The WaPo writes a dismissive article today on the new book written by Douglas Feith:
In the first insider account of Pentagon decision-making on Iraq, one of the key architects of the war blasts former secretary of state Colin Powell, the CIA, retired Gen. Tommy R. Franks and former Iraq occupation chief L. Paul Bremer for mishandling the run-up to the invasion and the subsequent occupation of the country.
Douglas J. Feith, in a massive score-settling work, portrays an intelligence community and a State Department that repeatedly undermined plans he developed as undersecretary of defense for policy and conspired to undercut President Bush’s policies.
Among the disclosures made by Feith in “War and Decision,” scheduled for release next month by HarperCollins, is Bush’s declaration, at a Dec. 18, 2002, National Security Council meeting, that “war is inevitable.” The statement came weeks before U.N. weapons inspectors reported their initial findings on Iraq and months before Bush delivered an ultimatum to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Feith, who says he took notes at the meeting, registered it as a “momentous comment.” Read the rest of this entry »
A great section of author Kenneth Timmerman’s new book Shadow Warriors: The Untold Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender
is the section about a supposed failing of the Bush administration. That failing being the fact that Bush didn’t purge the CIA and other segments of the government of liberal influences as Clinton did of conservative influences when he came in. Who was at fault for this?
Carl Levin understood that no president could govern effectively without putting his own highly skilled political appointees into key government positions. Although their numbers were small – the congressional “Plum Book” that was published every time a new president came into office listed just 7,000 in the year 2000 – they were critical. These were the men and women who gave direction to the unwieldy federal bureaucracy. Effective political appointees were essential for any president to transform his political vision into action. Without them, a president was like a cork bobbing in the ocean, swept by the wind and the currents. Read the rest of this entry »
Shadow Warriors: The Untold Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender, a book by Kenneth Timmerman, is chock full of facts on how various people within our State Department and Intelligence agencies undermined the war. As I did with The Looming Tower I am going to take excerpts from the book for the readers to check out and digest. The first one being about those sixteen words and the Niger deal. You know those words. Tenet wrote in his book, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA
:
Later some would allege that this handful of words was critical to the decision that led the nation to war. Contemporaneous evidence doesn’t support that, but just try convincing people of that today.
But as Timmerman notes:
Read the rest of this entry »
