As the United States and the
world look back over the events of the past three years,
events triggered by the terrorist attacks of September
11, 2001, it is worth taking a close look at the under
secretary of defense for policy, one of the architects
of the "war on terror" and the invasion of Iraq.
Douglas Feith is the No 3 civilian in the George
W Bush administration's Department of Defense (DoD),
under Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Under
Secretary for Policy Feith had previously served in the
administration of the late president Ronald Reagan,
starting off as Middle East specialist at the National
Security Council (1981-82) and then transferring to the
DoD, where he spent two years as staff lawyer for
assistant defense secretary Richard Perle. In 1984 Feith
advanced to become deputy assistant secretary of defense
for negotiations policy. Feith and Perle were among the
leading advocates of a policy to build closer US
military and diplomatic ties with Turkey and to increase
military ties between Turkey and Israel.
Feith
left the DoD in mid-1986 to found the Feith & Zell
law firm, based initially in Israel, whose clients
included major military contractor Northrup Grumman. In
1989, Feith established another company, International
Advisors Inc, which provided lobbying services to
foreign clients, including Turkey.
Feith's
private business dealings raised eyebrows in Washington.
In 1999, his firm Feith & Zell formed an alliance
with the Israel-based Zell, Goldberg & Co, which
resulted in the creation of the Fandz International Law
Group. According to Fandz' website, the law group "has
recently established a task force dealing with issues
and opportunities relating to the recently ended war
with Iraq and is assisting regional construction and
logistics firms to collaborate with contractors from the
United States and other coalition countries in
implementing infrastructure and other reconstruction
projects in Iraq." Remarked Washington Post columnist Al
Kamen, "Interested parties can reach [Fandz] through its
website, at www.fandz.com. Fandz.com? Hmmm. Rings a
bell. Oh, yes, that was the website of the Washington
law firm of Feith & Zell, PC, as in Douglas Feith
[the] under secretary of defense for policy and head of
- what else? - reconstruction matters in Iraq. It would
be impossible indeed to overestimate how perfect ZGC
would be in 'assisting American companies in their
relations with the United States government in
connection with Iraqi reconstruction projects'." A
vocal advocate of US intervention in the Middle East and
for the hardline policies of the Likud Party in Israel,
Feith has been involved in or overseen the activities of
two controversial Pentagon operations - the Defense
Policy Board, whose former head Richard Perle resigned
after concerns arose about conflicts of interest between
his board duties and business dealings, and the Office
of Special Plans (OSP), which allegedly misrepresented
intelligence on Iraq to support administration policies.
Feith's office not only housed the Office of Special
Plans and other special intelligence operations
associated with the Near East and South Asia (NESA)
office and the Office of Northern Gulf Affairs but also
the office of Under Secretary of Defense for
Intelligence Stephen Cambone, who directed military
policy on interrogations of the Guantanamo Bay detainees
and then arranged for the transfer of the base's
commanding officer, Major-General Geoffrey Miller, to
the Abu Ghraib prison in an effort to extract more
information from Iraqi prisoners.
Feith and
Israel Feith cannot be described by just one
label. He is a longtime militarist, a neo-conservative,
and a right-wing Zionist. According to Bob Woodward's
book Plan of Attack, Feith was described by the
military commander who led the Iraq invasion, General
Tommie Franks, as "the f---ing stupidest guy on the face
of the Earth", referring to the bad intelligence fed to
the military about Iraq and the extent of possible
resistance to a US invasion.
Feith also has a
reputation as a prolific writer, having published
articles on international law and on foreign and defense
policy in the New York Times, the Washington Times, the
Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Commentary,
and The New Republic.
His militarism - and close
ties with the military-industrial complex - were evident
in his policy work in the Pentagon working with Perle in
the 1980s and then part of the Vulcans along with
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Vice President Richard Cheney in
the Bush II administration; his work as a corporate
lobbyist in the 1990s for Northrup Grumman along other
military contractors; and his prominent role in the
Center for Security Policy and in the Jewish Institute
for National Security Affairs (JINSA). His political
orientation is distinctly neo-conservative, as evident
in his affiliations with such groups as the Middle East
Forum, Center for Security Policy, and Institute for
Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS).
