Feith Resigns Under Pressure of Investigations
Douglas Feith, the number three man at the
Pentagon who went there from the pro-Likud
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs
(JINSA) and the
Project for a New American Century, will leave
the Pentagon as of this summer.
Feith's office is the subject of an FBI
investigation as well as two Congressional investigations,
one by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Feith helped set up an
Office of Special Plans in the Near East and South Asia
desk of the Pentagon to cherry-pick Iraq intelligence and
create a case for Iraq having weapons of mass destruction and having operational
links with al-Qaeda. At one point, contrary to Federal law, Feith's people
actually briefed officials in the Executive on intelligence. Feith sent
David Wurmser from the Office of Special
Plans, once its work was well under way, over to the staff of Vice President
Dick Cheney, so that he could stove pipe OSP analyses into the VP's office and
thence directly to the president, doing an end run around the CIA and the State
Department Intelligence and Research division.
Having a Likudnik as the
number three man in the Pentagon is a nightmare for American national security,
since Feith could never be trusted to put US interests over those of Ariel
Sharon. In the build-up to the Iraq War, Feith had a phalanx of Israeli generals
visiting him in the Pentagon and ignored post-9/11 requirements that they sign
in. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was a
vocal advocate of a US war against Iraq, who
"put pressure" on Washington about it. (If Sharon wanted a war against Iraq, why
didn't he fight it himself instead of pushing it off on American boys?)
Feith has been questioned by the FBI in relation to the passing by one
of his employees of confidential Pentagon documents to the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee, which in turn passed them to the Israeli embassy. The
Senate Intelligence Committee is also investigating Feith. There seems little
doubt that he operated in the Pentagon in such a way as to produce false and
misleading "intelligence," that he created an entirely false impression of Iraqi
weapons capabilities and ties to al-Qaeda, and that he is among the chief
facilitators of the US war in Iraq.
Feith is clearly resigning ahead of
the possible breaking of major scandals concerning his tenure at the Department
of Defense, which is among the more disgraceful cases of the misleading of the
American people in American history.
There are several downsides to
Feith's departure, as welcome as it is for anyone who cares about US security in
particular. The first is that now we probably have to see him forever on cable
news channels as one of those dreary neocon talking heads flogged by the
American Enterprise Institute, a far rightwing "think tank" funded by cranky
rich people to obscure the truth. Another is that his departure now may help
keep Bush from being blamed for his shady dealings in intelligence "analysis."
It is important to note that what is objectionable about Feith is a) his
playing fast and loose with the truth, producing poor intelligence analysis that
has been shown to be completely false and b) his doing so on behalf of not only
American nationalist aspirations but also on behalf of a non-American political
party, the Likud coalition of Israel, which desired to destroy the Oslo peace
process initiated by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (and which was therefore on
the same side of this issue as the fanatic who assassinated Rabin). There is no
objection to Americans having multiple identities or love for more than one
country. Someone of Serbian heritage would make a perfectly good Pentagon
administrator. But you wouldn't want a vehement supporter of Slobodon Milosevic
as the number three man in the Pentagon. It is ideological dual loyalty that is
dangerous. Mere sentiment based on multiple ethnic identities is not dual
loyalty, and hyphenated Americans mostly have other countries they wish well
(and rightly so).
It is also important to underline that only a small
minority of American Jews support the Likud Party or its policies, and that a
majority of Jewish Americans opposed the Iraq war. In short, the problematic
nature of Feith's tenure at the Department of Defense must not be made an excuse
for any kind of bigotry.