A Little Learning
What Douglas Feith knew, and when he knew it.
by Jeffery Goldberg
Wow, it turns out that Douglas J. Feith is indeed “the fu***ng stupidest guy on the face of the earth.”
One afternoon, I asked Feith what had gone wrong in Iraq.
“Your assumption is that everything went wrong,” he replied.
I hadn’t said that, but I spoke of the loss of American lives—more than fifteen hundred soldiers, most of whom died after the declared end of major combat operations. This number, I said, strikes many people as a large and terrible loss.
“Based on what?” Feith asked.
I like this part too. Accepting the limitations on his genius, Feith relies on his intellectual mentor for guidence and “sound judgement.” Hint: It’s not Leo Strauss.
“There’s a paradox I’ve never been able to work out,” he said. “It helps to be deeply knowledgeable about an area—to know the people, to know the language, to know the history, the culture, the literature. But it is not a guarantee that you will have the right strategy or policy as a matter of statecraft for dealing with that area. You see, the great experts in certain areas sometimes get it fundamentally wrong.”
I asked Feith if he was talking about himself, and he said, “I am talking about myself in the following sense: expertise is a very good thing, but it is not the same thing as sound judgment regarding strategy and policy. George W. Bush has more insight, because of his knowledge of human beings and his sense of history, about the motive force, the craving for freedom and participation in self-rule, than do many of the language experts and history experts and culture experts.”
To any rational American, this ought to be the final explanation of why we must adopt a non-interventionist foreign policy.
