Douglas J. Feith, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War On Terrorism (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 688 pp., $27.95.

Michael Gerson, Heroic Conservatism: Why Republicans Need to Embrace America's Ideals (And Why They Deserve to Fail If They Don't) (New York: HarperOne, 2008), 320 pp., $15.95.

George Tenet with Bill Harlow, At The Center of the Storm: The CIA During America's Time of Crisis, (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 608 pp., $16.95.

FOR MUCH of the past eight years, the memoirs of former Bush administration officials have served as a battleground for debates over the true nature of conservatism. Ever since David Frum, one of the most astute observers of conservatism, aired some of his reservations about the Bush administration after serving as a speechwriter, numerous advisers have followed in his path. As they promise a bird's-eye view into the workings of a White House enmeshed in two wars and entangled in various internal power struggles, their books have seldom failed to garner a good deal of publicity. They represent a school of thought that might be called the tragedians. They see an administration that squandered its potential and tarnished its record by engaging in blatant and systematic deception.

Their efforts include The Price of Loyalty, Ron Suskind's chronicle of Paul O'Neill's tenure as treasury secretary, in which O'Neill indicated that planning for the Iraq War had commenced almost as soon as Bush became president; Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies, which exposed then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's failure to respond to warnings about an al-Qaeda attack; and David Kuo's Tempting Faith, which suggested that the administration was, in fact, simply paying lip service to evangelical concerns rather than seeking to promote them. More often than not, these books have become vital parts of partisan political warfare in Washington, deployed to show that the administration is as perfidious or inept as its adversaries have always claimed. The most sensational example of this phenomenon, of course, has been Scott McClellan's What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception.

Even as the tragedians have bemoaned the administration's course, however, a second school of disgruntled and more bellicose officials has emerged to offer a different version of history. They too believe that Bush has gone badly off course. But while their assessments are similar to those of the tragedians', their reasons are not. Their argument is not that Bush has been too conservative. It's that he has not been conservative enough. In crumpling before the onslaught of the liberal media and CIA and State Department officials, they suggest, Bush has betrayed his own early promise. Gone is the tough-talking unilateralism of the first term, replaced by feckless kowtowing to Iran and North Korea, while a resurgent Russia invades Georgia with impunity and democratization rhetoric goes by the wayside. This is, essentially, the argument that a cadre of neoconservatives have been making, and it is at the intellectual heart of new books emanating from that camp. The neoconservatives, you might say, have gone to war again-this time against the Bush administration.

So, with the changing of the White House guard, it's an opportune moment to take stock. New memoirs by Douglas J. Feith, who was undersecretary of defense for policy, and Michael Gerson, who was Bush's chief speechwriter, provide that opportunity, as does George Tenet's account of his tenure as director of the CIA.

PERHAPS NO neoconservative has endured more obloquy than Feith, who was memorably dismissed by General Tommy Franks with a vulgarity that left one with the clear impression that the general was not overly impressed with Feith's abilities. Similarly, speaking at the New America Foundation in October 2005, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as an aide to former-Secretary of State Colin Powell, too, dismissed Feith's intellectual abilities. But these comments never felt quite right. Feith can be dogmatic and zealous-an expert at splitting hairs-but a lack of candlepower has never seemed prominent among his deficiencies. Rather, what is most striking about Feith is the consistency of his chiliastic views and beliefs from a young age.

Like many neocons, Feith, as he recounts early on in his memoir, was decisively shaped by his family history. Feith's father, Dalck, grew up in Koenigsberg before being captured and tortured by the Nazis. His father escaped and fled to America, where he served in the United States Merchant Marine. Like many Holocaust survivors, Feith's father was tight-lipped about his experiences. According to Feith,

Trying to make sense of them, I read books on war, diplomacy, politics, and government. What came to interest me especially were the efforts of British leaders to manage the rise of Adolf Hitler. . . . it was obvious . . . to me, with hindsight, that nothing short of war could have stopped, let alone reversed, Nazi aggression. This lesson lodged itself in my thoughts when I was a teenager during the debate over the Vietnam War, leading me to question the slogans of the time proclaiming that war is never necessary.

Feith's parents were both Democrats, but at Harvard, which was dominated by liberals and radicals opposed to the Vietnam War, he began to turn toward the Right. Feith recollects that he was also suspicious of Richard M. Nixon's efforts to create détente with the Soviet Union: "I took no pleasure in watching my downbeat analysis confirmed throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, as the Soviets violated their arms-control obligations, offered support to terrorists, and devastated Afghanistan."

Feith earned a law degree at Georgetown, but his true interest was always politics. He wrote speeches for Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, who failed to win a seat in the Senate, and landed an internship at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, where he met Fred Iklé, John Lehman and Paul Wolfowitz. "When my internship ended," Feith recounts, "Wolfowitz wrote me a generous letter of recommendation. The letter was like a long pass he threw and then caught himself twenty-five years down the road." By the time he was twenty-three years old, Feith was a member of the board of directors of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.

