Losing Feith

The departure by mid-2005 of the number-three man at the Defense Department, announced by the Pentagon last week, marks the latest hint that President George W. Bush is moving foreign policy in a more centrist direction.

Combined with several other personnel shifts, as well as a concerted effort to reassure the public and U.S. allies abroad that the recent messianic inaugural address did not portend any dramatic new foreign-policy departures, the resignation of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith suggests that the administration is deliberately shedding its sharper and more-radical edges.

The fact that the Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton – who had hoped to be promoted to Deputy Secretary of State under Condoleezza Rice – has still not been assigned a new job has contributed to that impression.

Like Feith, Bolton – the administration's most outspoken exponent of unilateralism – has generally been regarded as an extremist on key issues that have wreaked havoc on U.S. ties with its European allies. Among these are Iraq, the International Criminal Court (ICC), Iran and other nuclear proliferation issues.

With a number of senior posts, including Feith's, still unfilled, however, it remains too soon to conclude that a Bush's second term will tack to the center.

Rice's decision to appoint Trade Representative Robert Zoellick as her deputy and to rely on career diplomats – rather than political appointees as urged by Cheney and the neoconservatives – for other top spots suggests strongly that the State Department will remain a realist redoubt in Bush's second term. But other key vacancies remain up in the air.

Speculation about who may replace Feith ranges from Bolton and  neoconservative hard-liner and Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby; to the more pragmatic, if hawkish, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Asia, Richard Lawless; while Elliott Abrams, Rice's former Middle East advisor, is considered the inside pick. Although neoconservative, Abrams is considered more flexible – and far more diplomatic – than either Feith or Bolton.

While Feith's hard-line neoconservative backers, including his mentor, former Defense Policy Board (DPB) chairman Richard Perle, insisted that his decision to leave the administration was taken solely for ''personal and family reasons'' as stated in the Pentagon the announcement – Feith, 51, has four children at home – many analysts dismissed that explanation, citing his well-known ideological zeal.

''I think they decided to get rid him of long ago but were afraid that doing so would have been seen as a tacit admission that Bush screwed up in Iraq,'' said one administration official, who asked not to be identified.

He added that Feith's authority over policy had been gradually reduced over the past 18 months due to complaints about his performance from Congress, the uniformed military, and Washington's coalition partners in Iraq – particularly British Prime Minister Tony Blair who, according to one source, had asked Bush to remove Feith well over a year ago.

As undersecretary, Feith played a critical role in the run-up to the Iraq war, for which he was a major prewar booster. Two offices established under his authority, the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group and the Office of Special Plans, became particularly controversial.

The former reportedly reviewed ''raw intelligence'' gathered by the official intelligence agencies and Iraqi exiles in order to try to establish the existence of links between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda that could be cited by the administration in its case for going to war. The resulting product – which was subsequently leaked to the neoconservative Weekly Standard – was then ''stovepiped'' to Cheney's office and from there into the White House, thus circumventing review by professional analysts.