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JWisdom.com: The (Jewish) Dating Game with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (8 minutes)
Nov. 17, 2009
Steven Emerson: How Does the 4th Amendment Impact Terror Finance Investigations?
JWisdom.com: If Frank Sinatra married Edith Piaf with Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein (2 minutes) Life lessons from what would be regarded as the most inappropriate lyrics ever sung
Nov. 16, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : When borrowing is stealing
JWisdom.com: Deconstructing faith with Rabbi Warren Goldstein (9 minutes)
Nov. 13, 2009
JWisdom.com Sarah's subjective reality with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 6 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick: Obama's failure, Netanyahu's opportunity
Nov. 12, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet By Marialisa Calta : A sweet sweet potato treat
JWisdom.com Does God get tired? with Rabbi Harvey Belovski ( 5 minutes)
Nov. 11, 2009
Rabbi Avi Shafran: Jews and money: When anti-Semitism isn't
JWisdom.com Marriages are not made in Heaven with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (VERY fast 15 minutes)
Nov. 10, 2009
Michael Doyle: Author of book exposing CAIR ordered to remove supporting documents from Web
JWisdom.com If the creation so loudly shouts the existence of the Creator, why aren't more people believers? with Rabbi Naftali Brawer (9 minutes)
Nov. 9, 2009
Mark Steyn: Shooter exposes hole in U.S. terror strategy
JWisdom.com It's never too late to have a happy childhood with Sarah Chana Radcliffe (5 minutes)
Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review May 14, 2008 / 9 Iyar 5768

Academic pariahs

By Jack Kelly

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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Little better illustrates the sorry state of academia today than the fact that William Ayres is a respected figure, but Douglas Feith is a pariah.


William Ayres is a professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He is also an unrepentant domestic terrorist associated with the Weatherman group, which was responsible for bombings, robberies and murders in the early 1970s. In an interview with the New York Times published, ironically, on Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Ayres said he regretted not setting more bombs. Also that year, he stomped on the American flag for a photo published in Chicago magazine.


About the time Mr. Ayres was wiping his feet on the Stars and Stripes, Mr. Feith became the Undersecretary for Policy in the Defense Department. After leaving DoD in 2005, he became a visiting professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service.


Georgetown announced in April that it will not renew Mr. Feith's contract, despite the fact that the evaluations his students gave him were "nothing short of exemplary," according Robert Galluci, dean of the School of Foreign Service.


Many on the Georgetown faculty opposed Mr. Feith's hiring because of his role in planning the Iraq war. One of those wasn't Mr. Galluci, a top diplomat in the Clinton administration, who wrote a dust jacket blurb for Mr. Feith's new book, "War and Decision."



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The memoirs of public officials tend to consist mostly of buttocks covering and score settling, like the books by former CIA Director George Tenet, former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks, and Ambassador Paul Bremer, former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority.


Mr. Feith's memoir contains very little rancor, which is remarkable, considering what others — including the three worthies mentioned above — have had to say about him.


To an extraordinary degree for books of this type, he admits errors by himself and by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who chose him for the Pentagon's number three job.


Most important, Mr. Feith provides an immense amount of documentation to support the points he gently makes. There are 140 pages of notes in "War and Decision," and Mr. Feith has posted on his Web site links to all the documents which he cites.


Professor Daniel Byman, director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown, joked that his Web site will strike fear into the hearts of professors across America, because it makes it so easy to check footnotes. Mr. Feith is out to set the record straight, not to settle scores.


That he does so effectively may explain why the Washington Post has yet to review his book, though he is the most senior Defense department official to write about the march to war. Books by, among others, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward (State of Denial) and Tom Ricks (Fiasco), based in large part on self serving leaks from opponents of administration policy, asserted that "neocons" within the Department of Defense politicized intelligence to build a case for war to impose democracy on Iraq.


It will come as a surprise to readers of those books to learn the most comprehensive warning of the things that could go wrong in Iraq came not from the State Department or the CIA, but from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and that it was the State Department, not DoD, which favored a U.S. occupation of Iraq rather than a quick transfer of power to Iraqis.


"The press wrote the first draft of the Bush administration and the War on Terror, but Feith's book relegates it to the recycling bin," wrote former Pentagon official Lawrence Di Rita.


The great failure was not the politicization of intelligence, but the absence of it, Mr. Feith makes clear. The CIA had little information on Iraq and concealed its lack of sources from policymakers.


The CIA's most publicized failure was its insistence that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. But the CIA also predicted there would be mass defections from the Iraqi army when the U.S. invaded (there weren't); that the army would remain intact at war's end (it didn't), and that Iraqis would not accept political leadership from exiles (they did). The CIA also had no clue Saddam had laid plans for an insurgency.


People who are interested in the facts about the march to war will give Mr. Feith's book a careful read. Those who prefer to cling to a discredited narrative will, like the Georgetown faculty, stick their fingers in their ears and chant "nyah, nyah nyah."

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JWR contributor Jack Kelly, a former Marine and Green Beret, was a deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. Comment by clicking here.

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