Feith notes that he also worked for Richard Perle, who was Senator Henry M. Jackson's key aide on foreign affairs. Always keen to show that there was nothing unusual about the web of relationships that made up the neoconservative world, Feith blandly observes, "Perle befriended talented political allies and helped them in their careers. He showed them attention and loyalty, which bred much loyalty in return. In time, Perle became the hub of an extensive network of successful people." The connection with Perle paid off years later when Feith went on to serve in the Reagan administration as an assistant to Perle after having flamed out at the National Security Council. His description of the Reagan administration captures the difference between neocons and traditional conservatives. According to Feith, "the Reagan Administration's outlook was not stodgy, do-nothing, muddle-through, status-quo conservatism. Reagan and his political appointees were ambitious, bordering on radical." But Reagan himself was not a radical. On the contrary, he wound down the cold war and signed arms-control treaties with Mikhail Gorbachev. Neocons such as Norman Podhoretz denounced Reagan for doing so at the time. But the perception, or fantasy, that he was one of them nonetheless became the credo of the neocons, who kept searching for a new Reagan, and believed they had found one in George W. Bush.

His account of the Bush years, you might say, is the best and worst of Feith. Consistent with his desire to downplay the conspiratorial character of the neocon movement ascribed to it by its adversaries, Feith seeks to depict Bush as someone who reluctantly and independently came to the conclusion that Iraq had to be confronted: "Ultimately, President Bush concluded that he had to remove Saddam's regime from power by war." Did he? Or was he intent on it long before? Feith is presenting speculation as fact. No one knows for certain when or why Bush decided that war was in the offing-perhaps the most basic mystery surrounding a mysterious war of choice.

The best case that Feith can make for the war in the end is simply to engage in scare scenarios. He claims that containment was on the ropes-in fact, we now know that it was quite effective-and speculates that the continuation of no-fly zones over Iraq would have inevitably led to renewed conflict, thereby giving "Saddam a chance to intimidate and hurt the United States-perhaps through cooperation with terrorists, and possibly through the brandishing, use, or transfer of biological or other catastrophic weapons." Sure. But the fact is that in retrospect Saddam appears to have been extremely cautious about striking any alliances with terrorists and the last thing he would have done was to try to attack the United States. Instead, he was simply intent on maintaining power and fending off Iraq's mortal enemy, Iran, by pretending that he possessed weapons of mass destruction. Finally, the no-fly zones appear to have worked very well, emasculating Saddam's military. It is far from clear that he would have been in a position to menace the United States and its allies. Quite the contrary.

Such boilerplate, redolent of the worst instincts of the administration, points toward Feith's true role, which was to furnish not plans for war or its aftermath, but convenient rationales for it. For in seeking to allay the notion of a neocon conspiracy, Feith somewhat inadvertently raises the nagging question of how influential he actually was. Within his book, memoranda are reprinted at length and discussions reproduced to show that debate really did take place in the Bush administration, that the Defense Department did, in fact, try to prepare for the aftermath of the Iraq War-and the State Department and CIA didn't-and that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was a capital fellow.

But as Feith himself notes, Rumsfeld kept him at arm's-length early on. Feith was Paul Wolfowitz's man, not Rumsfeld's. In Feith's own words, "Rumsfeld had not brought me in on any of his discussions with Tommy Franks about operational plans." As with all good courtiers, Feith ascribes the loftiest motives to his own attempts to ingratiate himself with Mr. Big: "the burdens on him were increasing, and he needed the sort of help I might be able to provide." But did he? Nominally, Feith was in charge of postwar planning in Iraq, which is why he hopes to clear his name with this compendious volume. But Rumsfeld never was interested in a postwar plan for Iraq; it was supposed to be a modern form of blitzkrieg warfare, followed by assaults on other Middle Eastern countries such as Iran or Syria. Regime change was the new domino theory, but the dominoes never toppled. Instead, the United States got mired in Iraq, and the war was transformed into one for democracy and the American way of life. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates himself has put paid to the Rumsfeld Doctine, observing that too much attention was paid to bogus shock-and-awe theories and not enough to the nitty-gritty of fighting house-to-house battles.

No doubt Feith is right to protest, as he does at some length, that Iraq was not supposed to be about democracy. It was supposed to be about terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. But Feith ends up protesting a little too much. What choice did Bush have but to package it as a battle for spreading the American dream throughout the Middle East once the war went south? In addition, it was Vice President Dick Cheney, the chief promoter of the neocons, who originally asseverated in a speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 2002 that overthrowing Saddam Hussein would lead to a wider spread of democracy in the region.

