Douglas Feith

And so it's really not until very late in the game that you have the kind of governance infrastructure there that could have helped stabilize that country before it really fell into kind of chaos and civil war.

I think a second big problem, which was unfortunate and did credit to nobody, was the profound and personal antagonism that developed between him and Colin Powell, between his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and Rich Armitage, who was Powell's deputy, and going even down a further level to the undersecretary level, Doug Feith at the Pentagon.

Actually, it ends up being several people over the State Department.

And that antipathy... really got in the way of effective interdepartmental coordination and planning, and shame on all of them.

Reagan was appropriated, I think, in the most hardcore way the first time in 1996.

That's when Project for a New American Century, that would be Bill Kristol and some of the other people who were soon to be in the, the George W. Bush administration just a few years later, I think Doug Feith was part of that, maybe Wolfowitz.

But the Project for a New American Century, the column that Bill Kristol penned for the Weekly Standard was called Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy, and he-- what he meant was, Bill Clinton, please bomb Iraq, 'cause they were already wanting that, and Bill Clinton wouldn't do it, and then we got 9/11 and they, you know, pretended that 9/11 had something to do with Iraq, and they finally got their war.

But Reagan pulled out of Lebanon.

times, and actually tried making his military service like a source of mockery, even though Bush and Cheney had never gotten near a front line.

But in any event, he had expressed his grievance that one of the Problems in American political life now, as illustrated by Bush and Cheney and so many of those neocons, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith and all of them throughout the U.S. government and the Pentagon didn't go to war.

And we have this kind of economic socioeconomic pressure where people who don't have a lot of economic opportunity join the military in order to to get it.

I mean, a lot of benefits to go to college would they otherwise wouldn't be able to afford in that the rich people who don't send their own kids to the front line, then send them to the front line and use them and exploit them.

Um, and, and so it's really not until very late in the game that you have the kind of governance infrastructure there that could have helped stabilize that country before it really fell into kind of chaos and civil war.

I think a second big problem, which is unfort- was unfortunate and did credit to nobody, was the profound an- personal antagonism that developed between him and Colin Powell, between his deputy, uh, Paul Wolfowitz and Rich Armitage, who was Powell's deputy, and going even down a further l- level to the undersecretary level, Doug Feith at the Pentagon.

Several, actually it ends up being several people over at the State Department.

And that, that antipathy really got in the way of effective inter- interdepartmental coordination and planning, and shame on all of them.

Uh, this was a, a huge propaganda effort, and it was basically being pushed by, as I said, Israel firsters who were in the Defense Department.

Uh, Doug Feith, uh, Scooter Libby, uh, there were a whole bunch of them.

And they faked the information to indict Iraq because Iraq was on Israel's list.

What a surprise.

... and in, inside of the Pentagon, they'd put together a special office to-

Doug Feith, yeah

... which is completely antithetical to, to CIA, how it operate, uh, any intelligence, to basically cherry-pick and find any indence- indices at all of weapons of mass destruction.

Like, that's all they looked at to build the case regardless of what it was.