Little sympathy for Tenet

More reaction to former CIA chief George Tenet's self-justifying new book. Former Time magazine editor and chairman of CNN Walter Isaacson weighs in:

George Tenet's woes, it seems to me, come from the very natural instinct to please rather than tell uncomfortable truths to those in authority... I was reminded how Kissinger, someone I once wrote about, was too willing to cater to and collaborate with the darker impulses of Nixon.

As does the flamethrowing Christopher Hitchens, in an article entitled "A Loser's History":

The author is almost the only man who could have known of Zacarias Moussaoui and his co-conspirators—the very man who positively knew they were among us, in flight schools, and then decided to leave them alone. In his latest effusion, he writes: "I do know one thing in my gut. Al-Qaeda is here and waiting." Well, we all know that much by now. But Tenet is one of the few who knew it then, and not just in his "gut" but in his small brain, and who left us all under open skies. His ridiculous agency, supposedly committed to "HUMINT" under his leadership, could not even do what John Walker Lindh had done—namely, infiltrate the Taliban and the Bin Laden circle. It's for this reason that the CIA now has to rely on torturing the few suspects it can catch, a policy, incidentally, that Tenet's book warmly defends.
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And now comes Tenet, the man who got everything wrong and who ran the agency that couldn't think straight, to ask us to sympathize with his moanings about "Iraq—who, me?"

A highly irritating expression in Washington has it that "hindsight is always 20-20." Would that it were so. History is not a matter of hindsight and is not, in fact, always written by the victors. In this case, a bogus history is being offered by a real loser whose hindsight is cockeyed and who had no foresight at all.

Better late than never, right?

Matthew Yglesias is not so impressed with the timing of former CIA Director Tenet's new book criticizing the Bush administration. Excerpt:

Now Tenet flips. Not before Bush's re-election, not before the midterms, not with the country still "deeply divided" about his administration, but with his approval ratings mired in the low thirties. For people who collaborated in the disasters of 2002-2004 to turn around and tell us now how terrible everything was is the political equivalent of taking cheap shots at a fighter whose already collapsed unconscious to the mat.

Former CIA director blasts Cheney in new book

From the New York Times:

"There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat,” Mr. Tenet writes in a devastating judgment that is likely to be debated for many years. Nor, he adds, “was there ever a significant discussion” about the possibility of containing Iraq without an invasion.

Mr. Tenet admits that he made his famous “slam dunk” remark about the evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But he argues that the quote was taken out of context and that it had little impact on President Bush’s decision to go to war. He also makes clear his bitter view that the administration made him a scapegoat for the Iraq war.

A copy of the book was purchased at retail price in advance of publication by a reporter for The New York Times. Mr. Tenet described with sarcasm watching an episode of “Meet the Press” last September in which Mr. Cheney twice referred to Mr. Tenet’s “slam dunk” remark as the basis for the decision to go to war.

“I remember watching and thinking, ‘As if you needed me to say ‘slam dunk’ to convince you to go to war with Iraq,’ ” Mr. Tenet writes.

This is huge. Interestingly, Tenet appears to admire Bush and focuses his vitriol on Cheney. I'm not sure I can absolve Tenet to the degree that he wants. I don't doubt that Bush and Cheney had other reasons for getting rid of Saddam, but what Tenet told Bush made the invasion all the more inevitable. It appears that prior to invasion Bush and Cheney had assumed, like many people inside and outside the government, that Iraq just had to have some WMD lying around somewhere. After all, Saddam had used them in the past. An assumption, though, is not a slam dunk, and Tenet had an obligation to say so. I don't find his distinction, that he made the "slam dunk" comment about strengthening a presentation making the case for the existence of WMD, to be particularly exculpatory.