http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_9915277Feith: The record of the administration shows that the president and his top advisers dealt with the 9/11 challenge and the Iraq problem soberly and in good faith. The president had difficult choices to make about whether to run the risks of leaving Saddam
in power or to run the risks of removing him by force. I think it's important for the public to understand the analysis of these choices that the president and his team used. The decisions were the kind on which reasonable people could — and did — differ, but the president's approach was careful and honest and sensible.
The Post: Most Americans believe that WMD was the single casus belli regarding Iraq. Congress had several other justifications. Was the quick erosion of the public's confidence in the Iraq War effected by a lack of articulation and communication from the administration about what to expect and what the goals were?
Feith: The administration did not do as good a job as it should have done in explaining to the public what is was doing and why, either before the war started in Iraq or after. There are major lessons to be learned from this failure. It's important for the president to sustain public support for major national security actions, like the war in Iraq . . . . Communications failures are a much bigger deal than a simple public relations or political problem. They can be strategic problems. They can lead to the loss of a war.
...
Feith: One has to say that we should have been more skeptical about the intelligence that turned out to be erroneous. That's obvious. In my book, I asked why officials weren't more skeptical about the WMD intelligence, in particular the CIA's assessment that we would find chemical and biological weapons stockpiles. The answer is that there was a strong basis for believing that assessment. Saddam wanted to encourage the belief among some of his enemies that he had such stockpiles. He was focused on the Iranians and on the Iraqi Kurds and Shiites, the groups against whom he had used (or tried to use) WMD in the past. He wanted them to believe he still had WMD.
At the same time, Saddam chose not to retain WMD stockpiles because he wanted to escape U.N. sanctions.
Nevertheless, Saddam built civilian-military dual-use production facilities so that he could create new chemical and biological weapons stockpiles for himself within a matter of a few weeks at any time.
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