Feith goes to some lengths to show that it wasn't just neocons who wanted to oust Saddam. He's right. Many liberal hawks, convinced that Kosovo had demonstrated the efficacy of American power in the service of human rights, signed on to the war. Opportunists such as Hillary Clinton, who reckoned that failing to support the war would scuttle her chances for the presidency, jumped on board the Iraq War train. But this does not mean that the neocons were not instrumental in making the administration's case for war. This Feith can dispute but not disprove.

Nor does Feith come to terms with his own relationship with the crafty Ahmad Chalabi, who had been the neocons' pet for the better part of a decade. Personal observations about Chalabi would have been welcome, but Feith is so focused on policy that his book never comes alive with character portraits.

Perhaps the most distressing part of Feith's book is his contention that Rumsfeld didn't deserve any blame for Abu Ghraib. In Feith's view, "From the outset, Rumsfeld grasped that the scandal could have strategic effects-even if we would learn that it amounted only to the depraved, criminal behavior of an isolated handful of soldiers." A handful of soldiers? As Jane Mayer has shown in her bestseller The Dark Side, maltreating prisoners has been the policy of the Bush administration-a policy that Feith himself helped advance through pettifoggery about the Geneva Conventions.

When it comes to the war itself, Feith, in a stab at even-handedness, suggests that historians, who "face a mountain of ifs," will sort it all out some day. But they don't face a mountain of ifs. Rather, Feith has created them out of thin air.

It's a pity that Feith doesn't simply dispense with the obfuscations and pieties about the verdict on the war still being up for grabs. Feith would be better off acknowledging more fully that he was a vital part of a more general effort to make the case for war, and that he thought it was a good thing. He contests, for example, the notion that he "rejected" the CIA's work and wanted to have his own intelligence unit. But of course he did. Former-CIA chief George Tenet, in his memoir At the Center of the Storm, devotes ample space to detailing Feith's efforts to show an operational link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Tenet notes that when CIA analysts stated that a "much stronger case could be made for Iran's backing of international terrorism than could be made for Iraq's," Feith would have none of it. According to Tenet, "They recall Doug Feith saying that their objections were just ‘persnickety.'" Tenet also pours scorn on Wolfowitz's and Feith's support for Chalabi, noting that the Iraqi Freedom Force (IFF), touted by the two, was airlifted into Iraq and

as a fighting force, the IFF proved to be totally feckless. Some of its members, however, evolved into a private militia for Chalabi, and set about commandeering property, vehicles, and wealth for the use of his Iraqi National Congress.

As Tenet vividly puts it,

You had the impression that some Office of the Vice President and DOD reps were writing Chalabi's name over and over again in their notes, like schoolgirls, with their first crush. At other times, so persistent was the cheerleading for Chalabi, and so consistent was our own opposition to imposing him on Iraq, that I finally had to tell our people to lay off the subject.

Like Wolfowitz, Feith held no brief for the CIA. Its record under Tenet was, in fact, a sorry one. Like Feith, Tenet cites documents, with little context, to show that he had it right all along. But at the time, Feith's efforts to circumvent the CIA didn't help. He had deputed David Wurmser and Michael Maloof to collect information on terrorist groups. Wurmser himself told Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman that the spiderweb chart of links between Saddam and terrorist groups that he made with Maloof ended up resembling something out of the film A Beautiful Mind, which featured a shack covered with mad scribblings. Feith, in short, was part of the original effort to drum up a bogus connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. But here is how Feith describes his deputy: "Wurmser, a quiet, even diffident Middle East scholar with a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University, was an intelligence officer serving in the Naval Reserve." Somehow Feith neglects to mention that Wurmser was a protégé of Richard Perle's at the American Enterprise Institute, that he wrote a book called Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein, and that he had also coauthored a paper with Feith and Perle titled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," which was reprinted in Commentary magazine. The paper advised then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to declare war against Arab despotisms. It served as a kind of blueprint for the Bush administration's own war on terrorism-for what it touted as "regime change."

Feith is on stronger ground in lamenting the Bush administration's lack of interest in taking on jihadist ideology. Feith complains that "many officials simply had no interest in ideological warfare: They considered it impractical to try to influence the way millions of people thought." He goes on to cite a speech that he drafted focusing on the intellectual atmosphere that incited terrorism. But once again, no one was much interested in what Feith had to say. And they still aren't.

MICHAEL GERSON is very much a different matter. Where Feith and Tenet try to defend the indefensible and become mired in useless detail, Gerson is direct and forceful. In Heroic Conservatism, Gerson, who was Bush's chief speechwriter, has no patience for skeptics of the war on terror or for small-government Republicans. He regards them as antediluvian, pitiful remnants of the past who have no business intruding upon the deliberations of a new and missionary elect that seeks to transform the GOP. Gerson, a devout Roman Catholic, seeks to temper conservatism with a more idealist, charitable streak.

