There’s the old knee-slapper about the guy looking for his keys under a streetlight, even though he lost them in a dark alley. When asked why he doesn’t look in the alley, he replies, “Well, the light’s better here.”
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall:
There’s a pretty high bar on news that makes former Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith look like an even bigger jackass.
But this may meet the standard. According to this Periscope report in Newsweek, just after 9/11, as administration officials were debating where to launch the war on terror, Feith came up with an idea that showed he was really thinking outside the box.
The first attacks, he apparently wrote, should come in South America. Such attacks would have the advantage of being “a surprise to the terrorists.”
Feith and his advisors “argued that an attack on terrorists in South America — for example, a remote region on the border of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil where intelligence reports said Iranian-backed Hizbullah had a presence — would have ripple effects on other terrorist operations.”
I don’t usually find much common ground with Feith. But I think he’s right that such an attack would have come as quite a surprise to the terrorists. But why stop there? They probably would have been even more dumbfounded if we’d blown up one of our ships in our initial round of retaliation, or perhaps bombed Portugal.
All jokes aside, consider that this fool was a key architect of our policies in fighting terrorism.
Tommy Franks, for all his mistakes, took the measure of this guy pretty well.