Former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith, who was at the heart of the Bush administration's selective cherry-picking of intelligence to make its case for the invasion of Iraq, appeared on The Daily Show on Monday to promote his new book about the run-up to the war.

The central premise of Feith's book, which he repeated over and over to Jon Stewart, is that although there were errors in some of the administration's claims about the dangers posed by Saddam Hussein, the people making those statements were not being intentionally dishonest and did not set out to mislead the American public.

"The administration had an honest belief in the things that it said," Feith insisted. "Some of the things that it said about the war that were part of the rationale for the war were wrong. But errors are not lies and I think much of what the administration said was correct and provided an important argument that leaving Saddam Hussein in power would have been extremely risky -- even though the president's decision to remove him was extremely risky."

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Stewart pointed out in response that painting a rosy picture of how quick and easy the war would be while downplaying the risks was itself a form of dishonesty. "You said something that I thought was interesting," he noted to Feith. "'The common refrain that the postwar has been a disaster is only true if you had completely unrealistic expectations.' Where would we have gotten those expectations?"

"If you knew the perils but the conversation that you had with the public painted a rosier picture, how is that not deception?" Stewart asked.

Feith attempted to counter this by suggesting that because "the recent history has been very unhappy in a lot of ways ... people look back and I think they misremember a lot," but he finally resorted to claiming once more that "there were statements ... that in looking back you wish you would have made differently ... I don't think any of them were deception. I think they were errors."

"You don't think it was a purposeful strategy?" Stewart asked. "This is an administration very sophisticated in the arts of propaganda and public relations."

Feith insisted that far from being sophisticated, the administration was actually very bad at propaganda. He then went on to summarize his version of what led up to the war:

"What the president decided after 9/11 was we should not focus only on the group that hit us, we should be trying to prevent the next attack. ... The administration ... became persuaded by the facts that Saddam Hussein was an extremely serious danger. ... There was a moment when the president wanted to focus on diplomacy. ... Ultimately the diplomacy failed. ... The administration grossly mishandled the public explanation."

"You removed the ability for the American public to make an informed decision," responded Stewart. "Once you have removed that, then you no longer have, I think, the authority."

This video is from Comedy Central's The Daily Show, broadcast May 12, 2008.