Feith serves as the number
three civilian in the George W. Bush administration's Defense
Department, under Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Undersecretary for Policy Feith
previously served in the Reagan administration, starting off as Middle
East specialist at the National Security Council (1981-82) and then
transferring to the Defense Department where he spent two years as
staff lawyer for Assistant Defense Secretary Richard Perle. In 1984 Feith advanced to become
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Negotiations Policy. Feith
and Perle were among the leading advocates of a policy to build closer
U.S. military and diplomatic ties with Turkey and to increase the
military ties between Turkey and Israel.
Feith left DOD in mid-1986 to found the Feith & Zell
law firm, based initially in Israel, whose clients included major
military contractor Northrop
Grumman. In 1989 Feith established another company, International
Advisors Inc., which provided lobbying services to foreign clients
including Turkey.
Feith's private business dealings raised eyebrows in
Washington. In 1999, his firm Feith & Zell formed an alliance with
the Israel-based Zell, Goldberg & Co., which resulted in the
creation of the Fandz International Law Group. According to Fandz's web
site, the law group "has recently established a task force dealing with
issues and opportunities relating to the recently ended war with Iraq,
and is assisting regional construction and logistics firms to
collaborate with contractors from the United States and other coalition
countries in implementing infrastructure and other reconstruction
projects in Iraq." Remarked Washington Post columnist Al Kamen,
"Interested parties can reach [Fandz] through its Web site, at www.fandz.com.
Fandz.com? Hmmm. Rings a bell. Oh, yes, that was the Web site of the
Washington law firm of Feith & Zell, P.C., as in Douglas Feith
[the] undersecretary of defense for policy and head of what else?
reconstruction matters in Iraq. It would be impossible indeed to
overestimate how perfect ZGC would be in 'assisting American companies
in their relations with the United States government in connection with
Iraqi reconstruction projects.'"
A vocal advocate of U.S. intervention in the Middle East
and for the hardline policies of the Likud party in Israel, Feith has
been involved in or overseen the activities of two controversial
Pentagon operations the Defense Policy Board, whose former head
Richard Perle resigned after concerns arose about conflicts of interest
between his board duties and business dealings, and the Office
of Special Plans (OSP), which allegedly misrepresented intelligence
on Iraq to support administration policies. Feith's office not only
housed the Office of Special Plans and other special intelligence
operations associated with the Near East and South Asia (NESA) office
and the Office of Northern Gulf Affairs but also the office of
Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone, who directed military policy on
interrogations of the Guantanamo Bay detainees and then arranged for
the transfer of the base's commanding officer, Maj. General Geoffrey
Miller, to the Abu Ghraib prison in an effort to extract more
information from Iraqi prisoners.
Feith & Israel
Feith cannot be described
by just one label. He is a longtime militarist, a neoconservative, and
a right-wing Zionist. According to Bob Woodward's book, Plan of Attack, Feith was described by the
military commander who led the Iraq invasion, Gen. Tommie Franks, as
"the f***ing stupidest guy on the face of the earth," referring to the
bad intelligence fed to the military about Iraq and the extent of
possible resistance to a U.S. invasion.
Feith also has a reputation as a prolific writer, having
published articles on international law and on foreign and defense
policy in The New York Times, Washington Times, Washington Post,
Wall Street Journal, Commentary, and New Republic.
His militarism and close ties with the
military-industrial complex were evident in his policy work in the
Pentagon working with Richard Perle in the 1980s and then part of the
Vulcans along with Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Cheney in the Bush II administration; his work as
a corporate lobbyist in the 1990s for Northrop Grumman along with other
military contractors; and his prominent role in the Center
for Security Policy (CSP) and in the Jewish
Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). His political
orientation is distinctly neoconservative, as evident in his
affiliations with such groups as the Middle
East Forum, Center for Security Policy, and Institute
for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS).
Feith served as chairman of the board of directors of
the Center for Security Policy, a policy institute that promotes higher
military budgets, missile defense systems, space weapons programs, and
hardline policies in the Middle East and East Asia. CSP was founded in
1988 by Frank Gaffney, a fellow neocon and, like Feith, a
former DOD official in the Reagan administration. Feith helped Gaffney
organize CSP's large advisory board, which includes leading neocons,
arms lobbyists, and the leading congressional members linked to the
military-industrial complex. Feith has also served as an adviser to the
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, which aims to foster
closer working relationships among the Israeli military, the U.S.
military, the Pentagon, and military contractors in both countries.
