A lot of ifs
US Under Secretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith told Khaled Dawoud in Washington that in the future Arabs will feel they "owe a great bit of gratitude" to US President George Bush
US Under Secretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith rarely speaks to the press. However, with the mounting criticism of President George W Bush's administration in recent weeks for allegedly exaggerating the evidence it presented to justify a war against Iraq, Feith has been more open to the media. Together with a number of key figures at the Pentagon, the office of US Vice-President Dick Cheney, figures on the National Security Council and in the State Department, Feith is a key member of the so-called "neo-conservatives" club within President Bush's administration. US observers suggest it was that team of neo-conservatives who began urging President Bush to wage war against Iraq shortly after the 11 September attacks. That same group long contended there was a link between the former Iraqi regime and Osama Bin Laden's Al- Qa'eda network in spite of the absence of any evidence in that respect. And they are the same figures that are now pushing for a harder line towards Iran and Syria, presenting Iraq as the model for what the world's sole superpower is capable of doing to those it considers a threat to its interests.
Feith, and like many other members of the neo-con club, first served in former President Ronald Regan's administration. He worked at the National Security Council before moving on to the Pentagon where he was an adviser to then Assistant Secretary of Defence Richard Perle. Perle is another key figure of the group, who until recently was chairman of the Defence Policy Board, an advisory body attached to the Pentagon. Perle resigned in late March as chairman while remaining a member of the board following allegations that he might have used his post to facilitate the conclusion of deals with the Pentagon for one of many companies in which he works as consultant.
Feith's mini-biography posted on the Pentagon's site lists as one of his books Israel's Legitimacy in Law and History, makes complete sense. In 1991, and while former US President George H Bush was pressing Israel to attend the Madrid Middle East peace conference, Feith urged him in an opinion piece to: "Abandon the name game by which they [Arabs] apply the label 'Palestine' only to the 20 per cent of British Mandate Palestine that lies west of the Jordan River. So long as one's goal is the elimination of Israel, one does well to pretend that the Kingdom of Jordan, which occupies the other 80 per cent of Mandate Palestine, is not a Palestinian state. That makes it possible to propagandise that the Jews control all the land and the Arabs of Palestine are 'stateless'." He added, "Drop the slogan of 'land for peace', which sceptical Israelis must suspect is a programme for dismantling Israel in stages, and simply offer peace. That is, they could put forward an open, unqualified, non-grudging and sincere acknowledgment that the Jewish people are entitled to a state in a Jewish homeland."
And in 1996, together with his former boss, Perle, and others, Feith wrote an advisory paper for former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, entitled, "A Clean Break: a New Strategy for Securing the Realm". In that paper they advised Netanyahu to "make a clean break from the peace process"; reassert "Israel's claim to its land" by another formula to reach peace with Arabs: "peace for peace". Looking to the future, the paper stated, "Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq -- an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right -- as a means of foiling Syria's regional ambitions."
Al-Ahram Weekly spoke to Feith in his office at the Pentagon.
What is your reaction to recent reports that officials at the Pentagon may have exaggerated the evidence of Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) to the international and domestic public in order to justify the resort to force?
The information that we had about Iraqi WMDs came from the intelligence community and it was voluminous. The judgments of the intelligence community about Iraqi capabilities were consistent for years, including before this administration came to office.
I don't think that anybody who read the information that we had would have doubted that the Iraqis had a chemical capability, biological capability and were pursuing nuclear weapons.
Most people would agree that Iraq might have possessed WMDs. But the question is whether such WMDs posed an imminent threat to the region and the world -- as the US claimed before the war. If Iraq did pose an imminent threat, shouldn't the weapons have been found by now?
I don't think it follows that an imminent threat means a highly visible threat. I don't agree with the logic that if the threat was imminent, then it would be obvious.
Imminent means that it could be readily used, but that doesn't mean that it would be obvious to find it.
In his speech to the Security Council on 5 February of this year, Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke of hundreds of tons of nerve gas, namely VX, and agents for chemical and biological weapons. Would it be possible to hide such amounts of those materials?
Take a room this size. If this room was full of chemical munitions, it would contain many tons. It is not an easy matter in a country the size of Iraq to find every place that could conceal tons of chemical munitions. I wouldn't jump to any conclusions on how easy it is to conceal quantities like that.
So what is your reaction to growing criticism that the US and Britain exaggerated the evidence against Iraq?
I don't think that our government exaggerated anything. I think we had very consistent intelligence reporting for years, including the period before this administration came in about these capabilities.
Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld suggested recently that the Iraqi regime might have destroyed the weapons. If that was the case, where was the imminent threat Iraq posed?
We don't know yet what happened, and when we know, we'll able to answer the precise questions. The only reasonable conclusion that one could come to, based on the information we had available before the war, was that the Iraqis had this capability and that it was a dangerous capability and that they were in a position to deploy weapons of mass destruction.
In a way that threatens the United States?
In a way that threatened the US, and our interests and the region.
Yet again, don't you think that if Iraq had weapons that could threaten the United States, they would have been found by now?
I don't support that logic. I don't think it is smart to speculate about all the possible explanations. We will know the facts, and when we know the facts, we will present what we know.
