The Banality of Evil: What Would Hannah Arendt Say About Doug Feith?
Dana Milbank offers us a good take down on Douglas Feith, one of the two or three principal architects of the Iraq war.
Feith, typical of the ideologues and seekers after profit, feels no guilt whatsoever about the role he played manipulating intelligence to help lie us into the war. But he will give proceeds from his self-justifying memoir to help the troops his actions helped maim or kill. (Big deal. Feith comes from a very wealthy family).
People like me who, in addition to hating this war, are involved in helping Israel and the Palestinians achieve peace, have extra problems with Feith. Long before he decided that a US attack on Iraq would help Israel secure the West Bank, Feith had been a leading Likud activist in the United States. He is no more a Republican than Ariel Sharon was. Feith is all about "securing the realm" (his term for defending the Israeli occupation).
I do not believe that most of the architects of this war had Israel on their minds when they pushed the US into the war. Their goal was profits and the money keeps rolling in. But Feith is not a greedy man. He is a right-winger but in the Israeli context. For him, everything is about crushing the Palestinians. (He despised Rabin and did what he could to undermine him).
Of course, this angle rarely comes up in any of the MSM stories about Feith. But this man has done almost as much damage to Israel as to the United States.
I always wondered how he ever got a security clearance to serve at the Pentagon.
Anyway, it's lovely that Georgetown fired his disloyal ass. But that is not enough by any stretch of the imagination. 4000 American dead. Would they be alive if Feith had never been born? He should be sentenced to spend the rest of his life working with brain injured soldiers at Walter Reed. Many of them will never ever be released. He shouldn't be either.
Here is THE BANALITY OF EVIL
The latest offensive comment out of the poisonous miasma that is the American neocon/Israeli right wing nexus comes from the Israeli ambassador to the US calling Jimmy Carter a bigot for meeting Hamas.
April 25, 2008 8:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
Doug Feith: The Banality of Evil. One of the Revisionaries Of Our Administration of Mediocrity, First Sceptered On Less than A Plurality.
Feith now holds The Disjunct Professorship Chair at George Washington University, School of Foreign Service, teaching two graduate level courses: 1) Advantageous Exploitation of Dialectic Rhetoric; and 2) Artful Renunciation As A Method Of Culpability Avoidance.
Or as it is referred to amongst Neoconniving friends: How To GitMo Abu Ghraib Without Doing The Time with a well-practised performance of the Ledeen Jig, replete with its grandiose spinning pirouettes of mendacity.
April 25, 2008 9:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
I fail to see how Arendt's famous (and frequently misunderstood) phrase applies to Feith. He is dangerously imbecilic, but no Eichmann.
April 25, 2008 10:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
Don't see how Feith and Eichman are similar?
Both conducted great evil, yet both are quite banal. Neither has recognized the evil they were responsible for, and neither ever expressed regret for the deaths for which they were responsible.
Eichman was no great evil man. He was simply a bureaucrat who did his job as directed as well as he could, with no consideration for the evil he did.
Feith seems to have greater purpose for what he has done, but similarly has no expressed no recognition of the evil he is responsible for nor regret for those who have died because of his actions.
They are not the same, but they are both quite commonplace and trite. Neither was in any way unusual in the manner that both Hitler and Dick Cheney are. Still, Feith and Eichman belong to the same (trite) cesspool. They are merely bureaucratic hangers' on to those who are themselves truly evil.
April 25, 2008 2:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yea, not sure that Georgetown did fire Feith...
http://contact.georgetown.edu/index.cfm?Action=View&NetID=djf35
Still listed on in the staff directory there as active, though the latest sylibi is for Spring '07 semester...so either GU is slow at updating their directory or Feith is slow at updating his sylibi.
i'd be interested to see you confirmation as it would ease my mind a bit. My girlfriend attends GU and I make a big point to address to her the indviduals (war criminals) her school chooses to hire.
April 25, 2008 10:46 AM | Reply | Permalink
see your confirmation
April 25, 2008 10:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
from WAPO :
He (Feith)argued that former secretary of state Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, were the ones who failed to challenge the logic of going to war -- not him. He suggested that Powell, Armitage, Franks, former Iraq viceroy Jerry Bremer and even Feith's old boss, Donald Rumsfeld, should be blamed for the postwar chaos in Iraq -- not him. He blamed then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice for the way she operated ("fundamental differences were essentially papered over rather than resolved").
