On September 11th, Feith was in Moscow participating in return meetings with Russian defense officials, when news of the awful events at the World Trade Center reached him. He recalls realizing that broadcast news would be the best source of information about the goings on back home, a sobering admission coming from the number three man in the Pentagon. When events were finally confirmed in the early evening Moscow time, Feith set about trying to figure out how to get back to Washington. With commercial air traffic grounded across the United States, military transport was the only option. Due to the late hour, it was impossible to get Russian permission for a U.S. military plane to land in Moscow to pick up the Pentagon contingent, a complication that would turn out to have very fortuitous consequences for the nation’s emerging war policy.
By the time Feith boarded the KC-135 tanker bound for Andrews from Germany, he had heard President Bush’s early references to the events as an act of war. Out of contact with the White House and the Pentagon, he took it as a given that the United States’ response was going to be far more involved than its previous acts following terrorist strikes. There would be no cruise missile launches in the dead of night this time. The president was taking the nation into battle.
Also stranded abroad on September 11th, and returning to Washington on the same plane as Feith were: Peter Rodman, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs; his deputy for Near East and South Asia Affairs, Bill Luti; and Lt. Gen. John Abizaid, head of the Strategy and Plans Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The four men spent the five hours of the flight comparing notes, and taking new ones, on just what the Pentagon’s policy should be going forward in the post-9/11 world. Key questions that the impromptu group discussed were: Who was the enemy; What should the United States response look like; How would success be measured; Where should strikes take place? The answers to those questions would be put through the bureaucratic ringer in the coming month, as the Pentagon, State Department, CIA, and White House decided upon the strategy in the emerging war on terror. Along the way, the answers met with general agreement from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, general disagreement from Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage, foot-dragging from CIA Director George Tenet and his intelligence community operatives, and blatant misreporting and mischaracterization from the liberal press.
Faith recounts all of these using quotes from heretofore-unseen internal memos and “snowflakes” emanating from Rumsfeld’s prolific pen in a page turning narrative that destroys the well-heeled notions that the Bush Administration’s war on terror lacked a planning focus and a coherent strategic direction. From September 12th, Feith depicts President Bush as pushing Rumsfeld, who was pushing his staff, to get the answers to the big questions right. That effort led directly to some of the early mistakes in the war, and some of its later successes.
Chapter four begins Feith’s examination of the campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan. In the next installment in this series, the relationship between the big ideas formulated on that September 12th trip back to Washington and the trajectory of the Afghanistan campaign will be explored.
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