Politics & Power Quote by Douglas Feith

The move here is to redefine inspection not as discovery but as theater. Feith strips the UN’s weapons inspections of their core logic - verify by looking - and reframes them as a naive “cat and mouse game,” a phrase that does a lot of political work. It suggests childishness, futility, even humiliation: the inspectors are cast as bumbling pursuers, Saddam as the agile trickster. Once you accept that framing, inspections stop being a method and become an obstacle, an endless scavenger hunt that only grants the target time.

The specific intent is managerial and strategic: narrow the mission of the “mechanism” so tightly that it can’t plausibly succeed, then use that presumed failure as justification for a different toolset (coercion, regime change, war). Notice the careful bureaucratic language - “UN mechanism,” “inspection mechanism” - which sounds technocratic and value-neutral, while the imagery (“cat and mouse”) is vivid and contemptuous. That contrast is the tell: procedure is being discredited by metaphor.

Context matters. Feith was a senior Pentagon official in the run-up to the Iraq War, when the central policy debate was whether inspections could credibly resolve the WMD question. The subtext is that concealment is a given and discovery is beside the point. If you’re already convinced the weapons exist and will be hidden, inspection becomes not a test of evidence but a delay tactic by dupes. The quote works because it shifts the burden: it’s not that the case for weapons must be proven; it’s that the act of proving is portrayed as strategically unserious.