Feith has supported lobbying efforts aimed at persuading
the United States to drop out of treaties and arms control agreements.
Wrote one journalist in The Nation, "Largely ignored or derided
at the time, a 1995 [Center for Security Policy (CSP)] memo co-written
by Douglas Feith holding that the United States should withdraw from
the ABM [antiballistic missile] treaty has essentially become policy,
as have other CSP reports opposing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty,
the Chemical Weapons Convention and the International Criminal Court."
Feith is a self-proclaimed Zionist not a Labor
Zionist, but a right-wing Zionist close to the Likud party and the
Zionist Organization of America.
In the 1990s, Feith was an outspoken critic of the
Middle East policies of both the Bush and Clinton administrations,
which he said were based on the faulty "peace now" and "land for peace"
policy frameworks. Instead, he called for a "peace through strength"
agenda for Israel and the United States invoking a phrase promoted by
the neoconservatives since the mid-1970s, which became the slogan of
the Center for Security Policy.
The Middle East Information Center described Feith as an
"ideologue with an extreme anti-Arab bias," remarking that "during the
Clinton years, Feith continued to oppose any agreement negotiated
between the Israelis and Palestinians: Oslo, Hebron and Wye." Feith
defined Oslo as "one-sided Israeli concessions, inflated Palestinian
expectations, broken Palestinian solemn understandings, Palestinian
violence, and American rewards for Palestinian recalcitrance."
In 1991, Feith, together with Frank Gaffney (founder of
the Center for Security Policy), addressed the National Leadership
Conference of the State of Israel Organization. In Feith's view, it was
foolish for the U.S. government and Israel to negotiate with the
Palestinians over issues of land given that contrasting principles
not differences over occupied lands fueled the Israeli-Arab conflict.
He notes that, even before Israel was established, Western political
leaders mistakenly thought that "the vast territories newly made
available for the fulfillment of Arab ambitions for independence would
make it easier to win acceptance within the region of a Jewish state in
Palestine." According to Feith, no matter what they say publicly or at
the negotiating table, the Palestinians have always rejected the
principle of legitimacy, namely "the legitimacy of Zionist claims to a
Jewish National Homeland in the Land of Israel." Criticizing the George
H. W. Bush administration's attempt to broker a land for peace deal,
Feith warned, "If Western statesmen openly recognized the problem as a
clash of principles, they would not be able to market hope through the
launching of peace initiatives."
In 1997 the Zionist Organization of America honored
Dalck Feith and Douglas Feith at its annual dinner. It described the
Feiths as "noted Jewish philanthropists and pro-Israel activists." The
father was awarded the group's special Centennial Award "for his
lifetime of service to Israel and the Jewish people," while Douglas
received the "prestigious Louis D. Brandeis Award."
Dalck Feith was a militant in Betar, a Zionist youth
movement founded by Ze'ev Jabotinsky, an admirer of Mussolini. Betar,
whose members wore dark brown uniforms and spouted militaristic slogans
modeled after other fascistic movements, was associated with the
Revisionist Movement, which evolved in Poland to become the Herut
Party, which later became the Likud Party.
In 1999 Douglas Feith wrote an essay for a book entitled
The Dangers of a Palestinian State, which was
published by ZOA. Also in 1999 Feith spoke to a 150-member ZOA lobbying
mission to Congress that called, among other things, for "U.S. action
against Palestinian Arab killers of Americans" and for moving the U.S.
embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The ZOA lobbying group also
criticized the Clinton administration for its "refusal to criticize
illegal Palestinian Arab construction in Jerusalem and the territories,
which is far more extensive than Israeli construction there."
Initially, Feith strongly supported the Netanyahu
government controlled by the Likud party. Immediately before Netanyahu
took office, Feith in a Washington Times op-ed wrote: "His
Likud party is in general about as radical as our Republican Party. Mr.
Netanyahu favors diplomatic, defense, and economic policies for Israel
similar in principal to the kind of policies that Reaganites favored
(and favor) for the United States." In the opinion piece, Feith echoed
the Likud position on peace negotiations and occupied territories.
