I just finished listening in on a bloggers' briefing hosted by Rob Bluey of the Heritage Foundation in which the former undersecretary of defense for President Bush fought back against what he called the "false narrative" that has developed both about the use of intelligence in the buildup to the Iraq War as well as the rationale for going to war. He is in the midst of writing a book due out this fall, giving what he believes to be the first thorough and accurate account of the lead-up to war. In the meantime, he has started a website aimed at countering media distortions. He decided to do so in the wake of a Feb. 9 Washington Post story that erroneously attributed damaging quotes to the Pentagon's inspector general that actually came from Democratic Senator Carl Levin. While the Post was forced to issue a correction on the story, by then it had spread throughout the world as truth. Feith has been frustrated by TV appearances that don't allow him to respond to issues in detail, so he decided to go online.
Feith criticized the Bush administration for not doing more to respond to the media as it developed the narrative that the president lied the country into war by manipulating intelligence. "It was a fascinating thing how the administration convinced itself that it didn't need to respond," Feith said. The people who ran communications would talk themselves into believing that newspaper stories or
Feith said that there was a broader rationale for invading
Furthermore, he said his team at the Pentagon did not try to manipulate CIA intelligence; instead, their conflict with the CIA came down to a debate over whether the CIA was suppressing some pieces of intelligence. Feith said one of the ways to prevent intelligence failures is for consumers of the intelligence to interrogate the suppliers of intelligence more thoroughly, and that's what his office was doing.
I asked Feith to respond specifically to an issue I raised in a recent column, essentially, whether the narrative that Bush administration lied America into war using false intelligence would undermine any case for taking military action against Iran, if it came down to that.
"This narrative can serve a lot of useful purposes to people who developed it," he responded. The