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Douglas J. Feith, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 688 pp.

In the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush administration faced unprecedented challenges. How could America prevent another attack? Would pursuing Osama bin Laden and his core followers in Afghanistan be enough? Or, was a more robust response, including a war to remove the Taliban, al-Qaeda’s host, necessary? Should America’s response be limited to Afghanistan? Or, should America’s new “war on terror” extend to the heart of the Middle East, where multiple regimes had long practiced the black art of sponsoring terrorism?

Answering these questions, and more, after the most devastating attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor was not an enviable task. But for Douglas Feith, the former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and a select group of other political appointees inside the Bush administration, it was their job. And with the publication of Feith’s War and Decision, we now have a meticulously detailed insider’s view of how they went about crafting America’s post-September 11th strategy.

Feith did not expect that al-Qaeda would be one of his or the Bush administration’s principal concerns. On September 11, 2001, he was in Moscow negotiating with his Russian counterparts. The Soviet Union had fallen a decade earlier and President Bush felt confident that America could find new common ground with its former Cold War adversary. Feith’s job description quickly changed, however. News of the attack in New York, Feith writes, “forced me and everyone else in the United States to revise our thinking about national priorities.”

The nation was at war, and the Bush administration scrambled to establish a war footing. America’s counterterrorism strategy underwent a radical transformation. Throughout President Clinton’s term and the first eight months of the Bush administration, terrorism had been viewed largely as a criminal justice matter. As a result, as former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy explains in his book Willful Blindness, a grand total of 29 terrorists were convicted. Meanwhile, according to former National Security Council official Richard Clarke, perhaps as many as 10,000 terrorists were trained in al-Qaeda’s Afghani camps during the 1990s. America, the new thinking went, could not wait for all these terrorists to become eligible for court proceedings. Clearly, prosecuting terrorists after the fact was an insufficient strategy.

Feith explains that the shift in the administration’s thinking came as early as September 12:

We chewed over some fundamentals. I asked: What should be the main purpose of the U.S. government’s immediate action? We agreed that it was neither to secure criminal justice for the perpetrators nor to retaliate but to prevent another attack. The United States should act in self-defense, not for vengeance. This idea was of the greatest importance. It focused our attention on the future; it demanded a strategy for war, rather than mere law enforcement; and it recognized that the enemy was a wide-ranging set of individuals, organizations, and states.

So America went on the offensive. The Bush administration was not going to pursue merely those responsible for the 9/11 attacks themselves, but instead go after the broader terrorist network. Most importantly, America would no longer distinguish between terrorists and the states that sponsored them. The Taliban, in particular, provided Osama bin Laden and his cohorts with a secure environment from which to operate. America would not, therefore, launch military strikes against individual terrorists inside Afghanistan, but instead overthrow the Taliban regime itself.

The decision to dislodge the Taliban was relatively uncontroversial. Most understood the logical necessity of ending a regime that had lived side by side with bin Laden’s al-Qaeda since the mid-1990s. The Taliban’s resurgence in northern Pakistan of late has led some to criticize the Bush administration’s handling of the war in Afghanistan, but its relevance to the “war on terror” remains widely accepted in the U.S. The same cannot be said of the decision to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, however.

The Iraq war has largely become the subject of mythology and conspiracy theories, with many believing the Bush administration lied this nation’s way into war. Feith himself has become something of a bogeyman for the mainstream press and antiwar activists, blamed for everything from the abuses at Abu Ghraib to “cooking” intelligence to justify the war. It matters little that most, if not all, of the charges thrown at Feith are obvious slanders. Smear a man often enough and eventually all anyone remembers are the accusations. This may explain why, as of this writing, not a single major newspaper has reviewed Feith’s book. It is easier for the press and the Bush administration’s critics to deal with a fictitious Feith invented in the imaginations of his enemies than the very real author of War and Decision.

In War and Decision, Feith sets out not only to reclaim his reputation, but also the facts. Time and again Feith corrects the false record with meticulous documentation. For example, there was no “rush to war,” as critics have charged, but instead a deliberate weighing of options. At the end of that process, the President concluded that the threat posed by Saddam’s regime in the post-September 11th world warranted action. This was, in part, because the CIA and other intelligence agencies around the world—not just American neoconservatives supposedly hell-bent on war—believed Saddam had both weapons of mass destruction stockpiles and ongoing WMD programs.