Feith served as chairman of the board of
directors of the Center for Security Policy, a policy
institute that promotes higher military budgets, missile
defense systems, space weapons programs, and hardline
policies in the Middle East and East Asia. CSP was
founded in 1988 by Frank Gaffney, a fellow neo-con and,
like Feith, a former DoD official in the Reagan
administration. Feith helped Gaffney organize CSP's
large advisory board, which includes leading neo-cons,
arms lobbyists, and the leading congressional members
linked to the military-industrial complex. Feith has
also served as an adviser to the Jewish Institute for
National Security Affairs, which aims to foster closer
working relationships between the Israeli military, the
US military, the Pentagon, and military contractors in
both countries.
Feith has supported lobbying
efforts aimed at persuading the US to drop out of
treaties and arms control agreements. Wrote one
journalist in The Nation, "Largely ignored or derided at
the time, a 1995 [Center for Security Policy -CSP] memo
co-written by Douglas Feith holding that the United
States should withdraw from the ABM [Anti-Ballistic
Missile] Treaty has essentially become policy, as have
other CSP reports opposing the Comprehensive Test Ban
Treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention and the
International Criminal Court."
Feith is a
self-proclaimed Zionist - not a Labor Zionist but a
right-wing Zionist close to the Likud Party and the
Zionist Organization of America.
In the 1990s,
Feith was an outspoken critic of the Middle East
policies of both the Bush and Bill Clinton
administrations that he said were based on the faulty
"peace now" and "land for peace" policy frameworks.
Instead, he called for a "peace through strength" agenda
for Israel and the US - invoking a phrase promoted by
the neo-conservatives since the mid-1970s, which became
the slogan of the Center for Security Policy.
The Middle East Information Center described
Feith as an "ideologue with an extreme anti-Arab bias",
remarking that "during the Clinton years, Feith
continued to oppose any agreement negotiated between the
Israelis and Palestinians: Oslo, Hebron and Wye". Feith
"defined Oslo as 'one-sided Israeli concessions,
inflated Palestinian expectations, broken Palestinian
solemn understandings, Palestinian violence ... and
American rewards for Palestinian recalcitrance'."
In 1991, Feith, together with Gaffney, addressed
the National Leadership Conference of the State of
Israel Organization. In Feith's view, it was foolish for
the US government and Israel to negotiate with the
Palestinians over issues of land given that contrasting
principles - not differences over occupied lands -
fueled the Israeli-Arab conflict. He noted that, even
before Israel was established, Western political leaders
mistakenly thought that "the vast territories newly made
available for the fulfillment of Arab ambitions for
independence would make it easier to win acceptance
within the region of a Jewish state in Palestine".
According to Feith, no matter what they say publicly or
at the negotiating table, the Palestinians have always
rejected the principle of legitimacy, namely "the
legitimacy of Zionist claims to a Jewish National
Homeland in the Land of Israel". Criticizing the George
H W Bush administration's attempt to broker a land for
peace deal, Feith warned, "If Western statesmen openly
recognized the problem as a clash of principles, they
would not be able to market hope through the launching
of peace initiatives."
In 1997 the Zionist
Organization of America (ZOA) honored Dalck Feith and
Douglas Feith at its annual dinner. It described the
Feiths as "noted Jewish philanthropists and pro-Israel
activists". The father was awarded the group's special
Centennial Award "for his lifetime of service to Israel
and the Jewish people", while Douglas received the
"prestigious Louis D Brandeis Award".
Dalck
Feith was a militant in Betar, a Zionist youth movement
founded by Ze'ev Jabotinsky, an admirer of Italian
fascist Benito Mussolini. Betar, whose members wore
dark-brown uniforms and spouted militaristic slogans
modeled after other fascistic movements, was associated
with the Revisionist Movement, which evolved in Poland
to become the Herut Party, which later became the Likud
Party.
In 1999 Douglas Feith wrote an essay for
a book titled The Dangers of a Palestinian State,
which was published by ZOA. Also in 1999, Feith spoke to
a 150-member ZOA lobbying mission to Congress that
called, among other things, for "US action against
Palestinian Arab killers of Americans" and for moving
the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The ZOA
lobbying group also criticized the Clinton
administration for its "refusal to criticize illegal
Palestinian Arab construction in Jerusalem and the
territories, which is far more extensive than Israeli
construction there".
