Iraq War Architect Feith Slams Trump Iran Deal
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- Douglas Feith published a Washington Post op-ed assailing Vice President J.D. Vance and indirectly Trump over the U.S.-Iran MoU signed in Versailles, his first major-paper op-ed since 2016.
- Feith served as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy in George W. Bush's first term and co-authored the 1996 "Clean Break" memo for incoming Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu calling for regime change in Syria and Saddam Hussein's ouster.
- At the Pentagon, Feith created the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Unit and the Office of Special Plans, which pushed intelligence linking Saddam to Al-Qaeda despite U.S. intelligence community judgments and championed de-Baathification that the source says fueled Iraq's sectarian civil war.
- Feith also established the short-lived Office of Strategic Influence, shut down by Congress over plans to plant false stories in foreign media.
- CENTCOM commander Tommy Franks told Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward he had to deal with "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth almost every day," referring to Feith.
- The columnist notes that the word "Iraq" did not appear once in Feith's new op-ed attacking the Iran deal.
Why it matters: The credibility of opposition to Trump's Iran deal rests partly on who carries the message — and putting an Iraq War architect at the front of that campaign risks making the anti-deal coalition look like a re-run of the neoconservative case for regime change rather than a fresh critique. With Feith emerging from near-total obscurity after not publishing a major-paper op-ed since 2016, the episode shows that the hardest-line anti-Iran voices in Washington remain tethered to the same policymakers who sold the 2003 invasion.
