Douglas Feith

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Douglas Feith

Douglas J. Feith has served as the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy for United States President George W. Bush since July 2001.

His responsibilities include the formulation of defense planning guidance and forces policy, United States Department of Defense relations with foreign countries and the Department's role in U.S. Government interagency policy making. Feith leads the Northern Gulf Affairs Office, renamed from Office of Special Plans. In July 2004, this Pentagon unit was heavily criticised by the Senate intelligence committee's review of the intelligence leading to war in Iraq. The allegation is that the Office of Special Plans sought to sideline the CIA's assessments of intelligence on Iraq. Senator Jay Rockefeller, the Democrat co-chair of the committee, said that Feith's office may have undertaken "unlawful" intelligence-gathering initiatives, resulting in calls for Feith's resignation.[1]

Feith is also thought to be responsible for a top secret report, written days after the 9/11 attacks, that called for US retaliation by attacking countries in South America or Southeast Asia (some with an alleged Hizbollah presence). Information about the document has been released by the 9/11 Commission Report. Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil, as well as other "non-Al Qaeda targets" like Iraq are given as possible targets. The reasoning advanced is that such a move would have come as a "surprise to the terrorist" which would have been caught "off-guard". [2]

There are hints that Feith has seen his authority dwindle since the first half of October 2003 when national security adviser Condoleezza Rice announced that she would head the new Iraq Stabilization Group (ISG).

Previous to his appointment, Feith spent fifteen years as the managing attorney of the law firm of Feith & Zell, P.C., located in Washington, D.C. (September 1986-July 2001).

Contents

Background

Feith is described as a neoconservative and Zionist and advocates a close alliance between the United States and Israel. Some of his critics have labeled him as anti-Arab (see e.g. [3]).

A protege of Richard Perle, the former chairman of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board (DPB) who stands at the center of the neo-conservative foreign-policy network in Washington, Feith has long opposed territorial compromise by Israel.

Feith first entered government as a Middle East specialist on the National Security Council (NSC) under Ronald Reagan in 1981 but was abruptly fired after only one year. Perle, who was then serving in the Pentagon as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security, however, hired him as his deputy, a post he retained until leaving in 1986 to found Feith & Zell. Three years later, Feith was retained as a lobbyist by the Turkish government and, in that capacity, worked with Perle to build military ties between Turkey and Israel.

In 1996 he participated in a study group chaired by Perle that produced a report called ""A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" [4] for incoming Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. In the report Feith, along with Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser, called for building a strategic alliance with Turkey, Jordan and a new government in Iraq that would transform the balance of power in the Middle East in such a way that Israel could decisively resist pressure to trade "land for peace" with the Palestinians or Syria.

Feith was an outspoken foe of the Oslo process and even the Camp David peace agreement mediated by former President Jimmy Carter between Egypt and Israel. In 1997, he published a lengthy article in Commentary magazine, titled "A Strategy for Israel." In it, Feith argued that Israel should repudiate the Oslo accords and move to re-occupy those parts of the West Bank and Gaza that had been transferred to the Palestinian Authority.

Two years later, he and Perle signed an open letter to President Bill Clinton calling for the United States to work with Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC) to oust Saddam Hussein. In May of 2000, they signed a report calling for the United States to be prepared to attack Syria militarily unless Damascus failed to withdraw its troops from Lebanon.

Feith also served with Perle on the board of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), a think tank that promotes military and strategic ties between the United States and Israel.

Like Perle, Feith has long been a hard-liner on foreign policy and arms control. He was an outspoken opponent of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Chemical and Biological Weapons conventions which he criticized as ineffective and dangerous to U.S. interests. Among other clients, his firm represented arms giants Lockheed-Martin and Northrop Grunman.

Also like Perle, Feith has long taken a strong interest in Israel and its security. His father, Dalck Feith, a philanthropist and major Republican contributor from Philadelphia, was active in the militantly Zionist youth movement Betar, the predecessor of Israel's Likud Party, in Poland before World War II. Both father and son have been honored by the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) which, unlike other mainstream Jewish groups in the United States, has consistently supported Likud positions and the settlement movement in the occupied territories and actively courted the Christian Right.

Feith's writings on international law and on foreign and defense policy have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, The New Republic and elsewhere. He has contributed chapters to a number of books, including James W. Muller, ed., Churchill as Peacemaker; Douglas J. Feith, et al., Israel?s Legitimacy in Law and History; and Uri Ra?anan, et al., eds., Hydra of Carnage: International Linkages of Terrorism.

Feith holds a J.D. (magna cum laude) from the Georgetown University Law Center and an A.B. (magna cum laude) from Harvard College.

A May 16, 2004 news article in The Boston Globe identifies Douglas Feith as having argued during the Reagan administration that Geneva Convention protections should not be extended to terrorists who mingled with civilians. In 2001 this policy was implemented and signed off by Defense Department counsel, and led to the designation of Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters as "enemy combatants" rather than "prisoners of war."

Many of Feith's critics label him a chickenhawk, criticizing him for his lack of military experience. One such critic is United States Army General Tommy Franks, who, according to Bob Woodward's 2004 Plan of Attack, described Feith as the "f***ing stupidest guy on the face of the earth" (p.281) [5][6].

Feith's former law partner, L. Marc Zell, is a spokesman for the Jewish settlers' movement in the occupied West Bank, and is known to have collaborated with Ahmad Chalabi's nephew in Baghdad to help interested companies win contracts for reconstruction projects.

In August 2004 it was revealed that one of Feith's top lieutenants, Larry Franklin, an analyst and Iran specialist, has been a subject of a broad FBI investigation and the target of espionage allegations. He is said to have passed secret information to two officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee of AIPAC and to Naor Gilon, a "senior official" of the Israeli Embassy in Washington.

Bibliography

Conference on International Law and the Arab-Israeli Conflict; Siegel, Edward M.; Feith, Douglas J.; & Louis D. Brandeis Society of Zionist Lawyers (1994). Israel's Legitimacy in Law and History. Center for Near East Policy. ISBN 0964014505.
Perle, Richard; Colbert, James; Fairbanks, Jr., Charles; Loewenberg, Robert; Wurmser, David; Wurmser, Meyrav; & Feith, Douglas J. (1996). A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.

External links

Slate profile of Feith