Marshall on Feith on the War on Terror
Joshua Micah Marshall offers a very interesting analysis of the logic, or lack thereof, in the neocons’ conflating of Iraq with al Qaeda for War on Terra purposes: Doug Feith, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, had an OpEd…
August 8th, 2004 at 5:50 pm
I read Feith’s piece. It is short and to the point: Feith tries to justify why he and Donald Rumsfeld (and maybe a few others) were pushing to hit targets outside of Afghanistan, such as in Iraq, in the days right after Sep. 11. There are a few interesting things to pick up on:
– while Feith bemoans (like Rumsfeld) the “lack of targets” in Afghanistan, he does not claim or even suggest that the US had any intelligence of terrorist targets to be hit elsewhere
– Feith seems more concerned to use bombings to market the USA’s image as a determined superpower rather than to do actual damage to terrorists. He says he wanted to use the bombings to “show the seriousness of the U.S. military purpose to our allies as well as to our enemies”, “show the war would not be limited geographically to Afghanistan” and “highlight the global nature of the conflict”. In short, he is actually eager to do something stupid (such as pounding a random bunker in Iraq) because other countries will perk up to attention when they see us taking unjustified military actions
– Feith is very eager to frame his suggestion of carrying bombings outside of Afghanistan within Bush’s doctrine of “war, not law enforcement”. War is “global”, “diffuse”, etc—in short, war is messy, and a sure sign to show people you are fighting a war is to make a mess! Let’s get to it!
All in all I found it rather staggering to see how hitting hard terrorist targets and doing immediate damage to the Al-Qaeda network took a back seat in Feith’s mind. What we see here is mostly PR concerns, or rather anti-PR concerns as Feith tries to justify defining America’s image as a big bully. I’m not sure it’s the best way to go in the long run.