George Tenet's book is out this week, and he's hopping mad. Mad at the White House for dissing his CIA team. Mad at Cheney, Rice and the other Neo-Con/Pentagon apparatchiks that blundered and lied their way into an Iraq invasion ... and supposedly mad at himself for allowing the CIA to 'guess wrong' about WMDs.
And from his viewpoint and what has been said about he CIA over the past few years, I'd be pissed too. It would appear that the CIA --- and he in particular --- became the fatted calf to be sacrificed for White House/DOD/DIA and State eff-ups of CATASTROPHIC proportions.
But is George Tenet being just a weeeeee bit disingenuous? I should not judge him before reading his book (which I hate paying for, but can't see a way out of), it would appear that he and the CIA are responsible not for where we are in Iraq today, but where we would be had we NOT destroyed the infrastructure and bureaucracy of the Ba'athists; in other words, reexamining a more Allende-like situation, where we would need to defend bumping off a foreign dictator, and justifying it with words like "imposing Democracy".
I am not so dumb as to think that bad political organizations like the Ba'athists can be cured by sweet talk over tea, but Iraq STILL would have been a lose-lose situation. In other words, hindsight ain't so golden in Tenet's case, since the CIA would still have been playing the King-Killing game anyway. Which is supposed to be ILLEGAL, according to Congress.
All this book and others like it point to is a big, circular argument trying to justify the COSMICALLY STUPID action of invading Iraq. And letting all those America, British and other Western military forces die there for no good reason. They are no less noble in death because of it; it just makes their lost lives that much more tragic.
Oh, yes ... and the million or so Iraqis who died without any say in the matter.
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3 comments:
have you seen reaction to Tenet's account from some of his "underlings?"
scathing, my good man.
did you see Tenet on Laaaary King last night?
Some hate him, some like him, some say he was right not to slam the White House when he resigned. I suppose if you believe in serving the nation, it might influence your behavior. But now he's got the book out, and says he wants to let off steam, it would seem murky if you felt he was dick to begin with.
I get what the guy quoted in the Washington Post was saying. But the Danziger cartoon was a bit much. What is a better solution, folks? Every possible 'solution' to Iraq is wrong, mostly because we shouldn't have been there in the first place.
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