Pentagon’s Feith: Getting the job done

(Washington, D.C.): The editorial page of today’s Wall Street Journal features an extraordinarily complimentary profile of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith. The article, written by the Journal’s highly respected Associate Editorial Page Editor, Melanie Kirkpatrick, provides long-overdue recognition to one of the George W. Bush Administration’s most thoughtful, most effective and least recognized national security decision-makers.

Ms. Kirkpatrick’s essay quotes a number of Mr. Feith’s senior colleagues — including notably his boss, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — concerning the signal contribution that the Pentagon’s policy organization has been making under his leadership. The praise of those willing to be cited on the record contrasts markedly with the often vitriolic criticism emanating particularly from State Department functionaries clearly frustrated at being repeatedly out-thought, out-maneuvered and out-gunned by their Defense Department counterparts. Such petty jealousy seems to have spawned groundless speculation in Washington circles in recent days that Secretary Feith would be blamed for and removed from office over difficulties Coalition forces have encountered in the wake of their liberation of Iraq.

Prior to his current, distinguished government service, Douglas Feith was the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Center for Security Policy. The Center takes great pride in the contribution he and his subordinates are making to the successful prosecution of the war on terror and welcomes the well-deserved commendation afforded him by the Nation’s preeminent editorial page.

The ripest political target in Washington these days is a man who rarely gets his picture in the paper.

Douglas Feith’s sin is being Donald Rumsfeld’s ideas man and one of the brains behind some of the most significant foreign policy and national security advances of the Bush administration. As Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Mr. Feith has transformed a once relatively obscure corner of the Pentagon into the world’s most effective think tank. The fact that the president has adopted many of the ideas brewed there infuriates those who see Defense usurping a role that rightly belongs to the State Department.

“Without a doubt, the policy division has the most significant intellectual capabilities in the government,” says former Defense Department official Richard Perle, who hired Mr. Feith for the Reagan Pentagon and now sits on the Defense Policy Board. “It’s a creative shop that produces a lot of good ideas,” says Stephen Hadley, deputy national security adviser and one of the policy group’s main customers. “They are prepared to think differently.”

The urgency of the need to think differently became evident on Sept. 11, 2001, six weeks after Mr. Feith started on the job and the war on terrorism began. “Soon after the war got started,” Mr. Feith says, “I had a talk with the secretary about how we could support him. He said, ‘I need a few ideas every day lobbed in front of me.’ “

Since then Mr. Feith has lobbed ideas with the ferocity of Andre Agassi. He and his team of 450 spend a great deal of time on Iraq and Afghanistan — they conceived the offensive strategy in the global war on terrorism — but their strategic focus extends to virtually every corner of the world.

In Russia, they thought through the implications of the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and helped negotiate the Moscow Treaty, dramatically reducing nuclear warheads. They urged a rapid expansion of NATO and the development of a strategic relationship with India, moves that paid off in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the Mideast, they pushed for U.S. support of the creation of a Palestinian state in return for Palestinian reform — the position announced by the president in his June 24, 2002 speech.

The idea that fighting the war on terrorism requires a new military “footprint” world-wide was worked by Mr. Feith’s policy staff. It led to decisions to reduce the number of U.S. troops in Germany and South Korea and negotiate basing rights in more places world-wide (Central Asia, for example), closer to where they might be needed. The new basing strategy will affect the way the military fights and the way we do diplomacy for decades.

The policy organization represents Defense in the inter-agency process, where its proposals are thrashed out along with those from State, CIA, the National Security Council and others. “There is not a lot of pride of authorship, says the NSC’s Mr. Hadley. “They are prepared to launch an idea and then let others modify and improve it.”

In the Pentagon, Mr. Feith was instrumental in forging a more collaborative relationship with the Joint Staff, which has its own independent policy organization. He and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace, co-chair a daily meeting in Mr. Feith’s office to share ideas and hash out differences of opinion before they reach Mr. Rumsfeld’s desk. The Campaign Planning Committee — “CapCom,” in Pentagonspeak — “has become an invaluable tool to work through complicated issues and provide the secretary with a coordinated product,” says Gen. Pace.

Success breeds enemies, and the influence of Mr. Feith’s policy shop doesn’t go down well in certain quarters of Foggy Bottom, which seem to resent that good ideas that don’t originate in State can sometimes prevail over their own. Nor does it win friends at the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, which don’t always welcome the competition in intelligence analysis. The result has been a nasty, mostly anonymous, campaign in the media to discredit Mr. Feith and his policy team.

The first wave focused on the small Special Plans Office, set up last fall to prepare for possible war in Iraq. This “cabal” (the New Yorker), “highly secretive group” (Knight-Ridder), or “shadowy Pentagon committee” (Agence France Press) was the subject of so much false reporting that Mr. Feith and fellow cabalist William Luti took the rare step of calling a press conference in June to set the record straight.

The latest attacks hold Mr. Feith’s office responsible for “flawed” postwar planning in Iraq. A story in yesterday’s Financial Times is typical: The Pentagon planning was “hurried” and “ignored the extensive work done by the State Department.”

The criticism is preposterous if only for the fact that Defense’s proposals for a provisional government, de-Baathification, and free Iraqi forces to help with security were initially shot down. They have now all been adopted by the Coalition Provisional Authority — albeit after costly delay. In any event, the postwar plans went through a rigorous inter-agency process. Anyone looking to assign blame needs to cast a wider net.

Mr. Feith’s office is also accused of deep-sixing State’s Future of Iraq project. A more accurate way of putting it is that State’s ideas didn’t make the grade — that is, they didn’t survive the inter-agency process. One consumer of the Future of Iraq’s output calls it “nothing more than a seminar series that produced concept papers that would have gone nowhere. There were no action plans.”

The campaign to discredit Mr. Feith is unlikely to have any effect on the one man who matters. Mr. Rumsfeld went out of his way at a news conference recently to say his policy chief was doing a “very fine job.” But it would be nice to think that in the competition of ideas for winning the war on terrorism, the nation’s policy wonks were all pulling together.

Ms. Kirkpatrick is associate editor of the Journal’s editorial page.