Jon Stewart Interviews Douglas Feith

Have you ever wanted someone to ask Douglas Feith real questions. You remember, Feith, the Undersecretary of Defense under Rumsfeld and architect of the Iraq War invasion? The man who wrote a bang-up PowerPoint linking al-Qaeda with Saddam Hussein? The man who Tommy Franks called "the stupidest f***ing guy on the earth?"

Well, someone interviewed Feith and actually asked probing, legitimate questions. There were even some follow up questions to boot! Of course, it wasn't a real journalist. It was Jon Stewart. And it is definitely worth a watch:

[WATCH THE UNCUT VERSION]

Comments

[MadJeffersonian]

STFU, Feith. You guys, the Bush Crime Syndicate, are liars.

"Thought through the problems reasonably well?" Are you kidding us?! According to Bush Crime Syndicate, dissent and questioning were unacceptable then, and it still is now. Shinseki, and others like him, were public ridiculed for expressing serious concerns and offering intelligent advice. Rummy threatened to fire people if he heard any more opinions that differed from his and Bushie's.

Feith and the rest of you like0-minded criminal SOBs should be in a courtroom or a jail cell for what you have perpetrated on the US and the world.

We need more Jon Stewarts (and Helen Thomases). The traditional media outlets are a JOKE!

[cuchulain]

normathumb,

The south felt they were responding to an attack on their way of life. They attacked to protect and defend. They also felt they had the food and textiles wrapped up. They felt pretty good about their agricultural wealth, supply lines, and the size of their land holdings. At the start of the Civil War, the north was not militarized to any great degree, and the south believed it was superior. By every metric, it felt it could defeat the Yankees when the war started. In fact, they thought they could make very short work of them and get back to living their lives without federal government interference.

Your example doesn't work. On any level.

[rbloom]

Not my original comment, but I feel I have to drop in and recommend James McPherson's great "Battle Cry of Freedom." The first chapter lays out the comparative demographics of the North and South very well.

[UncleSquinky]

To you armchair historians going off on a tangent here:

I think a more accurate maxim of history is that no nation has initiated a war against another nation, which it didn't think it would win.

But as to whether a weaker nation ever started a conflict with a stronger one, there is most certainly a major historical precedent: The Second Punic War. However, even in this case, the aggressor, Carthage, foolishly thought it could beat Rome; it also knew that time was against it, so it was a now or never proposition.

Another classical case is Alexander's invasion of Persia. Persia had much more manpower, wealth and resources than the indomitable Macedonian; however, Darius The Not So Great played his hand very poorly, challenging Alexander in head on, rather than using Fabian-esque tactics.

I would also argue that Hitler attacking the USSR was a case of a weaker nation attacking a stronger one, given that Germany was already at war with England and the USSR was a vast country to conquer, with a much greater population, more resources and a much more vast industrial capacity than Germany.

The same could/has be said of Napoleon's invasion of Russia, as well as his reprise, culminating at Waterloo.

Certainly Imperial Japan attacking the US was a dubious proposition from the outset.

The Seven Years War was another case in point: Prussia and England against just about everybody else .

And what about the Falklands War?.

[rbloom]

Good points all, Unc.
But I object to being called an "armchair historian." My chair has no arms!
Nor does it have any padding. So that makes me a sore-assed historian.
Get your facts straight.

[cuchulain]

Completely false. Germany towered over Russia, as far as military strength at the beginning of WWII. It wasn't even close. Germany was far, far more industrialized as well. No nation had poured as much money and industry into creating a war machine at the time. The Soviet Union was reeling from several economic shocks and self-inflicted genocide. Hitler knew he had a more powerful nation, by far. He had military and economic superiority. He went wrong by opening up too many fronts at the same time and misjudged the Russian winter. The snow beat him, along with millions of Russian soldiers sent to their slaughter by their own government. Hitler couldn't defeat the weather, too many fronts, and the masses of human cannon fodder.

Hitler never attacked a nation he thought he couldn't beat handily.

[rbloom]

I don't want to be argumentative. Let me just refer you to "Thunder in the East" by Evan Mawdsley or "When Titans Clashed" by David Glantz. They're on Amazon or probably at your local library.

[jagoneely]

That was great journalism. Sadly, he doesn't consider himself a journalist, but a comedian. I'm starting to think all the other journalists are "comedians" and Stewart is the real deal. BRAVO!

[simpleshepard]

Oh my Lord,
That was just about the best and most honest discussion I have seen from somebody in our media. I have to say he pretty much took it to him. He allowed him to make his points but in the end Jon's logic was unassailable. If they did know the truth of what we were getting into and they didn't tell us that truth, then they were practicing deception.
Traitors. They are all traitors.

[drkazmd65]

I watched that interview - and my two thoughts were,...

1) Wow,... somebody is actually asking one of the lying necon bastards that got us into that war / occupation of Iraq on (mostly) false pretenses REAL QUESTIONS - and it is a satirical comedy show host.

2) How stupid / ballsy is Feith (or his publicist) to actually go onto a show where the host is going to ask him specific & pointed questions?

That being said - Stewart asked the quesitons that our alleged journalists should have been asking for years, and then allowed the guest a chance to answer them, and then restated what all of us thinking Americans have been thinking for years,.. that we were outright lied to.

Thank you again Jon Stewart!

[argeec]

I wonder if the media and others were deceived or if they were knowingly complicit.
After all, the NY Times, NBC, etc. were intimately familiar with the mideast, were they not?
And I was totally amazed when I first heard that Iraq was a target-it made no sense to me.
Everything I knew told me that Iraq was very weak, secular and an enemy of Al Qaeda.
And Colin Powell's UN presentation was just about the lamest thing I've ever seen.
So why wasn't the media more sceptical and questioning?

