Soon to be Feithless

Perhaps the next administration official to fall on his sword as a plausible scapegoat will be Douglas Feith.

"The broad outlines of the role played by Feith as a champion of the view that Iraq and Al Qaeda were closely linked have been disclosed previously. The view, a staple of the Bush administration's public statements before the Iraq invasion in March 2003, has since been discredited by the Sept. 11 commission, which concluded that Iraq and Al Qaeda had 'no close collaborative relationship.'

Bush administration officials have defended Feith's prewar efforts as reflecting a legitimate effort to develop an alternative analysis of the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda. But the report by Levin includes new details showing that Feith's accounts to the White House and Congress through early 2004 deviated from the intelligence agencies' assessments to a degree that the Pentagon official did not acknowledge."

Or not.