that were created in the wake of foreign policy failures.  The Weinberger Doctrine came after the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut.  The Albright and Powell Doctrines followed the conflict in the Balkans.  These doctrines have one theme in common:  Don't commit American forces without good reason.  It's fair to suggest that theme assumes we know the reason going in and we don't stumble upon it once the war is well underway.

Civilian control of the military exists for good reasons, but the American people should demand a reckoning, one less binary than matters separated by "inappropriate" and "illegal."  Otherwise the lessons risk going unlearned.

The Iraq War will certainly result in another doctrine; let's see that it's not the Feith Doctrine.

Related Artcle: Pentagon: Pre-War Intel not Illegal

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