On the occasion of the publication of the paperback version of his book, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, Douglas J. Feith participated in a conference call this afternoon with a number of bloggers, including FinkelBlog.  Feith served as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy for President George W. Bush.  He worked closely with the President, Vice-President and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld in formulating US policy on Iraq and Afghanistan.

Highlights from Feith’s remarks:

• Even though the rhetoric of the Obama campaign was harsh toward the Bush administration on Guantanamo and related national security policies, now that the Obama administration is facing the realities of office, “they’re going to wind up making substantively a lot of decisions that are quite similar or even identical to the decisions that the Bush administration made.”
• Those who say that the surge should have been undertaken long before 2007 ignore the reality that a surge was simply not feasible back, say, in 2004.  It was not until after years of bitter experience that the Sunni tribal chiefs decided to renounce their functional alliance with al Qaeda, making a successful surge possible.
• Although Iraq war critics have leveled a variety of personal attacks on Feith and his book, none have attempted to refute his facts, although he explicitly challenged them in the book to do so on a variety of issues.

As the account of someone who was there at the creation of an Iraqi policy that subsequent events have cast in much more favorable light, Feith’s extensively-documented book is an invaluable resource for policy makers and historians.  Now that it is available in paperbook, let’s hope War & Decision will be more widely assigned in relevant college courses. It is certainly a compelling read for students of the period, be they in or past their university years.