Oh btw, Iraq wasn’t over WMD

Dough Feith, one of the principal architects of the war in Iraq, is pushing his new book. He’s assigning blame for all the blunders to everyone else in the administration. One of the things he disagrees with was the need to make the WMD case in order to justify the invasion. Yes, the administration’s [obviously manufactured] casus belli.

For being such a moron, Dana Milbank of the Washington Post takes a few necessary chops at Feith:

Doug Feith, the No. 3 man at the Pentagon before, during and after the invasion of Iraq, has come in for his share of blame for the failures there — in large part because he led the Pentagon policy shop that badly misstated the case for war and bungled the planning for the aftermath. Gen. Tommy Franks called him “the dumbest [bad word] guy on the planet.” George Tenet of the CIA called his work on Iraq “total crap.” And Jay Garner, once the American administrator in Iraq, deduced that Feith is “incredibly dangerous” and, “He’s a smart guy whose electrons aren’t connected.”

…

As he has promoted his book this month, Feith has continued to say things that suggest an ongoing electron disconnect. On “60 Minutes,” he made the straight-faced claim that “I don’t think we needed to” make weapons of mass destruction part of the case for war with Iraq.

To the third in command at DoD, the war in Iraq wasn’t about WMD, it was the fact that Saddam was part of the “broader international terrorist network.” Feith calls it a “serious error” for the administration to have rationalized the war under the threat of WMD — even though he can’t recall any official stating that the threat Iraq posed was imminent:

This is how ridiculous the political climate has become in Washington today. Feith can brazenly come out and say that the administration’s case for war in Iraq was bogus — that they had ulterior motives — without any fear of reprisal in the form of a congressional investigation. It would be just if, for the record, it was established that this war was sold to public on a fabricated and misleading basis — that the internal and public justifications in favor of war differed greatly.