Few Bush administration officials have escaped their time in government service with their reputations intact, but nobody has done as much to make himself despised as former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith. Famously dubbed “the stupidest fucking guy on the face of the planet” by General Tommy Franks, Feith achieved a level of notoriety unusual for a subcabinet official. The Policy shop, generally regarded as the number three post at the Pentagon, has a wide range of responsibilities for developing the Defense Department’s thoughts on big-picture strategic issues and relationships with other countries. From that vantage point, Feith became known as a kind of less-sympathetic version of his bosses, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld.

His book will do little to dispel the sense that his role in the presentation of pre-war intelligence claims was deliberately dishonest, since he’s produced a fundamentally dishonest book. The problems start in the third sentence of the introduction, where he claims he has “aimed not to write a polemic, but rather to make a contribution to history, extensively documented and as accurate as one person’s account can be.” The book is, in fact, very much a polemic -- a lengthy exposition of a point of view that’s had little play in the press or the political system, namely that the serious problems in Iraq have stemmed not from the president listening too much to the extremist views of the civilian defense department officials of the first term, but from listening to them too little.

Fortunately for the world, Feith is not a very good liar. One key contention of the book is that contrary to widespread reporting, Feith and his allies in the administration never sought to install Iraq National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi in power in post-war Iraq. But the sheer amount of space Feith dedicates to Chalabi (not counting the index, he’s mentioned on 64 pages -- about ten percent of the total) belies the contention. A staggering proportion of Feith’s memoir is dedicated to defending Chalabi against various accusations, to questioning the motives of Chalabi’s critics, and to asserting that anti-Chalabi zeal drove the key policy errors that, in Feith’s view, led to the outbreak of the insurgency. His intra-administration opponents were, allegedly, ”so preoccupied with the need to block the externals [i.e., Chalabi] from playing too large a political role that they lost sight of their own stated goal, which was to avoid a long post-Saddam occupation.” And by his own admission he did things like put together a group composed of “Kurdish leaders Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabi, Sherif Ali of the Constitutional Monarchy Movement, and Ahmad Chalabi” to put together a plan for an Iraq Interim Authority. That’s two Kurds who, in virtue of their ethnicity, couldn’t lead Iraq, Chalabi, and Ali -- who coincidentally enough was also a member of Chalabi’s Iraq National Congress. At other times, Feith obscures his water-carrying for Chalabi by getting vague as to what he’s talking about, accusing State Department official Thomas Warrick of making himself “a partisan in the factional quarrels among the Iraqi Americans” who worked on the Future of Iraq project (a government-sponsored study of what post-war Iraq could or should look like that Warrick headed) , and saying that “a few Iraqi American acquaintances” advised him that “Warrick lacked judgment” without explaining which Iraqi Americans he’s talking about.

But lurking behind the smokescreen is a fair point. Feith truly did not get his way on a number of key issues regarding post-war Iraq, and it really is unfair to assert that things turned out as poorly as they did because the administration implemented Feith’s ideas. Of course, Feith would be on firmer ground in asserting this point if not for the fact that his ideas were impractical and absurd. The idea that turning the governance of Iraq over to a nominally sovereign government of American-backed exiles in which “the United States would have the authority to appoint top officials for the ministries of Defense, Finance, Interior, and Oil” could have avoided the “taint of occupation” and prevented the emergence of an insurgency is laughable, and transparently so. Similarly, early elections were not held for the simple reason that absent large-scale rigging they would have produced a nationalist government that asked us to go, not the kind of pliant Chalabist regime Feith dreams of.

On the other hand, Feith mounts a fairly convincing defense of the Bush administration pursuit of a relatively aggressive de-Baathification policy, pointing out that absent this much-criticized move “people might now be asking how President Bush could have failed to foresee that soft-pedaling de-Batthification would trigger an uprising by more than 80 percent of the Iraqi population.” Feith’s critics often assume that just because particular things the administration did seem to have worked out poorly, that doing the reverse would have worked out better, but this doesn’t follow. Unfortunately for him, Feith makes the same mistake -- arguing that if only we’d listened to him more everything would have been fine. Neither side seems prepared to consider the possibility that things worked out poorly because the mission was fundamentally misguided and impossible.

For Feith, though, these errors of implementation are small beer and the only really meaningful mistakes the administration made was in how it made the case for war, in particular over-reliance on arguments about WMD, links to al-Qaeda, and the prospects for democracy. Since that was the entire case, one might think there’s nothing left, but to Feith the key to the whole enterprise is a vague concept he calls the “terrorist network” a murky catchall term for disparate sorts of terrorist groups (Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Abu Nidal Organization) and state sponsors of terrorism (the Taliban, Iraq, Iran, Syria, even North Korea) that should be treated as a single threat such that “if the U.S. government limited its attention to the perpetrators of 9/11, Rumsfeld reasoned, we would not be doing all we could to prevent the next attack, which could come from any quarter of the international terrorist network.” That this conception of terrorism as a quasi-unitary phenomenon was inspired by a book Claire Sterling published in 1981 -- at a moment when geopolitical circumstances were very different and al-Qaeda didn’t exist -- doesn’t seem to embarrass Feith. Nor does the fact that “could” is doing an awful lot of work here -- if the Lakers shut down the Celtics’ two main scoring threats in Thursday’s game, Kendrick Perkins could emerge as a dominant low post offensive presence, but he almost certainly won’t.

The striking thing about this isn’t just how shockingly stupid it is, but that Feith is correct to point out that many of his detractors, including administration moderates like Colin Powell and Democrats like Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Jay Rockefeller didn’t really challenge it at the time. But if Feith is correct to say that such people are being unfair when they attempt to lay the blame for the war all at his feet, they at least have the virtue of recognizing that the war was a disaster the blame for which should be left at someone’s feet. To Feith, however, it remains a fundamentally noble undertaking -- one that historians are likely to vindicate now that they have access to his (deeply unconvincing) book.