Douglas Feith

Douglas J. "Doug" Feith is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for National Security Strategies at the Hudson Institute. He is also a Belfer Center Visiting Scholar at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

In the George W. Bush Administration, he was Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from July 2001 until August 2005, he helped devise the U.S. government's strategy for the war on terrorism and contributed to policy making for the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns.

Law practice
A graduate of Harvard and Georgetown Law, Mr. Feith was for fifteen years the managing attorney of the Washington, D.C. law firm Feith & Zell, P.C.

Isakoff & Korn state his firm was heavily involved in work for Israel. They called him a "consultant" on the 1996 "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" paper prepared for Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, authored for an Israeli think tank, The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS), by David Wurmser. They state the paper called for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Feith accepts the term consultant, but in the sense of "simply someone with whom the author consulted in the course of his work."

Ronald Reagan Administration
From his law practice, he became a National Security Council specialist on the Middle East in the Reagan Administration, and then moved to the Pentagon as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Negotiations Policy, working for Richard Perle.

George W. Bush Administration
In the George W. Bush Administration, other officials found him intent on injecting ideology into policy discussions, as abstractions rather than as specific proposals as did Dick Cheney and others. "All he did was sput rhetoric...he would launch into these diatribes about neofascism...he had no interest in problem solving. According to the same NSC official, he seemed more concerned with protecting Donald Rumsfeld's opinions than formulating policy.

Intelligence interpretation
Feith said that he reported on a relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq. He speaks of contacts, but the more general concern in the United States intelligence community was whether any operational relationship exists, or if Iraq directed al-Qaeda.

War planning
LTG Greg Newbold had been in Britain, discussing Operation NORTHERN WATCH and Operation SOUTHERN WATCH, when the 9-11 attack struck. On his return, he said Feith saked him "why are you working on Afghanistan? You ought to be working on Iraq." Feith denied this, saying he had been conveying Rumsfeld's thinking about considering the war on terrorism in a broader context.

GEN Tommy Franks, commander of United States Central Command, told his planning staff, in January 2002, that the Office of the Secretary of Defense was demanding much, but "I'll worry about OSD, all of them &mdash; including Doug Feith, who's getting a reputation as the dumbest f*****g guy on the planet. Your job is to make me feel warm and fuzzy. Look, we're all professionals. Let's earn our pay."