Wildly Off the Mark Posted by Shawn Brimley

It is amazing to me that these guys aren't simply going quietly into the night.  In a speech last night to the American Enterprise Institute, Douglas Feith (former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and a leading player in the Iraq fiasco) made the following points, according to the Washington Post's Tom Ricks:

1. The decision to carry out "a lengthy occupation was, I believe, the single biggest mistake the United States made in Iraq;" and
2. On the decision to throw tens of thousands of Iraqi military personnel out of work, Feith said that, "some of the problems resulted from implementation, rather than the policy itself."

This is part of an emerging neo-con narrative in which they will assert that the policy (re: neo-cons) of invading Iraq was brilliant but the implementors (re: the military) are at fault for grabbing defeat from the jaws of victory. 

But perhaps the biggest sick joke of the night was audience-member Paul Wolfowitz's response after the speech, according to Ricks:

After Feith's talk, Wolfowitz commented that he thought it was "pretty much on the mark."

This coming from a guy who mocked former Army Chief-of-Staff General Eric Shinseki's estimate that it would take several hundred thousand troops to secure Iraq by saying it was "wildly off the mark." 

Depressing.

Comments

[robertdfeinman]

One of the characteristics of ideologues is that their faith is unshakable. What this means in practice is that when something goes wrong that illustrates the fallacies of their ideas they cannot accept this conclusion.

All failures are thus reframed as being someone's fault. Lost wars (Korea, Vietnam) were because the military wasn't aggressive enough or was hampered by specific people in government (or even by protesters in the general public).

The same dynamic is at work in this case. Now the neo-cons are turning on one another, but it quite likely that there will be finger pointing later on that will include Bush and Cheney. It's a variation on the "who lost China" discussions that occurred during the 1950's.

The finger pointing is much further along in the economic sphere. The total failure of "trickle down" economics to produce the claimed economic growth in now being attributed to improper implementation. Those in this camp will not accept the fact that the theory is without any empirical backing and are looking for scapegoats.

There is some psychological data on behavior by ideologues. The principle conclusions have to do with their inability to accept data which contradicts their views and their ability to hold contradictory ideas simultaneously.

Psychologist Robert Altemeyer has a nice, free, online book which summarizes his 40+ years of research on the topic. If you want to understand the psychological characteristics of these people have a look:

http://theauthoritarians.com/

The thing to know is that you can never win an argument with such people by presenting facts and logical arguments. They are incapable of changing their beliefs.

[Don Bacon]

This is just more evidence that there is little difference between the Repubs and the Dems, the two branches of the War Party. The Dems have been saying all along that the Iraq invasion wasn't the problem, the implementation was. The US should have used more troops, had more alliances, shouldn't have disbanded the Iraq army, etc.

Recall the 2004 presidential campaign when George Bush pressed John "The Real Deal" Kerry to clarify his Iraq position?

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On Friday, Bush challenged Kerry to answer whether he would support the war "knowing what we know now" about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction that U.S. and British officials were certain were there.

In response, Kerry said: "Yes, I would have voted for the authority. I believe it was the right authority for a president to have."

But Kerry has charged that the president and his advisers badly mishandled the war.

"I believe if you do the statesmanship properly, I believe if you do the kind of alliance-building that is available to us, that it is appropriate to have a goal of reducing our troops" by August 2005, Kerry told reporters during a news briefing from the edge of the Grand Canyon.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52839-2004Aug9.html

[Mike M.]

Don Bacon makes a great point -- we have to resist the phony notion that the war in Iraq was rational or a defensible position in 2002 or 2003. It wasn't. It was the wrong thing to do, not just something done the wrong way.

[Greg Sanders]

Feith statement reminds me of the early talk in the U.S. backed invasion of Somalia by Ethiopia. Ethiopia was going to go in, throw out the Islamic Courts Union, and get out fast. Not surprisingly, Ethiopia is still there.

I was initially too open to the war and have subsequently come around to the idea that it was a clear mistake regardless of implementation. That said, there was a series of implementation mistakes that were truly horrendous. Feith seems to have learned that the war itself was a mistake or what are biggest mistakes were in executing the war. In short, the judgment of him classically attributed to Tommy Franks seems quite solid.