- Misconceptions and the Facts
- 1 - Hell-bent on war?
- 2 - Manipulated intelligence?
- 3 - Spreading democracy?
- 4 - War would be easy?
- 5 - State Department plan?
- 6 - No Post-War Plan?
- 7 - Anoint Chalabi?
- 8 - Nothing was found?
- 9 - WMD Focus?
- 10 - Documents: Post-War Planning for Iraq
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- About Douglas J. Feith
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Misconception 3
Was the goal of regime change in Iraq simply a cover for pursuing political reform in the Middle East?
IN FACT: The Pentagon “neocons” continually urged the President to tone down his democracy rhetoric.
I did not think that a U.S. president could properly decide to go to war just to spread democracy, in the absence of a threat requiring self-defense. . . . I had the opportunity to clarify [publicly] this democracy point . . . in an interview I gave to Nicholas Lemann for The New Yorker. . . . “Would anybody be thinking about using military power in Iraq in order to do a political experiment in Iraq in the hope that it would have positive political spillover effects throughout the region? The answer is no.” (pp. 235, 304)
In my view, the reason to go to war with Iraq was self-defense. If that necessity drove us to war, the fighting might open the way for a new democracy to arise (as it did with Germany, Italy, and Japan after World War II). . . . But it’s one thing to try to ensure that your defeated enemy becomes a democracy after the war comes to an end, and quite another to initiate a war for that purpose. (p. 234)
Discussing a draft of a Presidential speech in May 2004:
[Material in quotation marks comes from the memo cited below.]
Some of the speech’s rhetoric about democracy struck me as a problem: “The draft speech now implies that we went to war in Iraq simply to free the Iraqi people from tyranny and create democracy there,” I noted. But that implication “is not accurate and it sets us up for accusations of failure if Iraq does not quickly achieve ‘democracy,’ an undefined but high standard. . . . [I]t would be better to talk of ‘building democratic institutions,’ or ‘putting the Iraqis on the path to democracy,’ rather than ‘constructing a stable democracy,’ a goal that will not be achievable for many years.” (p. 492)
Citation: Douglas J. Feith, Memo to Rumsfeld, “Comments on Draft #8 of President’s Speech on Iraq,” May 23, 2004. [Not available for publication]
Copyright Douglas J. Feith