Tenet’s Revisionist History

Charles Krauthammer skewers the new book by George Tenet and exposes Tenet's revisions of history. It's kind of interesting how the book was news for a while and has suddenly dropped out of sight in commentaries. I rather suspect it is because the rewriting of history is too blatant for even the most partisan. Tenet has been caught out telling some real whoppers.

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-Sept. 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 Sept. 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 U.S. policy. U.N. resolutions, congressional debates and foreign policy arguments were seized with the Iraq question and its many post-Gulf War complications — the weapons of mass destruction, 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 Bill 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?

I personally have no plans to enrich Mr. Tenet by buying this book and frankly have no desire to read it. An awful lot of these self-serving revisions of history are circulating these days. Maybe they should be gathered up and debunked by Snopes. That would keep them very busy for quite some time. I wasn't particularly impressed with Tenet when he was in charge of the CIA. His book and his rewrite of history indicates that my opinion of him was too high altogether.