According to Feith, "Israel is unlikely over time to retain control
over pieces of territory unless its people actually live there.
Supporters of settlements reason: If Israelis do not settle an area in
the territories, Israel will eventually be forced to relinquish it. If
it relinquishes the territories generally, its security will be
undermined and peace therefore will not be possible."
Feith wrote that the Likud party's policies were guided
by the "peace-through-strength principle." Feith took the opportunity
of the op-ed to explain that both Israel and the United States would
benefit from a strong commitment to missile defense. According to
Feith, Israel would directly benefit from the installation of a
sea-based, wide-area missile defense system, which would supplement
Israel's own national missile defense system that the U.S. helped
develop. Noting the symbiosis of U.S. and Israeli interests, Feith
wrote that Netanyahu knew that "if he encourages Israel's friends in
Congress to support such programs, he will create much good will with
the broad-based forces in the United States, led by the top Republicans
in Congress, that deem missile defense the gravest U.S. military
deficiency." Feith didn't see fit to mention that, along with Israel,
the main beneficiary of such a global missile defense system would be
military contractors such as the ones he represented in his law firm,
including Northrop Grumman.
Feith is also well known for his participation along
with neoconservative big wigs Richard Perle and David Wurmser in a 1996 study organized by the
Israel-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies,
which urged scrapping the then-ongoing peace process. The study, titled
"A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," advised Prime
Minister-elect Benjamin Netanyahu "to work closely with Turkey and
Jordan to contain, destabilize, and roll back" regional threats, help
overthrow Hussein, and strike "Syrian military targets in Lebanon" and
possibly in Syria proper.
Three of the six authors of the report Perle (who was
IASPS team leader), Wurmser, and Feith helped set the Middle East
strategy, including strong support for Sharon's hardline policies in
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in the Bush II administration. Perle
chaired the DOD's Defense Policy Board, Feith became undersecretary of
defense for policy, and Wurmser became Vice President Cheney's top
Middle East adviser after leaving the State Department where he worked
under Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton.
Other members of the IASPS study group on "A New Israeli
Strategy Toward 2000" included James Colbert of the Jewish Institute
for National Security Affairs, Meyrav Wurmser of the Middle
East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), and Jonathan Torop of the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a neoconservative think tank
founded by a director of the American
Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). At the time the report
was published, David Wurmser was an associate of IASPS.
As guiding principles for a new framework of
Israeli-U.S. policy in the Middle East, the report advocated that the
new Likud government do the following:
"Change the nature of its relations with the
Palestinians, including upholding the right of hot pursuit for self
defense into all Palestinian areas and nurturing alternatives to
Arafat's exclusive grip on Palestinian society. Forge a new basis for
relations with the United States stressing self-reliance, maturity,
strategic cooperation on areas of mutual concern, and furthering values
inherent to the West. Israel has the opportunity to make a clean break;
it can forge a peace process and strategy based on an entirely new
intellectual foundation, one that restores strategic initiative and
provides the nation the room to engage every possible energy on
rebuilding Zionism, the starting point of which must be economic
reform."
By 1997 Feith and other right-wing Zionists in the
United States were expressing their disappointment that the Netanyahu
government had not "dismantled the Oslo process," as Feith wrote in Commentary,
the neoconservative magazine of the American Jewish Committee. Feith
then proceeded to outline a radical break with what he characterized as
the "peace now" framework of negotiations. Instead, Feith recommended
that Netanyahu fulfill his "peace through strength" campaign promise.
"Repudiating Oslo would compel Israel, first and foremost, to undo the
grossest of the errors inherent in the accords: the arming of scores of
thousands of PA 'policemen.'" Feith asserted that the "PA's security
force has succeeded primarily in aggravating Israel's terrorism
problem." What is more, Feith argued for Israel "to deflate
expectations of imminent peace" and to "preach sobriety and defense."
It was not until a new Likud government was formed under Ariel Sharon
and when Feith and other Zionists such as Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, and Michael
Rubin, together with militarists such as Rumsfeld and Cheney, took
over control of Middle East policy during the Bush II administration
that Israel, supported by the United States, made a "clean break" from
the Oslo framework.