Initially, Feith strongly
supported the Benjamin Netanyahu government controlled
by the Likud Party. Immediately before Netanyahu took
office, Feith in a Washington Times op-ed wrote: "His
Likud Party is in general about as radical as our
Republican Party. Mr Netanyahu favors diplomatic,
defense, and economic policies for Israel similar in
principal to the kind of policies that Reaganites
favored (and favor) for the United States." In the
opinion piece, Feith echoed the Likud position on peace
negotiations and occupied territories. According to
Feith, "Israel is unlikely over time to retain control
over pieces of territory unless its people actually live
there. Supporters of settlements reason: If Israelis do
not settle an area in the territories, Israel will
eventually be forced to relinquish it. If it
relinquishes the territories generally, its security
will be undermined and peace therefore will not be
possible."
Feith wrote that the Likud Party's
policies were guided by the "peace-through-strength
principle". Feith took the opportunity of the op-ed to
explain that both Israel and the US would benefit from a
strong commitment to missile defense. According to
Feith, Israel would directly benefit from the
installation of a sea-based, wide-area missile defense
system, which would supplement Israel's own national
missile defense system that the US helped develop.
Noting the symbiosis of US and Israeli interests, Feith
wrote that Netanyahu knew that "if he encourages
Israel's friends in Congress to support such programs,
he will create much goodwill with the broad-based forces
in the United States, led by the top Republicans in
Congress, that deem missile defense the gravest US
military deficiency". Feith didn't see fit to mention
that, along with Israel, the main beneficiary of such a
global missile defense system would be military
contractors such as the ones he represented in his law
firm, including Northrup Grumman.
Feith is also
well known for his participation - along with
neo-conservative bigwigs Richard Perle and David Wurmser
- in a 1996 study organized by the Israel-based
Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies,
which urged scrapping the then-ongoing peace process.
The study, titled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for
Securing the Realm", advised prime minister-elect
Netanyahu "to work closely with Turkey and Jordan to
contain, destabilize, and roll back" regional threats,
help overthrow Saddam Hussein, and strike "Syrian
military targets in Lebanon" and possibly in Syria
proper.
Three of the six authors of the report -
Perle (who was IASPS team leader), Wurmser and Feith -
helped set the Middle East strategy, including strong
support for current Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's
hardline policies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
in the Bush II administration. Perle chaired the DoD's
Defense Policy Board, Feith became under secretary of
defense for policy, and Wurmser became Vice President
Cheney's top Middle East adviser after leaving the State
Department, where he had worked under Under Secretary of
State for Arms Control John Bolton.
Other
members of the IASPS study group on "A New Israeli
Strategy Toward 2000" included James Colbert of the
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, Meyrav
Wurmser of the Middle East Media Research Institute
(MEMRI), and Jonathan Torop of the Washington Institute
for Near East Policy, a neo-conservative think-tank
founded by a director of the American Israeli Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC). At the time the report was
published, Wurmser was an associate of IASPS.
As
guiding principles for a new framework of Israeli-US
policy in the Middle East, the report advocated that the
new Likud government do the following:
Change the nature of its relations with the
Palestinians, including upholding the right of hot
pursuit for self-defense into all Palestinian areas and
nurturing alternatives to Yasser Arafat's exclusive grip
on Palestinian society.
Forge a new basis for relations with the US -
stressing self-reliance, maturity, strategic cooperation
on areas of mutual concern, and furthering values
inherent to the West.
Israel has the opportunity to make a clean break; it
can forge a peace process and strategy based on an
entirely new intellectual foundation, one that restores
strategic initiative and provides the nation the room to
engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism, the
starting point of which must be economic reform.
By 1997, Feith and other right-wing Zionists in
the US were expressing their disappointment that the
Netanyahu government had not "dismantled the Oslo
process", as Feith wrote in Commentary, the
neo-conservative magazine of the American Jewish
Committee. Feith then proceeded to outline a radical
break with what he characterized as the "peace now"
framework of negotiations. Instead, Feith recommended
that Netanyahu fulfill his "peace through strength"
campaign promise. "Repudiating Oslo would compel Israel,
first and foremost, to undo the grossest of the errors
inherent in the accords: the arming of scores of
thousands of PA [Palestinian Authority] 'policemen'."
Feith asserted that the "PA's security force has
succeeded primarily in aggravating Israel's terrorism
problem". What is more, Feith argued for Israel "to
deflate expectations of imminent peace" and to "preach
sobriety and defense". It was not until a new Likud
government was formed under Sharon and when Feith and
other Zionists such as Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams and
Michael Rubin, together with militarists such as
Rumsfeld and Cheney, took over control of Middle East
policy during the Bush II administration that Israel,
supported by the US, made a "clean break" from the Oslo
framework.
