George Tenet Should Have Resigned in 2003

Who knew? A couple of the right-wing students in my classes are carrying around a book entitled Conservative Comebacks to Liberal Lies by Gregg Jackson. But more and more people are coming out as leftists. Today, it's George Tenet, former director of the CIA, who reveals in At the Center of the Storm that he was a leftist the whole time he was heading up the CIA. I'll just mention a couple of instances

Before the Iraq invasion, people on the left were arguing that an invasion would spur al-Qaeda recruitment in the Arab world.

Guess what! The CIA was also concerned about “a surge of global terrorism against U.S. interests fueled by deepening Islamic antipathy toward the United States.” In other words, the CIA didn't buy the delusion that the invasion would be cost-free any more than the left.

Anti-war types like I discussed the consequences of occupying Iraq at enormous length. It turns out that George Tenet was just as worried about “'anarchy and the territorial breakup” of the country. "

Amazing. I wonder if Tenet is a card-carrying member of the ACLU.

Like every anti-war person in the U. S., I thought Dick Cheney was lying about Iraq. So did Tenet even though Tenet puts the issue in bureaucratese when he claims that "Cheney . . . stretched the intelligence to serve his own belief that war was the right course."

Even though he was CIA chief, George Tenet did not believe the whole mendacious campaign to justify the invasion any more than a common liberal like myself.

But here's the difference. When people on the left decided that the invasion was an extremely bad idea, they wrote articles, started blogs, posted on the internet, organized marches, and started campaigning to get their views heard by the media.

To the contrary, George Tenet sat right behind Colin Powell as he was making his crucial and crucially deceptive presentation to the UN Security Council. Tenet writes that his position behind Powell "was about the last place I wanted to be."

In fact, Tenet shouldn't have been there at all.

He should have resigned from the Bush administration as soon as he realized that they were misusing intelligence to justify a potentially disastrous war.

That's what I would have done.