New Yorker: Profile of Douglas Feith

It has been Feith’s job, as the top policy adviser to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his departing deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, to help build the intellectual framework for the Bush Administration’s campaign against terrorism. His detractors see him as an ideologue who manipulated intelligence to bring about the invasion of Iraq. His main nemesis on Capitol Hill, Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who serves on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told me that Feith deceived not only the White House but Congress as well. Yet the criticism of Feith in Washington goes beyond his ideology, to his competence. Even some fellow-neoconservatives, who have been lacerating in their criticism of Rumsfeld for his management of postwar Iraq, have asked whether Feith is better at reading history than at shaping it. “I don’t know whether Feith deserves more praise for supporting George W. Bush’s foreign policy or more criticism for being an agent of Rumsfeld,” William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, said.