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Feith Says, Oops, Our Bad

You absolutely have to read this AP article to understand what a complete screw-up Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (USD[P]) Doug Feith is.

The top policy adviser to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld says the Bush administration erred by building its public case for war against Saddam Hussein mainly on the claim that he possessed banned weapons.

The comment by Douglas J. Feith, in an interview with The Associated Press, is a rare admission of error about Iraq by a senior administration official. Feith, who is leaving after four years as the undersecretary of defense for policy, said he remains convinced that President Bush was correct in deciding that war against Iraq was necessary.

"I don't think there is any question that we as an administration, instead of giving proper emphasis to all major elements of the rationale for war, overemphasized the WMD aspect," he said, using the abbreviation for weapons of mass destruction. ---------------

"Our intelligence community made, apparently, an error, as to the stockpiles" of weapons it assured President Bush existed in 2003, Feith said. Thus that part of the administration's argument for why war was necessary was overdone, he said, adding, "Anything we said at all about stockpiles was overemphasis, given that we didn't find them." ...

Feith said he is irritated by the assertions of administration critics that the absence of WMD stockpiles in Iraq negates the rationale for going to war. They ignore the broader reasoning, he said, which included the dangers posed by Saddam's record of aggression against Kuwait, hostility toward the United States, a "rhetorical and financial support" for terrorism and a weakening of the world's resolve to contain his ambitions.

"One could fault the administration on the presentation of the rationale, but that is different from saying the rationale was actually extremely narrow and invalidated by the disclosure of the error" on WMD stockpiles, he said.

Words actually fail me. I could rant on about the idiocy of this man, this poor example of a defense official, the third highest ranking man in DOD, but it would be a wasted effort. I just don't understand his giving an interview to say, whoops, yeah, we pulled a boner there, but it all came out okay. Years from now, some historians are going to have a field day explaining this administration's actions.