[lechatnoir]

asking that question is answering it...the media are OWNED by the very same corporation that stand to make zillions of dollars from war, any war.

as corporations, it's their duty to maximize profit for their shareholders. The media only serve to fill in the airtime between the ads.

[tbone99]

Mr Feith , you believe they were errors , not deceptions? How about a polygraph on that statement .....

while you're in the bathtub?

[fdp3]

Feith continues to claim that the government thought Saddam was a serious threat. The bulk of the evidence for that was either overstated or flatly fabricated by the government itself.

fp

[lisakaz2]

I'm waiting for the day it comes out that the yellowcake lie was started by Darth Cheney and ppl like Feith.

[fdp3]

By FAR the most substantive, probing, persistent, relentless, yet relentlessly polite, intelligent and adult interview on the foundation of the war and our government's role in it plays under a banner that says COMEDY CENTRAL.

fp

[tipiglen6]

And they say Americans don't do irony!

[drkazmd65]

Exactly fdp3 - isn't this what actual journalists are supposed to be doing?

[leogorcey]

The problem back in 2000-2003 was that most of the country (including the leadership) lacked that most valuable of of human qualities - common sense. The McClatchey papers told us this thing was bullshit, everyone who knew the difference between a Sunni and a Shite knew it was bullshit, military people in and out of the government knew it was bullshit.

The problem was that the MSM did not think it was bullshit and if there was a spark of doubt it was doused with a little fear of appearing unpatriotic. The MSM also knows there is nothing like a good old fashioned war to keep people interested enough to watch night after night of commercials for medicines for their digestive tract, medicines to help them go to sleep, medicines to get a hard-on, cure baldness, tension headaches, acid reflux disease, etc., etc., etc.

Let us face it. The intellectual perverts who sold this war THINK THAT 50.1111111111 PERCENT OF US ARE COMPLETE MORONS. My sweet suffering Jesus...28% of us STILL THINK BUSH IS DOING A GREAT JOB. All they needed was another 22% of us to go along or even better DON'T SAY A FUCKING THING ABOUT IT.

The neo-con types obviously never saw a mangled dead body or could ever imagine that the great old US OF A would make such a perfect mistake. This guy will sell books simply because there are a lot of stupid people in our country.

[tompoe]

We can all look forward to watching the interview later, when this war criminal is placed behind bars.

[iBgood]

Why didn't Stewart bring up Wilson and Plame being targeted for Wilson's report that blew a hole in their whole WMD excuse to invade? Come one. They just didn't "word things" right but there was no intension to deceive?

LOL! feith thought he had a moment of glory when toward the end he started spouting about how bad things would have looked in history if bush had let Sadam stay in power and Stewart said that could be said about a lot of countries! You could see his pumped up chest deflate.

Why are these neo cons still around trying to influence perception with their lies and why are they all such ugly prissy elitists with no lips?

[drtwo25]

given the time constraint of the interview Stewart had to talk about Feith's and the governments deception at a general scale and didn't have time to go into every mistake he made. The time he gave to Feith to answer the questions was merely to build up to his final case, the government 'sold' the war while hiding any information that might hurt the case, which is undeniable true.

trying to pin him down on smaller issues would've been petty

[kl836]

I disagree. I believe Jon Stewart played softball although to his credit he was tougher than anyone else I've seen one on one with the people responsible for this tragedy. These war criminals now claiming good intentions and perhaps conceding "some bad judgement" need to be publicly confronted with exactly what you call "smaller issues": Paul O'Neill, Ex Sec. of Treasury under Bush (along with other insiders) stating that Iraq was on the agenda from the first day of the Bush administration, the Downing Street Memo, the report to then President Clinton from The Project for a New American Century urging him to attach Iraq , top pentagon officials having the intelligence that Iraq was indeed no threat and being cut off from any planning and decision making (what's the name of that female officer who who resigned and sacrificed her career because she knew that what they were feeding the public was mainly lies and deception). They were successful in their propaganda to take this country to war, they might yet again be successful in their latest insidious attempts to write the history of the run up to this war and then frame the whole thing as "some unfortunate mistakes were made."
It's an outrage that Rumsfeld, Rove, Kristol, et.al. have been offered prestigious positions at well repected institutions or publications and are not experiencing the social ostrasization and legal prosecution that befits liars, thiefs and murders.

[Hardbull]

Stewart wasn't playing softball, just being polite. The underlying message of the interview was that the American people were largely deceived and the Iraq invasion and occupation amounted to a costly, unnecessary war of Bush's choice. That can't be said enough this election year. Plus, he noted how Feith's book was "slooooow reading," which has got help book sales...

[drtwo25]

you're missing my point
if Stewart, first of all a comedian, not a prosecutor, would try to pin him down on all these issues he had to give Feith time to explain them. These issues aren't as black and white and it would have given Feith an opportunity to slip in some.. defensive truth which in turn would undermine the iron tight ball grip Stewart had on him.

In that perspective you can hardly call it softball, but maybe you expect hardball to be played the way papa bear O'reilly does, by shouting every thing he can think of at his opponent. Now I'm for one glad Stewart doesn't agree with you on that and got the best out of the interview in an intellectual and civilized manner.

[Scarllatti]

This scumbag can actually sell a hooker to the Pope. What a bizarre line of thought. They all want to write these stupid books after the fact. He should tell his stories to the marines for all I care.

[DrVeruju]

I think the saddest thing is the fact that this administration managed to lose all the sympathy that was apparent from all around the world immediately after 911. We could have had hundreds of millions more allies in a really effective police action, most of whom have turned against us as a result of the actions prompted in part by DF.