Tue May 1, 6:03 PM ET
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- All the fuming and fussing over the new book of former CIA chief George J. Tenet on the follies of the Bush administration and the Iraq war make it sound like Tenet's revelations are something new:
Look, look! The very man who oversaw American intelligence during this entire disastrous period of planning, plotting and going to a hypothetical war in that remote country worlds away has now come out to "reveal" how much of everything was false.
But in truth, the Tenet book, "At the Center of the Storm," is old stuff. It only confirms what culture-savvy journalists like Arnaud de Borchgrave of United Press International, Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune, Trudy Rubin of The Philadelphia Inquirer, Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker and, modestly, yours truly, were writing even a year before the war started.
Still, one has to say, Thanks, George! Your book will stand as a kind of final confirmation for all of us. As the neocons have momentarily paused in their passions to destroy our country, just about the only ones left to join the "mea culpa" club now are the president himself, Vice President Cheney and the disgraced (and disappeared!) Donald Rumsfeld. Let's look at the arguments?
The book's main point, repeated over and over by commentators since it leaked last week, is that an administration hotly eager for war with Iraq pushed the war without even bothering to conduct "a serious debate" about whether Saddam Hussein posed any "imminent threat" to America.
Nor, Tenet said, was there ever a significant discussion about "containing Iraq." No, from the day shortly after 9/11 when he ran into one of the sleaziest deal-makers of the neocons, Richard Perle, he says that Perle told him, "Iraq has to pay a price for what happened. They bear responsibility."
Yet Tenet is at least as clear as everyone, now even the president of the United States, that the intelligence showed "no evidence of Iraqi complicity" in the 9/11 attack.
(We were all saying that as early as the fall of 2002.)
Actually, Tenet says in the book that he doubts the idea of Saddam's supposed weapons of mass destruction constituted the real reason for going to war with Iraq. That was just "the public face that was put on it."
Rather, he went on, the real reason was that the administration wanted "democratic transformation" through "regime change in the Middle East to transform the entire area and especially to make it safe for Israel."
The Israel intention in the equation had always been the major goal of neoconservatives like Perle, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, David Wurmser, Elliott Abrams and many others who had worked closely with the right wing of the right-wing Likud Party in Israel, which then came to connect in a once-in-a-lifetime way with the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld mix of extraordinary hubris, arrogance and ambition for world hegemony.
(We were saying all that, too, from the very beginning.)
Intelligence was constantly stretched to build support for the war, Tenet writes, and the Cheney/Rumsfeld axis repeatedly inserted "crap" into public excuses for the war, while super neocon Douglas Feith, third at the Pentagon, ran his own intelligence system, often bypassing Tenet's supposedly premiere CIA.
(But then, we were saying that, too.)
What seems particularly to have irked -- indeed, enraged -- Tenet is the manner in which two words of his, spoken in the White House in an offhand manner at the height of the administration's euphoria about invading the world, became like a scarlet letter embroidered on his jacket.
Oh, poor "slam dunk!" Why, George, did you use those words? Now they haunt you. On "60 Minutes" Sunday, you seemed always close to tears, sometimes near to hysteria, as you tried to tell the world -- to assure it -- that you never meant to say that it was a slam dunk that Saddam had WMD, but only that his entire regime was evil and dangerous.
(Ditto, foreseen.)
But it is here that we finally reach the inner George Tenet, for it is here, with those ineloquent words, "slam dunk," that he reveals his true self. He speaks of honor. His Greek blood spills out and he challenges the bloodless men who started this war and threw him over, albeit with a Medal of Freedom on his chest, and who are now trying to blame it all on one silly phrase of his!
At the end of the day, he says, all a man has is his honor and his reputation, and they tried to take it from him, from this man with such a passionate nature. He seems to be crying out that they cannot take a man's honor and reputation.
In effect, we get the real insider's insider story, from a man less concerned about the horrors of the war (he approves of the torture of insurgents, which he says is not torture, and speaks not at all of the cultural inevitability of Iraqi society acting as it always has) than his own personal reputation. That's OK; he provides perhaps the final needed legitimacy for the rest of us who resisted too early.
Yet, there are three questions I would like to ask the director:
1. Why did it take you three years to speak out while so many were dying?
2. Where was the all-important element of "culture" in your intelligence analysis? Why didn't you warn them about how Iraqis behave and what we could expect from history?
3. When are you going to give back the Medal of Freedom?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucgg/20070501/cm_ucgg/tenetconfirmswhatmanyalreadyknew