As a result, he has produced rousing stuff. As he notes, George W. Bush has always had meliorist instincts. Gerson begins his book with an account of the president sitting in his blue-and-yellow-striped chair at the right of the fireplace in the Oval Office in November 2002, determined to help provide AIDS treatment and prevention to Africa. For Gerson, this is true heroism-the president staring down the niggling advisers who worry about profligate outlays to Africa, when Bush should instead be burnishing his budget-cutting credentials. But evil is averted. Bush stays the course.

For Gerson, this is the key to Bush. According to him,

It is one expression-maybe the least controversial expression-of the organizing principle of the Bush era: an idealism of amazing historical ambition. President Bush's religiously informed moralism, his impatience with political "small ball," his indifference to establishment criticism, have combined to produce far-reaching changes in domestic and foreign policy; far-reaching changes in Republican Party ideology.

And as he sees it, these changes are overdue. He believes that "Republicans who feel that the ideology of Barry Goldwater-the ideology of minimal government-has been assaulted are correct." For Gerson, religion is essential. Thus he believes in government-funded faith-based programs that can help instill moral values, something that is anathema to Goldwater types who believe that Washington does best when it does least. Gerson, by contrast, wants it to do good, which is why he also lauds Bush's support for foreign-aid programs. Gerson, you might say, is proselytizing on behalf of a missionary conservatism.

Previous religious awakenings have helped spur America on to greatness, he believes, and an attentiveness to morality can carry it forward once more, both domestically and abroad. Bush, he suggests, rejects the moral relativism that became chic in the 1960s, where one country was as good as another. In Gerson's view, America has a unique, divine dispensation to lead the march for freedom. And Bush agrees with him. In contrast to Feith, Gerson notes that Bush was indeed intent on promoting democracy in invading Iraq. In 2002, Bush

set out a reform agenda that included all the institutional prerequisites for the exercise of political freedom. His argument represented a clean break with the Middle East policies of the president's father, and nearly every other president.

Unfortunately, Bush's grand plans have triggered a backlash in both the Democratic and Republican parties. Democrats have become the new realists, averse to loose talk about human rights, nation building and intervention abroad. Gerson is confounded by this. He believes that Democrats have simply become unhinged by their personal contempt for the hated Bush. They are throwing away their patrimony, the heritage left behind by John F. Kennedy, not to mention Franklin D. Roosevelt. "What," he asks, "can liberalism possibly mean apart from idealism in the cause of liberty?"

Having sketched out the problem of the Democrats, Gerson turns to the GOP. Once again, he sees darkness where there should be light. He laments that realists such as Brent Scowcroft have expressed concern about the idea of upending the Middle East. These fuddy-duddies fail to recognize, Gerson explains, that

the Middle East's mixture of tyranny, radicalism, and stagnation is not only toxic, it is explosive, resulting in the mass murder of American citizens on American soil. The status quo in the Middle East is not stable or sustainable. . . . Yet some foreign-policy realists, of every ideological background, have chosen this moment to call for retrenchment and retreat.

But is military intervention the most efficacious way to lance the boil of terrorism in the Middle East? Or is the expansion of American commitments abroad itself a recipe for the diminution of American power and prestige? Has American intervention in Iraq in fact promoted terrorism? Gerson elides these nagging questions to soar into the empyrean, issuing moralistic calls for national grandeur abroad. Indeed, the main weakness of Gerson's book is that it substitutes exhortation for analysis. Niggling matters like the fact that the occupation of Iraq has proved both a disaster for its citizens and America are airily dismissed with the contention that only cynics and congenital grouches could possibly wish to deny the Iraqis their true liberties. Gerson may be a Roman Catholic, but he sounds more like an evangelist who seeks to persuade his flock that a new crusade will purify it and the world than someone who believes in tradition and hierarchy.

If this sounds reminiscent of liberal zeal, that's because it is. While it would probably be a mistake to call Gerson a neoconservative, he fits, for the most part, snugly into that camp. He is an unabashed champion of big government. He wants to redeem the rest of the world. And he's scornful of conservative instincts.

Whether Gerson's exhortations will serve as a guide to the future, however, is questionable. They have a distinctly musty quality to them. An America crippled by debt and by a sagging economy seems most unlikely to embark upon new and grand crusades to save the rest of the world. In retrospect, the Bush era will probably be seen as a bizarre interlude, a moment when America adopted a eupeptic salvation doctrine that substituted wishful thinking for the cold, hard realities of international politics. Even as a new round of self-exculpatory memoirs appears soon-Donald Rumsfeld is finishing his and Condoleezza Rice is apparently preparing hers-the next four years will likely see more penitence than impenitence as America atones for its past profligate behavior.

Jacob Heilbrunn is a senior editor at The National Interest.