But Saddam’s putative WMD were only part of the reason the President chose to topple Saddam. The sanctions regime designed to contain the Butcher of Baghdad and his barbaric sons was eroding. Saddam had launched two wars against his neighbors and was willing to use any means to defeat his enemies, including the deployment of chemical weapons against civilians. Most importantly, Saddam was aggressively anti-American in both his rhetoric and behavior. Saddam never conceded defeat after the first Gulf War, insisting that the “Mother of All Battles” continued. All of this, and more, made Saddam Hussein’s regime a legitimate worry for policymakers. Indeed, Iraq was the most prominent foreign policy issue of the 1990s, well before President Bush or his advisors ever came to power.

For the most part, Feith pre- sents a robust defense of the Bush administration’s decision-making leading up to the Iraq war. There is, however, one issue that he does not adequately cover: the Iraqi regime’s ties to al-Qaeda.

Shortly after September 11th, Feith and his team set out to re-examine the intelligence on al-Qaeda. It was thin gruel; the CIA had rarely collected useful information on the Bin Laden network, and did not adequately analyze the intelligence that it did. In particular, the CIA inexplicably downplayed or ignored evidence tying the Iraqi regime to al-Qaeda. Feith’s analysts thought this was odd, and challenged the CIA’s methodology. No, Saddam was not conclusively linked to the September 11 operation. Feith himself makes it clear that he did not think Saddam was involved. But there was a flurry of contacts between the two sides, and enough reports of collaboration to be worried.

Feith’s team made Langley’s analysts think more carefully about the issue of Saddam’s ties to al-Qaeda. In the end, as a bipartisan investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee later found, the work performed by Feith’s team actually improved the CIA’s analysis of the issue. Over time, the CIA itself came to report the substantive ties between Saddam’s regime and al-Qaeda.

You would never know that by listening to the mainstream press or Senate Democrats, however. Feith is often presented as someone who manufactured a non-existent link between Saddam and al-Qaeda. What the press and partisan Democrats don’t mention is that this allegation is rooted in the untrustworthy opinions of some disgruntled CIA analysts, who opposed both the Bush administration and its approach to fighting the “war on terror.” Some dogmatically asserted that Saddam’s secular regime could not possibly find common ground with al-Qaeda’s Islamists—no matter what the evidence actually said. And they quite obviously resented being challenged on the issue. So much so, in fact, that Feith became an early target of anonymous leaks inaccurately portraying him as someone who was politicizing intelligence. In reality, a handful of senior analysts inside the CIA who refused to weigh the evidence were the ones doing just that.

In War and Decision, Feith convincingly demonstrates that his team did nothing wrong by looking at the issue of al-Qaeda’s ties to state sponsors of terrorism, including Saddam’s Iraq. If anything, however, he does not go far enough. Feith is content to correct the record, but says almost nothing of substance concerning the actual relationship between Saddam’s Iraq and al-Qaeda. Indeed, Feith insists that the relationship “was a minor part” of the Bush administration’s rationale for war, and Saddam posed a terrorist threat even if there was no substantive link to al-Qaeda.

Maybe so. But by avoiding any significant discussion of the ties between Saddam’s regime and al-Qaeda, Feith has drastically undersold the terrorist threat Saddam’s regime posed. Even the CIA, with its porous intelligence collection and less than rigorous analysis, detected numerous examples of suspected cooperation between Saddam’s regime and al-Qaeda. Indeed, in August 1998, President Clinton himself ordered an act of war based on this body of intelligence—the cruise missile strike on a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan suspected of being one of several owned by al-Qaeda and manufacturing or storing Iraqi VX nerve gas precursors. The intelligence surrounding the strike on al-Shifa remains controversial, but it would have advanced Feith’s argument to have at least mentioned it.

There were a spate of other connections between Saddam’s regime and al-Qaeda as well. For example, the organization’s number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had a longstanding relationship with the Iraqi regime. And Iraqi intelligence documents captured after the fall of Saddam’s regime, at least some of which were available to Feith as he was writing War and Decision, detailed a few instances where Iraq and al-Qaeda discussed joint attacks, including against American forces.

In the end, Feith is right that Saddam’s Iraq posed a unique national security challenge in the post-September 11th world. Ironically, even he does not fully explain this threat. Still, War and Decision corrects the record in so many ways that it will be an indispensable resource for historians looking to write an accurate account of how the Bush administration decided to go to war against Saddam’s regime.

Thomas Joscelyn is a terrorism researcher, writer, and economist living in New York. He is the author of Iran’s Proxy War Against America (Claremont Institute, 2007).