Dan Senor Demolishes (Gently) Feith and Wolfowitz

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Dan Senor Demolishes (Gently) Feith and Wolfowitz

Paul Wolfowitz’s admission that he and others were “clueless on counterinsurgency” at the Hudson Institute’s symposium on Douglas Feith’s “War and Decision” last week was certainly the lede as Eli Lake reported it in the New York Sun reported last week, but overlooked were the remarks on the same panel by Dan Senor who demolished — albeit very politely — just about everything Feith and Wolfowitz had to say.

I’m never been a fan of Senor — he has been a spokesman for Freedom’s Watch — and he was, of course, spokesman and a top adviser to Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) chief L. Paul (”Jerry”) Bremer to whom he obviously retains some sense of loyalty. But his responses to the most basic point made by Feith in his book and Wolfowitz during the symposium — that things went bad when the U.S. declared an “occupation” instead of turning over the government to and empowering an Iraqi authority dominated by “externals” like Ahmed Chalabi and other members of the so-called “London Group” — were clear and irrefutable (at least by Feith and Wolfowitz) and also served to point up once again how completely ignorant the administration’s leading hawks were both about Iraqi society and the likely impact on it of the U.S. invasion.

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http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/?p=137

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