They come as a complete shock to, well, none of you, but according to former CIA chief George Tenet, the president and top officials in his White House were determined to go to war in Iraq in 2002, and didn’t much care about reality.
George J. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, has lashed out against Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials in a new book, saying they pushed the country to war in Iraq without ever conducting a “serious debate” about whether Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States.
The 549-page book, “At the Center of the Storm,” is to be published by HarperCollins on Monday. By turns accusatory, defensive, and modestly self-critical, it is the first detailed account by a member of the president’s inner circle of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the decision to invade Iraq and the failure to find the unconventional weapons that were a major justification for the war.
“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.
You don’t say. The Bush gang didn’t much care about diplomacy, the seriousness of the Iraqi threat, or competing ideas? Who ever would have thought it?
For a Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, Tenet doesn’t seem terribly impressed with his former superiors in the White House, and seems all too aware of the fact that he’s been made something of a scapegoat. According to the NYT, which obtained a copy of the book in advance, Cheney is characterized as arrogant and out of touch, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley are careless, and the president largely lives in a bubble. It’s an interesting insight from a key insider, but it’s not exactly jaw-dropping news.
Of course, Tenet’s career, much to his dismay, has come to be defined by two words: “slam dunk.” The former CIA director, however, claims to have an explanation for the phrase.
Mr. Tenet says he decided to write the memoir in part because the infamous “slam dunk” episode had come to define his tenure at C.I.A.
He gives a detailed account of the episode, which occurred during an Oval Office meeting in December 2002 when the administration was preparing to make public its case for war against Iraq.
During the meeting, the deputy C.I.A. director, John McLaughlin, unveiled a draft of a proposed public presentation that left the group unimpressed. Mr. Tenet recalls that Mr. Bush suggested that they could “add punch” by bringing in lawyers trained to argue cases before a jury.
“I told the president that strengthening the public presentation was a ‘slam dunk,’ a phrase that was later taken completely out of context,” Mr. Tenet writes. “If I had simply said, ‘I’m sure we can do better,’ I wouldn’t be writing this chapter — or maybe even this book.”
I find this very hard to believe. The “slam dunk” wasn’t the intelligence, but the ability to sell the intelligence? To hear Tenet explain it, the phrase hardly makes any sense.
Regardless, add Tenet to the (growing) list of Bush aides who learned too late that loyalty to the president is rarely reciprocated. If Tenet had realized this sooner, and had the courage to say something before it was too late, he might have made a difference.