The Boston Review has an interesting article "Fault Lines. Inside Rumsfeld's Pentagon" which looks at what went on inside the Pentagon with regard to what has become known as the Iraq War - especially the perspective of Douglas Feith, neo-con supreme:
"Setting aside combat memoirs, of which there are a growing number, the literature of the Iraq War divides neatly into two categories. The first category, dominated by journalistic observers, indicts. The second category, accounts authored by insider participants, acquits. The two books reviewed here fall into the second category: They are exercises in self-exculpation. Pretending to explain, their actual purpose is to deflect responsibility.
Douglas Feith and Ricardo Sanchez are not exactly marquee figures. Yet each for a time played an important role in America’s Mesopotamian misadventure. From 2001 to 2005 Feith served in the Pentagon as the third-ranking figure in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) under Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy. From 2003 to 2004 Lieutenant General Sanchez, now retired, served in Baghdad, commanding all coalition forces in Iraq.
Of the two accounts, Feith’s qualifies as the more sophisticated. It is also far and away the more dishonest. Feith trained as a lawyer, and War and Decision qualifies as a masterpiece of lawyerly, even Nixonian, obfuscation."
"Setting aside combat memoirs, of which there are a growing number, the literature of the Iraq War divides neatly into two categories. The first category, dominated by journalistic observers, indicts. The second category, accounts authored by insider participants, acquits. The two books reviewed here fall into the second category: They are exercises in self-exculpation. Pretending to explain, their actual purpose is to deflect responsibility.
Douglas Feith and Ricardo Sanchez are not exactly marquee figures. Yet each for a time played an important role in America’s Mesopotamian misadventure. From 2001 to 2005 Feith served in the Pentagon as the third-ranking figure in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) under Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy. From 2003 to 2004 Lieutenant General Sanchez, now retired, served in Baghdad, commanding all coalition forces in Iraq.
Of the two accounts, Feith’s qualifies as the more sophisticated. It is also far and away the more dishonest. Feith trained as a lawyer, and War and Decision qualifies as a masterpiece of lawyerly, even Nixonian, obfuscation."
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