Typical of other neo-conservatives,
Feith in public statements has not made reference to his
own Zionist convictions. Rather in congressional
testimony and in op-eds in major media, Feith has
instead argued that US policy in the Middle East should
be guided by concerns about human rights and democracy.
Israel, according to Feith, should never enter into
good-faith negotiations with Arab countries or the PA
because they are not democratic. Moreover, human-rights
violations in Syria, Iran and Iraq justify aggressive US
and Israeli policies aimed at ousting undemocratic and
repressive regimes. Israeli occupations are justified in
the name of ensuring the national security of democratic
Israel.
Intelligence operations and
scandals Feith is no stranger to intelligence
scandals. In 1982 he left the National Security Council
under the shadow of a Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) probe of Reagan administration officials suspected
of passing intelligence information to Israel. During
the Bush II administration, investigative reports by
Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker focused public attention
on the Office of Special Plans that came under Feith's
supervision.
In the days after the September 11
terrorist attacks, Feith and Wolfowitz started cooking
intelligence to meet the needs of the radically new
foreign and military policy that included regime change
in Iraq as its top priority.
One might have
thought that the priority for a special intelligence
would have been to determine the whereabouts of the
terrorist network that had just attacked the homeland.
But Wolfowitz and Feith, working closely with Rumsfeld
and Cheney, had other intelligence priorities. This
loosely organized team soon became the Office of Special
Plans directed by Abram Shulksy, formerly of RAND and
the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC). The
objective of this closet intelligence team, according to
Rumsfeld, was to "search for information on Iraq's
hostile intentions or links to terrorists". OSP's
mission was to create intelligence that the Pentagon and
vice president could use to press their case for an Iraq
invasion with the president and Congress.
About
the same time, the Pentagon took the first steps toward
launching a counterintelligence operation called the
Office of Strategic Intelligence to support the emerging
security doctrine of preventive war. But this shadowy
office, whose very purpose was to create propaganda and
to counter information coming out of Iraq, was quickly
disbanded. Congressional members expressed their concern
that a counterintelligence office would not limit itself
to discrediting the intelligence of US adversaries. Such
a secret counterintelligence office, critics warned,
either intentionally or inadvertently might spread
disinformation to the US public and policy community as
part of the buildup to the planned invasion.
Feith oversaw these efforts to provide the type
of "strategic intelligence" needed to drive this policy
agenda. As the Pentagon's top policy official in Middle
East affairs, Feith had oversight authority of the DoD's
Near East and South Asia bureau (NESA). That office came
under the direct supervision of William Luti, a retired
navy officer who is a Newt Gingrich protege and who has
long advocated a US military invasion of Iraq.
The OSP worked closely with Ahmad Chalabi and
others from the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an
expatriate group promoted by the neo-conservatives to
replace the Saddam regime once US troops were in
Baghdad. Chalabi assured the Pentagon that a US invasion
would be supported by widespread Iraqi resistance,
leading to claims by top administration officials and
neo-con pundits that the invasion would be a "cakewalk".
The OSP also relied on intelligence flows about Iraq
from a rump unit established in the offices of Sharon -
who like Chalabi was a proponent of a US military
invasion and had close relations with neo-cons such as
Wolfowitz and Feith. Feith became embroiled in a new
intelligence scandal in late August when it was reported
that the FBI had for the past two years been
investigating intelligence leaks to Israel from the
Pentagon. The Pentagon official named in the media
reports is Lawrence Franklin, who was brought into the
Office of Special Plans from the Defense Intelligence
Agency. Franklin, who had served in the military
attache's office in the US Embassy in Tel Aviv in the
late 1990s as a colonel in the Air Force Reserve, is
suspected of passing classified information about Iran
to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee and
Israel. Fellow neo-con and Franklin's friend Michael
Ledeen called the allegations against Franklin
"nonsensical". The FBI is also investigating whether
Franklin and other DoD officials passed classified
information to Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress.
According to one neo-con interviewed by the Washington
Post, "This is part of a civil war with the
administration, a basic dislike between the old CIA and
the neo-conservatives."
This article is used
by permission of the Interhemispheric Resource
Center (all rights reserved). It first
appeared on Rightweb.
Portrait of a
neo-con
