Doug Feith's Web Counterattack

Dou

g Feith, the Pentagon's former No. 3 civilian official whom many Democrats blame for pushing the U.S. to invade Iraq with sloppy intelligence ginned up by his office, is fighting back. He's just launched his own website at www.dougfeith.com

It's a workmanlike site, featuring the same photograph of the former undersecretary of defense for policy that the Pentagon used in his official bio before he left in 2005. "The 'Bush lied, people died' argument is not true," he asserts in bold-faced type at the top of his home page. He notes the Feb. 7 release of a Pentagon inspector general's report that has "spawned a lot of inaccurate commentary by politicians and misreporting by journalists."

Of course, inaccuracies and misreporting are exactly what Sen. Carl Levin and other Democrats allege that Feith himself did in the walkup to the 2003 invasion. Intelligence analysts working for him drew links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda that didn't pan out, they say. But those suspected links were cited by President Bush and Vice President Cheney in the rush to war. The IG said Feith's work was "inappropriate," but not illegal.

Feith chooses to argue that the debate shouldn't be over whether he and his staff got it right, but whether or not the CIA — which looked but could find no links between Saddam and al-Qaeda — should be immune from outside criticism. "The IG got this point wrong and it would be dangerous to follow his badly reasoned opinion on the issue," Feith writes on his site. "To guard against such errors, policy officials should be praised, not slapped, for challenging CIA products." He helpfully notes that the CIA got it wrong when it concluded, before the war, that Saddam's Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

The site includes praise for Feith from Marine General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who calls him a "patriot" who "cares only about what is best for the United States." The site includes news articles and documents pertaining to Feith's Pentagon tenure. And there's a tempting link entitled "Media Myths vs. Facts." Unfortunately, clicking that link brings you to a bare page with a forlorn message: "More information coming soon."