What Tenet knew
By Thomas Powers
Asia Times
(This essay, which considers At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA by George Tenet with Bill Harlow, appears in the July 19 issue of the New York Review of Books and is posted here with the permission of the editors of that magazine.)
How the US got into Iraq is the great open question of the decade, but George Tenet in his memoir of his seven years running the Central Intelligence Agency takes his sweet time working his way around to it. He hesitates because he has much to explain: the claims made by Tenet's CIA with "high confidence" that Iraq was dangerously armed all proved false.
But mistakes are one thing, excusable even when serious; inexcusable would be charges of collusion in deceiving the US Congress and the public to make war possible. Tenet's overriding goal in his carefully written book is to deny "that we somehow cooked the books" about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD). If he says it once he says it a dozen times: "We told the president what we did on Iraq WMD because we believed it."
But repetition is not enough. Tenet's problem is that the intelligence and the war proceeded in lockstep: no intelligence, no war. Since Tenet delivered the (shockingly exaggerated) intelligence, and President George W Bush used it to go to war, how is Tenet to convince the world that he wasn't simply giving the boss what he wanted? Tenet naturally dislikes this question, but it is evident that the US public and Congress dislike it just as much.
Down that road lie painful truths about the character and motives of the president and the men and women around him. But getting out of Iraq will not be easy, and the necessary first step is to find the civic courage to insist on knowing how we got in. Tenet's memoir is an excellent place to begin; some of what he tells us and much that he leaves out point unmistakably to the genesis of the war in the White House - the very last thing Tenet wants to address clearly. He sidles up to the question at last on page 301: "One of the great mysteries to me," he writes, "is exactly when the war in Iraq became inevitable."
(Continued here.)
Asia Times
(This essay, which considers At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA by George Tenet with Bill Harlow, appears in the July 19 issue of the New York Review of Books and is posted here with the permission of the editors of that magazine.)
How the US got into Iraq is the great open question of the decade, but George Tenet in his memoir of his seven years running the Central Intelligence Agency takes his sweet time working his way around to it. He hesitates because he has much to explain: the claims made by Tenet's CIA with "high confidence" that Iraq was dangerously armed all proved false.
But mistakes are one thing, excusable even when serious; inexcusable would be charges of collusion in deceiving the US Congress and the public to make war possible. Tenet's overriding goal in his carefully written book is to deny "that we somehow cooked the books" about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD). If he says it once he says it a dozen times: "We told the president what we did on Iraq WMD because we believed it."
But repetition is not enough. Tenet's problem is that the intelligence and the war proceeded in lockstep: no intelligence, no war. Since Tenet delivered the (shockingly exaggerated) intelligence, and President George W Bush used it to go to war, how is Tenet to convince the world that he wasn't simply giving the boss what he wanted? Tenet naturally dislikes this question, but it is evident that the US public and Congress dislike it just as much.
Down that road lie painful truths about the character and motives of the president and the men and women around him. But getting out of Iraq will not be easy, and the necessary first step is to find the civic courage to insist on knowing how we got in. Tenet's memoir is an excellent place to begin; some of what he tells us and much that he leaves out point unmistakably to the genesis of the war in the White House - the very last thing Tenet wants to address clearly. He sidles up to the question at last on page 301: "One of the great mysteries to me," he writes, "is exactly when the war in Iraq became inevitable."
(Continued here.)
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