“But,” Feith said, “they had flowers in their minds.”

A LITTLE LEARNING
by JEFFREY GOLDBERG

What Douglas Feith knew, and when he knew it.


http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/050509fa_fact

<<Feith formed his views as a teen-ager in the Philadelphia suburbs during the Vietnam War. “I had done a lot of reading, relative for a kid, about World War Two, and I thought about Chamberlain a lot,” he told me. “Chamberlain wasn’t popular in my house.” Feith’s father lost his parents, three brothers, and four sisters in German death camps. “What I was hearing from the antiwar movement, with which I had a fair amount of sympathy . . . were thoughts about how the world works, how war is not the answer. I mean, the idea that we could have peace no matter what anybody else in the world does didn’t make sense to me. It’s a solipsism. When I took all these nice-sounding ideas and compared it to my own little personal ‘Cogito, ergo sum,’ which was my understanding that my family got wiped out by Hitler, and that all this stuff about working things out—well, talking to Hitler to resolve the problem didn’t make any sense to me. The kind of people who put bumper stickers on their car that declare that ‘war is not the answer,’ are they making a serious comment? What’s the answer to Pearl Harbor? What’s the answer to the Holocaust?” He continued, “The surprising thing is not that there are so many Jews who are neocons but that there are so many who are not.”>>



(I guess the "fair amount of sympathy" he felt for the anti-war movement amounted to "Hell, no, I won't go." :eyes: )



<<There’s a difference between Iraq and Afghanistan: it has been more than two years since the invasion of Iraq; Afghanistan was somewhat pacific a year after the overthrow of the Taliban. But Feith would not yield on that point. When I asked, for instance, if the Administration was too enamored of the idea that Iraqis would greet American troops with flowers, he argued that some Iraqis were still too intimidated by the remnants of Saddam’s Baath Party to express their emotions openly. “But,” Feith said, “they had flowers in their minds.”>>

<<I <the New Yorker's Greenberg> 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. “It’s a large sacrifice. It’s a serious loss. It’s an absolute disaster for the families. Nobody can possibly deny how horrible the loss is for the families involved. But this was an operation to prevent the next, as it were, 9/11, the next major attack that could kill tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Americans, and Iraq is a country of twenty-five million people and it was a major enterprise.”>>

Hitler killed my grandparents, so now I will be Hitler. What a useless piece of crap.

What's the answer to Pearl Harbor, Mr. Feith? In his mind, I presume it would have been to launch a counterattack on Brazil.

The man's "thinking" is so fucked up, it's difficult to know where to start. Even the most basic questions these snippets from the article prompt don't get anywhere near the heart of his delusional ideations.

cited by Neocon publications like the Weekly Standard that there was an absolutely "slam-dunk" provable connection between Saddam and 9/11.

He admits that WMDs were not the main concern in going to war. He admits that they had been planning on war long before they made it public that they were giving Saddam his last chance. He admits that they had to shift gears and change justifications in the middle of the war, though he backtracks when he sleeps on it and realizes the goof he made.

This is a damning article.

Flowers have been blooming all over Iraq for the last five days - at least 150 dead so far.

Guess they're not just in peoples' minds any more, are they Chumpass?

as a phiily kid myself feith is an embarassment. i grew up around men and women who had tattoos from the nazi death camps, but oddly all of those people were liberals and socialists.

note that feith was still attempting to scare people by linking 911 with some sort of iraqi conspiracy to bomb the US.

feith is a lying son of a bitch who ought to have something done to him for all the misery he has caused.

That is what an unnamed White House told Ron Suskind. Another way of expressing the same thought is, "We're always in denial."

Feith probably thinks what he was doing to intelligence at the OSP wasn't cooking it but correcting it.

Feith said.

<You can say that again!>


“It was known to anyone who read newspapers and knew history. Saddam had used nerve gas, he had invaded his neighbors more than once, he had attacked other neighbors, he was hostile to us, he supported numerous terrorist groups. It’s true that he didn’t have a link that we know of to 9/11. . . . But he did give safe haven to terrorists.”

:kick:

He has errors in thinking that result in other people's suffering.

:puke: