I’ll be on the radiohere tonight at 6 p.m. CST, to talk about Feith’s book and Special Plans, and in preparation for that, I poured a generous dose of whiskey into my coffee and listened toFeith on Hannity’s show, a bit generously hosted by Spocko’s Brain.
Feith essentially said — during the occasional break in Hannity’s usual schtick of “liberals don’t know the history of the world, I DO!!!!” — that Bush screwed up and trusted the CIA when it came to WMD. It was a repeat of a claim he made on CNN here:
He also went into a routine about how he never held with the idea of creating democracy in Iraq, a direct contradiction of what David Neiwert came up with in the piece we published in Special Plans about the Bush Doctrine.According to Feith, handing Iraq over to the exiles and Chalabi (he’s careful not to use the name on Hannity, you’ll notice) was the way to go, and “that was the view that prevailed at State, lost at the White House but won in Baghdad.” In other words, don’t look at Rumsfeld and me, look at Colin Powell. Yeah. Good luck with that line.
It doesn’t really surprise me that Hannity doesn’t ask the natural follow-up, which is, “Doug, you were at the Pentagon until August 8, 2005. By then the US had had, in your mind, the predicted disastrous occupation government in Iraq for more than a year. Yet you sat back and watched instead of quitting and speaking up then. Why?”
I suspect the answer would involve a lot of squirming, which is why the question never even occurred to Hannity.
In addition, Feith said that 9/11 focused Americans on the idea that countries could have weapons of mass destruction. At which point I turned the sound off lest the screaming scare the neighbors. As I recall, 9/11 focused Americans on anthrax and airplanes, with a sideline into how we could lay hands on some red-white-and-blue body paint and beat the shit out of Sikh cab drivers. WMDs weren’t our main concern until Dick Cheney started talking about them.
I don’t expect intellectual honesty from this crowd, really, but I do expect some basic understanding of what went on while they were, you know, engaged in government service. Jesus.
A.