George Tenet’s War Against History
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By Charles Krauthammer

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.”

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?

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.

© 2007, The Washington Post Writers Group

For the complete article- National Review http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=YmUyYTE4ZDY2YTRhNDhhM2ZjZTE3OTMyZWMwYzM1ODc==

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