Admittedly I'm a woman and non soldier, but I have more sense than to admit this stupidity. Powell, by press accounts told Bush NOT to go to wage war on Iraq. Blaming after the fact is not only dishonest, it borders on treason.
Instead of quietly atoning for his part in the mess, he writes a book as if he's talking to a bunch of us who don't know what we know now. Can't wait till its in the local dollar store, with John Ashcroft and Karen Hughes junk screed.
April 25, 2008 10:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
April 25, 2008 11:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
While I'm sensitive to the sometimes sincere (usually just a shout down campaign) point about "sympathy" for the "enemy." Many of us remember our grade school years, when our eager but under funded rural schools still had old globes that we used for geography lessons (based on a world atlas from the 40's). The names were different. No Israel for one. Many other non-related territories have also changed names and boundaries or ceased to exist, but of course the point is that Palestine was partitioned by UN directive in 1947. Many of the disagreements and hatreds of course are generational in nature, religious, territorial, cultural, and historical...
but extremism is an interesting species, it feeds off of desperation and injustices. Injustice of course is subjective and debatable, but desperation --that has some measures, and I think by any measure Palestinian desperation has been incrementally increased since 1947. ANTI SEMITE! ANTI ISRAEL! Someone is probably going to reply to this post (or at least think). No. I don't think the UN did the wrong think in acting in facilitating the creation of the Israeli state in 1947, I just happen to humbly recognize with appropriate hindsight, that they did not do it the right way. The short sightedness of 1947 has been causing suffering for 60 years now, suffering of the weak leads to desperation, suffering of the advantaged leads to fear and retribution, and more injustice. Sound familiar? That paints a Douglas Feith as either criminal opportunist, or a misguided idealist (and given power, we know that misguided idealists are not only capable of genocide --they are driven to it).
April 25, 2008 11:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
How typical. Feith simply refuses to accept responsibility for anything he has done or promoted.
April 25, 2008 11:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
The WSJ in defense of Feith et al
I did not know that there were two kinds of torture, lawful and unlawful.
I am not a lawyer but here's my interpretation.
'maximum flexibility' = no limits
'lawful interrogation' = Bush's lawyers will make it lawful, the Golden Shield.
'unlawful torture' = Bush admin narrow definition:
"equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."
April 25, 2008 11:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
"Securing the realm" was one of the catchphrases of the Project for the New American Century of which Feith was a member.
Some of us were on to him 4+ years ago
"WHAT HAS THE PENTAGON'S THIRD MAN DONE WRONG? EVERYTHING."
http://www.slate.com/id/2100899/
April 25, 2008 12:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Why would you subject our heroic, injured soldiers to the evil machinations of this traitorous moron?
How about a swift late-night rendition to our out-sourced torture cells in Egypt or Romania?
April 25, 2008 1:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
To call Feith an example of the banality of evil is being a little hard on banality. I mean, even Eichmann eventually expressed a little remorse for what he had helped do.
April 25, 2008 2:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
John Yoo goes to Berkeley, Feith goes to George Washington. The standards students must meet to enter these universities are obviously exponentially harder than the standards for hiring Professors.
There's a scandal for you.
April 25, 2008 7:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
"John Yoo goes to Berkeley, Feith goes to George Washington.... There's a scandal for you."
Therein lies the banality of evil or what Thorstein Veblen called "The Higher Learning in America."
April 25, 2008 10:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
This isn't a popular point of view around here, because many blame Armitage for Plame's outing, and he does bear a great deal of responsibility for it. Consider though that Armitage, upon realising he'd bee a loud-mouthed buffoon who'd blown a CIA agents's cover immediately went down to the FBI to voluntarily give a deposition, and cooperated uncoerced with Fitzgerald's investigation. Armitage has also publicly admitted he was an utter fool to have spoken to Novak about Plame. Compare that to the saga of Scooter and the Prosecutor.
The Neocons have had a grudge against Armitage since the Reagan Administration (see Counterpunch link below). He has often been the big ox standing in their path. Armitage also provided refuge to bureaucrats under fire from Feith and Bolton while he worked for Powell at State. Feith's finger pointing blame at Armitage and Powell should been seen for what it is: an attempt to blame others for his own responsibility, incompetence and immorality. Neoconsevative Renunciate is a redundant term.
April 26, 2008 10:16 PM | Reply | Permalink