Tenet, the brazen

George Tenet has a very mixed legacy. On the one hand, he presided over the two biggest intelligence failures of this era - 9/11 and the WMD debacle in Iraq. On the other hand, his CIA did devise and carry out brilliantly an astonishingly bold plan to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan. Tenet might have just left it at that, gone home with his Presidential Medal of Freedom and let history judge him.

Instead, he's decided to do some judging of his own. In his just-released book and in hawking it on television, Tenet presents himself as a pathetic victim and scapegoat of an administration that was hell-bent on going to war, slam dunk or not. Tenet writes as if he assumes no one remembers anything. For example: "There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat."

DOES HE think no one remembers President Bush explicitly rejecting the imminence argument in his 2003 State of the Union address in front of just about the largest possible world audience? Said the president, "Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent" - and he was not one of them. That in a post-9/11 world, we cannot wait for tyrants and terrorists to gentlemanly declare their intentions. Indeed, elsewhere in the book Tenet concedes that very point: "It was never a question of a known, imminent threat; it was about an unwillingness to risk surprise."

Tenet also makes what he thinks is the damning and sensational charge that the administration, led by Vice President Cheney, had been focusing on Iraq even before 9/11. In fact, he reports, Cheney asked for a CIA briefing on Iraq for the president even before they had been sworn in.

This is odd? This is news? For the entire decade following the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Iraq was the single greatest threat in the region and therefore the most important focus of US policy. UN resolutions, congressional debates and foreign policy arguments were seized with the Iraq question and its many post-Gulf War complications - the WMDs, the inspection regimes, the cease-fire violations, the no-fly zones, the progressive weakening of sanctions.

IRAQ WAS such an obsession of the Clinton administration that Clinton ultimately ordered an air and missile attack on its WMD installations that lasted four days. This was less than two years before Bush won the presidency. Is it odd that the administration following Clinton's should share its extreme concern about Iraq and its weapons?

Tenet is not the only one to assume a generalized amnesia about the recent past. One of the major myths (or, more accurately, conspiracy theories) about the Iraq War - that it was foisted upon an unsuspecting country by a small band of neoconservatives - also lives blissfully detached from history.

The decision to go to war was made by a war Cabinet consisting of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld. No one in that room could even remotely be considered a neoconservative. Nor could the most important non-American supporter of the war to this day - Tony Blair, father of new Labour.

THE MOST powerful case for the war was made at the 2004 Republican convention by John McCain in a speech that was resolutely "realist." On the Democratic side, every presidential candidate running today who was in the Senate when the motion to authorize the use of force came up - Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd - voted yes.

Outside of government, the case for war was made not just by the neoconservative Weekly Standard, but - to select almost randomly - the traditionally conservative National Review, the liberal New Republic and the center-right Economist. Of course, most neoconservatives supported the war, the case for which was also being made by journalists and scholars from every point on the political spectrum - from the leftist Christopher Hitchens to the liberal Tom Friedman to the centrist Fareed Zakaria to the center-right Michael Kelly to the Tory Andrew Sullivan. And the most influential tome on behalf of war was written not by any conservative, let alone neoconservative, but by Kenneth Pollack, Clinton's top Near East official on the National Security Council. The title: The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.

Everyone has the right to renounce past views. But not to make up that past. It is beyond brazen to think that one can get away with inventing not ancient history but what everyone saw and read with their own eyes just a few years ago. And yet sometimes brazenness works.

“Iraq is a long way from [here], but what
happens there matters a great deal here. For the
risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use
nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us
or our allies is the greatest security threat we
face.”
- Madeline Albright, Feb 18, 1998

“He will use those weapons of mass destruction
again, as he has ten times since 1983.”
- Sandy Berger, Clinton National Security Adviser, Feb, 18, 1998

“We begin with the common belief that Saddam
Hussein is a tyrant and threat to the peace and
stability of the region. He has ignored the mandate
of the United Nations and is building weapons of
mass destruction and the means of delivering them.”
- Sen. Carl Levin (D, MI), Sept. 19, 2002

“We know that he has stored secret supplies of
biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.”
- Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002

“Iraq’s search for weapons of mass destruction
has proven impossible to deter and we should assume
that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.”
- Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002

“We have known for many years that Saddam
Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass
destruction.”
- Sen. Ted Kennedy (D, MA), Sept. 27, 2002

"Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the
development of weapons of mass destruction
technology which is a threat to countries in the
region and he has made a mockery of the weapons
inspection process."
- Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), Dec. 16, 1998

I’m surprised that Krauthammer failed to mention that it was under the Clinton Administration that the Iraqi Regime Change Act was signed into law, making it official U.S. policy to seek the overthrow of Saddam’s dictatorship.

Bill Clinton signed that act into law, and technically all that President Bush did was to enforce that law.

So where are all the idiot savants and leftist scumbags screaming for Bill Clinton to be held accountable for the situation in Iraq? After all, if Clinton had not made it U.S policy to change Iraq’s government, Saddam and his boys might still be in power, ramping up their nuke program in anticipation of Iran’s lil runt, swearing to go nuclear himself.

Hello? ‘Rats, liberals, leftists, Moron.Org’rs, Code Pinkos?

Can’t HEEEAAARRRR youuuuuu!

[crickets chirping]

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