And if I were to speculate now, on the basis of simply logic rather than facts, and if it turns out that the speculation was wrong, somebody would later turn around, and say: 'Oh, you were claiming this, but it turned out to be wrong'. So, I don't want to speculate. It makes much more sense to say we have a major effort underway, the Iraq Survey Group effort, they are going to systematically go and find what became of these capabilities, and we know that Iraq is a country that had these munitions. We know that they used them, we know that the UN in 1999 pointed out the large amount of biological weapons material and chemical weapons material that was unaccounted for.
There is no logical reason to suppose that the WMDs Saddam Hussein had developed and protected -- despite the high cost to Iraq, with international sanctions and everything else -- that he would have destroyed [those WMDs] unilaterally after the country was seized to be inspected.
The reason people are worried about the evidence is that you might make similar assumptions in the future against other countries. So we want to make sure your assumptions are correct. In a similar vein, the New York Times recently reported that key Al-Qa'eda operatives recently arrested by the United States denied any links with Iraq's former regime. Such testimony, however, was disregarded and the administration continued to insist on linking the two. What is your reaction to this report?
The CIA made the point some months ago that there were contacts between high-level people in Al-Qa'eda and high- level people in the Iraqi intelligence service going back 10 years or so, and that there was cooperation in training and exercises, including chemical weapons between Al-Qa'eda and Iraqi intelligence service people. That's why they said.
When you have Khaled Sheikh Mohamed (chief of Al- Qa'eda operations arrested in Pakistan in mid-March) saying Al-Qa'eda had no connection with Iraq, isn't this sufficient evidence to question the actual existence of such a link?
If the story is true; if what he said, he actually said; if what he said is true, and if he would necessarily know the answer. There are a lot of ifs...
And there are a lot of ifs in the CIA reports too. Most reports spoke of a "possible", or "suspected" link between Iraq and Al-Qa'eda, and nothing seemed certain...
Intelligence people often speak that way, sure.
Also no other intelligence body -- European or Arab -- seemed to back that assumption?
I don't think that's correct. I'm saying that we have intelligence that led our intelligence community to say what I just mentioned about certain connections between high-level Al-Qa'eda people and high-level Iraq intelligence people. There is intelligence supporting that.
How do you see the region's future after Iraq's occupation? Many people in the region are concerned that after Iraq, there might be other Arab countries to follow, in accordance with a certain vision that people like you at the Pentagon advocate.
What we are focussed on right now is what is called winning the peace and laying the foundation for a good government, a stable government, representative government in Iraq that will respect the rights of the Iraqi people, and respect the rights of Iraq's neighbours.
I think there are people all over the world who recognise that the danger that state sponsors of terrorism, especially those that are pursuing [the development of] WMDs pose to international security, is such that this is not a problem that can be ignored, and there is great value in the United States having led coalitions to demonstrate that there are costs for governments in making the bad decisions to pursue WMDs and sponsor terrorists.
The lessons of Afghanistan and the lessons of Iraq, I think, are being studied around the world.
So you are talking about a demonstration effect, and you don't expect further military plans to attack other countries such as Syria or Iran? This is an issue of serious concern for the Arab reader.
What we hope the Arab reader will focus on is the commitment that the United States has been [showing for] setting the conditions for good government in Iraq, good government in the Palestinian Authority, and the opportunity to promote freedom and prosperity in the Middle East in a way that could be inspirational for not just the Middle East, but for the whole world.
This is very positive; this is not something that should be treated as just political talk; this is something that the president cares about, he ascribes great importance to it, and he thinks that the opportunity to transform the Middle East for the good through the promotion of freedom and prosperity is a major opportunity, and it is something that we are working on.
If he achieves what he is aiming at, I think that people throughout the Middle East will look back in the future on this administration, and say: 'maybe many people in the region at this moment were critics of President Bush, but we owe a great bit of gratitude to him'.
One of the papers that your critics always refer to, you wrote in 1996 with Richard Perle. Entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Security in the Realm", you advised former Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu to give up the "land for peace formula", reject the evacuation of settlements and work to oust Saddam Hussein in order to increase pressure on Syria. Where do you stand now on these matters, particularly on the issue of a Palestinian state?
I think that there is an opportunity now if the Palestinians can succeed in the kind of reforms that President Bush talked about in his 24 June 2002 speech and in his recent statements, there is an opportunity to reach a settlement of the conflict where the president's idea of two states living side by side in peace could be the basis for stability.
So now you personally support the establishment of a Palestinian state?
If the preconditions for a successful peace arrangement are achieved, the kinds of political reforms, the kind of new leadership, then I think that a two-state solution could work.
And removing settlements?
The settlements' issue will go away if there is peace because the peace agreement will end the issue of occupation, and it will solve the issue of settlements.
In what way, removing settlements?
Some maybe removed, some may not be removed. But the point is that the peace arrangement would deal with it.
Did your views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict change after joining the government?
This is a little bit like performing in a play and then writing a review of your own performance. I'm not going to write a review of my own performance. What I wrote, I wrote, and what I say, I say, and anybody who wants to judge is welcome to judge it.
But do you see Arabs being evil versus Israelis being good and that it enjoys moral superiority?
No, I never said that and I never wrote that. That would be a terrible thing to say.
Do you still think Jordan is Palestine?
History is history, and I'm not going to get into a debate about history here, that's not fruitful.
