Life in a Neocon's Parallel Universe

Douglas J. Feith's new book War and Decision. Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism is an old-fashioned morality tale written by a man with little discernible moral sense or any real concern for the truth.

In a nutshell, Feith's story resembles a 1930s cowboy movie. In the white hats are Feith, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and such of their retainers as Zalmay Khalilzad, John Bolton, Victor Davis Hanson, and R. James Woolsey. Here, according to Feith, is a team that exists only to support the president by considering all issues from every angle [p. 334] and which refuses to gain political advantage by leaking to the media. [pp.250-252] In the black hats are all those who are blind to the pure motives and sage brilliance of what Feith calls "Rumsfeld's team." The hats of the State Department and the CIA in this movie are particularly black because officials from both undermined the president and betrayed their country by disagreeing with Rumsfeld's team.

Feith's horse-opera-like script will be familiar to all who read this book, and it should have had a happy ending except for the fact that Feith, like all neoconservatives, lives in a parallel universe where he defines reality and only his ideas are valid, pure, and good for America. As a result, and despite 528 pages of text, Feith unwittingly explains how he and Rumsfeld's team brought America unmitigated disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq. He also shows how delusional the Bush administration is in its day-to-day modus operandi; to paraphrase a Celtic warrior's words about the Romans, the Bush administration creates catastrophes for America and calls them successes.