Who’s your war-daddy?

Stupidest fucking guy on the planet² – Hugh Hewitt meets Doug Feith:

HH: I’m so struck by the deep division in the Bush administration first term, between those who think ideologically, and those who are often called realists, pragmatists, whatever. It’s a deep, deep division. That’s the revelation of War And Decision, that the media’s been sniffing around this for a long time, Doug Feith. But it was profound, it had enormous consequences for the war thus far.

DF: It did, and I mean, one of the points that I make throughout the book is that almost everything that…almost all the key elements of the conventional wisdom that people get from the mainstream media are…almost all those elements are inaccurate. And part of the reason that they are so widespread and have become the conventional wisdom is that they came from people within the administration who did not support the President.

HH: Right, right, and that’s very important. And the distortions in the public record, which we’re going to go through, are many and important. But I want to start with a more global question, that War And Decision answers in a sort of backwards way. Six and a half years after 9/11, five years after the invasion of Iraq, does the American public, Doug Feith, have a good grasp on the network of jihadists, and the threat they pose?

DF: Well, we have some grasp of it, and I think in some respects, we have knowledge, and we’ve had some accomplishments. But as Secretary Rumsfeld used to emphasize all the time, we’ve got a thinking enemy. And so as we get on top of issues, the enemy adapts.

HH: Well, I think…my question was the American public, not our decision makers, but generally speaking, the average man or woman in the street.

DF: Oh, no. There, I would agree with you. There is, I think, I think that there is not, in general, an appreciation of the nature of this problem. And partly, it’s because the administration decided, and that this is I think one of the things that is most to the President’s credit, the President decided immediately after 9/11 that our main goal was not retaliation, but preventing the next attack.

HH: Yup.

So we gave up on going after Al Qaeda and invaded Iraq.

Yup.

Thinking about both Hewitt and Feith reminded me of one of my favorite literary stories:

One of modern poetry’s great symbolic and prophetic moments came in 1912, when Ezra Pound challenged Lascelles Abercrombie to a duel. Upset at the literary shenanigans of younger writers (as well as some old enough to have known better), Abercrombie had called for a return to Wordsworth; incensed, Pound issued his challenge, announcing to his intended victim that ‘Stupidity carried beyond a certain point becomes a public menace’. Offered a choice of weapons (and knowing that Pound was a practised, if eccentric, fencer), Abercrombie suggested that the two poets should bombard each other with unsold copies of their own books. As an image for what was to come — the struggle between tradition and innovation in the context of an enduring lack of public interest in poetry of either shade — the comic resolution of this quarrel could hardly be bettered.

Feith and Hewitt should be forced to hurl copies of War and Decision and Painting the Map Red at each other until they are both exhausted and unable to defend themselves.

Then we should release the hounds….