Typical of other neoconservatives, Feith in public
statements has not made reference to his own Zionist convictions.
Rather in congressional testimony and in op-eds in major media, Feith
has instead argued that U.S. Policy in the Middle East should be guided
by concerns about human rights and democracy. Israel, according to
Feith, should never enter into good-faith negotiations with Arab
countries or the PA because they are not democratic. Moreover, human
rights violations in Syria, Iran, and Iraq justify aggressive U.S. and
Israeli policies aimed at ousting undemocratic and repressive regimes.
Israeli occupations are justified in the name of ensuring the national
security of democratic Israel.
Intelligence
Operations and Scandals
Feith is no stranger to
intelligence scandals. In 1982 he left the National Security Council
under the shadow of an FBI investigation of administration officials
suspected of passing intelligence information to Israel. During the
Bush II administration, investigative reports by Seymour Hersh in the New
Yorker focused public attention on the Office of Special Plans that
came under Feith's supervision.
In the days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Feith
and Wolfowitz started cooking intelligence to meet the needs of the
radically new foreign and military policy that included regime change
in Iraq as its top priority.
One might have thought that the priority for a special
intelligence would have been to determine the whereabouts of the
terrorist network that had just attacked the homeland. But Deputy
Defense Secretary Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense Feith,
working closely with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice
President Richard Cheney, had other intelligence priorities. This
loosely organized team soon became the Office of Special Plans directed
by Abram Shulsky, formerly of RAND and the National
Strategy Information Center (NSIC). The objective of this closet
intelligence team, according to Rumsfeld, was to "search for
information on Iraq's hostile intentions or links to terrorists." OSP's
mission was to create intelligence that the Pentagon and vice president
could use to press their case for an Iraq invasion with the president
and Congress.
About the same time the Pentagon took the first steps
toward launching a counterintelligence operation called the Office of
Strategic Intelligence to support the emerging security doctrine of
preventive war. But this shadowy office, whose very purpose was to
create propaganda and to counter information coming out of Iraq, was
quickly disbanded. Congressional members expressed their concern that a
counterintelligence office would not limit itself to discrediting the
intelligence of U.S. adversaries. Such a secret counterintelligence
office, critics warned, either intentionally or inadvertently might
spread disinformation to the U.S. public and policy community as part
of the buildup to the planned invasion.
Feith oversaw these efforts to provide the type of
"strategic intelligence" needed to drive this policy agenda. As the
Pentagon's top policy official in Middle East affairs, Feith had
oversight authority of the DOD's Near East and South Asia bureau
(NESA). That office came under the direct supervision of William
Luti, a retired Navy officer who is a Newt Gingrich protιgι and who has
long advocated a U.S. military invasion of Iraq.
The OSP worked closely with Ahmed Chalabi and others from the Iraqi National
Congress (INC), an expatriate group promoted by the neoconservatives to
replace the Hussein regime once U.S. troops were in Baghdad. Chalabi
assured the Pentagon that a U.S. invasion would be supported by
widespread Iraqi resistance, leading to claims by top administration
officials and neocon pundits that the invasion would be a "cakewalk."
The OSP also relied on intelligence flows about Iraq from a rump unit
established in the offices of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who like
Chalabi was a proponent of a U.S. military invasion and had close
relations with neocons like Wolfowitz and Feith.
Feith became embroiled in a new intelligence scandal in
late August 2004 when it was reported that the FBI had for the past two
years been investigating intelligence leaks to Israel from the
Pentagon. The Pentagon official named in the media reports is Lawrence
Franklin, who was brought into the Office of Special Plans from the
Defense Intelligence Agency. Franklin, who had served in the military
attachι's office in the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv in the late
1990s as a colonel in the Air Force Reserve, is suspected of passing
classified information about Iran to the American Israeli Public
Affairs Committee and Israel. Fellow neocon and Franklin's friend Michael Ledeen called the allegations against
Franklin "nonsensical." The FBI is also investigating whether Franklin
and other DOD officials passed classified information to Ahmed Chalabi
and the Iraqi National Congress. According to one neocon interviewed by
the Washington Post, "This is part of a civil war with the
administration, a basic dislike between the old CIA and the
neoconservatives."
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/barry.php?articleid=3545