Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Thursday, January 27, 2005

SELF-DEFENESTRATING DOUG

...on balance, it's probably a good thing that Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of
Defense for policy, has decided to hit the silk and leave his position in the Defense Department. As a major player in the run-up to the Iraqi invasion, he may not have been the head designer of this generation's Viet Nam, but he most certainly was one of the chief mechanics who bolted this evil monstrosity together. All the right words are being said over his departure (and, given the sources, they may well even be heartfelt):

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld praised Feith, (saying)he would be missed.

Feith "is creative, well organized and energetic, and he has earned the respect of civilian and military leaders across the government," Rumsfeld said in a statement.

...well, 'respect' may be too strong a word in some cases, but he certainly did make an impression on some military leaders, such as Tommy Frank, recently retired Commander of Southern Command and former commander of US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq:

"I have to deal with the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth almost every day."

...so Doug Feith gets to saunter away to lucrative private life, after hammering together a poisonous mixture of misstatements, misrepresentations, half-truths, and fables to engineer Gee Dub's Grand Iraqi Adventure, subsequent to which he did a major portion of the heavy lifting in post-conquest planning that stands as a stark icon to absolute perfection in incompetence. The darkly grim irony in all of this is that, while Feith moseys off into this personal glimmering sunset, tens of thousands of common folk - butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, the guy down the street - found themselves federalized into full-time combat area duty as National Guard and Reserve members, jerked away from their jobs and families for far longer than they ever could have realistically imagined, while thousands of others were held in or called back to military service under stop-loss provisions when they thought their military commitment was about to be or had been completed. They can't look up one day from their MRE lunch and decide "for family and personal reasons" that they would like to leave this particular branch of government service. As time goes by, in fact, suggestions are growing stronger that the previously understood commitment of maximum 24-month in-service tours may get jiggered around by the Pentagon to become virtually indefinite, stipulating only a break between overseas tours rather than an upper limit (as is currently the case)...

...Doug Feith leaves his own ugly share of the grim neocon legacy derived from this most recent spin in Federal service. What final shape his statue gets hammered into is yet to be determined by forthcoming events in Iraq, but the fact remains that there is plenty of blood-red ink on the ledger tracking the costs in treasure, bodies, and lives incurred in the prosecution of this long-sought neocon political science experiment in the Middle East, at least in part as a result of his actions in the Defense Department. Maybe the most just course of action would be to stop/loss Feith and make him stick around and see this thing through to the end, to be there to share in whatever rewards come from the outcome...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:22 AM

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