Page 2 of 2 BOOK
REVIEW Greek
tragedy At the Center of the Storm
by George
Tenet
collectively that if
we decide not to empower our
intelligence-collection activities, we have to be
willing to take the risk and pay the price."
As a nation Americans may decide to do
without these valuable but morally or legally
troubling practices, but they should acknowledge
the cost of so doing. As the candidates in next
year's presidential election debate the boundaries
of interrogation
of
detainees and as Congress considers the direction
of national intelligence's proposed revisions to
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA),
Tenet's points should be kept very much in view.
And these arguments should not be seen as
partisan. If anything, the sense that comes out of
the book is that Tenet was far more comfortable in
the Clinton than in the Bush administration.
Tenet's own political views are nowhere very
apparent but, naturally, given his experience
working for former Democratic senator David Boren
and his appointment by president Clinton, they
seem to hover nearer to the left-of-center
position. The very fact that a centrist Democrat
so fervently takes these positions should give
pause to those who associate interrogation,
domestic surveillance and the like with President
Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
The
other pillar of the book is the story of the
lead-up to and conduct of the Iraq war and
occupation. On this sad and sorry topic, Tenet's
narrative is basically right, even though it
inflates the CIA's prescience about the
difficulties after the occupation and paints over
the question of Tenet's own political calculus.
Fundamentally, Tenet's line is that the
Bush administration decided to go to war against
Iraq based upon reasons other than Iraq's
purported WMD programs and therefore, while the
intelligence community was indeed wrong about
Iraq's capabilities, that failure was not the
cause of the war. As he argues,
The leaders of a country decide to
go to war because of core beliefs, larger
geo-strategic calculations, ideology and, in the
case of Iraq, because of the administration's
largely unarticulated view that the democratic
transformation of the Middle East through regime
change in Iraq would be worth the price. WMD
was, as [then deputy defense secretary] Paul
Wolfowitz was quoted as saying in Vanity Fair in
May 2003, something that "we settled on" because
it was "the one issue that everyone could agree
on".
The evidence supports Tenet's
storyline that the war was undertaken for reasons
broader than Iraq's alleged WMD programs. Whether
or not Richard Perle did actually say to Tenet on
September 12, 2001, that Iraq would pay for the
events of the previous day, it is well established
that Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and others of like
mind were pushing this policy immediately after
the attacks. After Afghanistan fell, these
advocates grew stronger, so that by the middle of
2002 - according to sources as diverse as Tenet,
Bob Woodward and the British - the march toward
war was well under way.
Why was this?
Certainly the almost universal conviction that
Iraq was clandestinely rebuilding its WMD
capabilities was a significant element. But it was
not sufficient. War hawks weren't calling for
action against North Korea, which had WMD programs
that were clearly much further advanced. More
important were the other factors: Iraq's alleged
links to al-Qaeda and even September 11, Iraq's
oppression of its own people, its resistance to US
and United Nations direction, its challenge to US
regional primacy, its opposition to Israel, its
status as a counter-example to pro-Western
movements in the Middle East, and so forth.
Different war advocates proceeded from different
premises: Wolfowitz and the neo-conservative
idealists from a desire to remake and modernize
the Middle East, then-defense secretary Donald
Rumsfeld and perhaps Cheney from a conviction of
the necessity of demonstrating US supremacy and
resolve, Feith and others in the Department of
Defense from a belief that Iraq lay behind much of
the anti-Western terrorism of the preceding
decades.
This explains why, through much
of 2001 and especially 2002, war advocates at the
Pentagon pushed the intelligence community to sign
off on the assessment that Iraq was cooperating
with al-Qaeda - a push that the intelligence
community commendably resisted. Rebuffed there,
however, war advocates coalesced around the one
rationale that all could agree on - Iraq's pursuit
of WMD. The intelligence community was already
there, having for years judged Iraq to be working
on reconstituting its banned capabilities. The
hawkish types wouldn't have to rely on
astonishingly liberal-sounding arguments for
humanitarian intervention. And the American people
and their representatives would surely understand
the appeal of a war undertaken to stop a supposed
madman from launching a nuclear or biological
attack.
The irony of all this is that the
intelligence community's very resistance to the
push to associate Iraq with al-Qaeda made the
public case for war rest disproportionately on
Iraq's alleged WMD programs. This reached its
apotheosis with then-secretary of state Colin
Powell's speech to the UN, when the initial
draft's sections on Iraq's violation of human
rights and ties to terrorism were well-meaningly
slashed, leaving the speech focused entirely on
Iraq's purported WMD programs.
Of course
the intelligence community was wrong about Iraq's
WMD programs, which Tenet forthrightly admits. (He
doesn't have much choice.) But the bottom line is
that this error, while very serious and troubling,
was not what actually drove the decision to go to
war, and therefore should be kept in perspective.
While it is likely true that the intelligence
community's assessments on Iraq's WMD programs
were a necessary cause of the war, it is also true
that they were neither sufficient nor primary.
Tenet and the CIA therefore deserve criticism for
getting the intelligence wrong, but not for
leading the United States to war. Those were
policy decisions made for much broader reasons.
And even the intelligence error should not
be over-emphasized. The real fault of the
intelligence community was in not making more
clear the limited evidence underlying their
assessments and in not being more skeptical about
their own estimates. The error was in allowing a
legitimate inference - that Iraq, a consistent
defier of UN inspection resolutions, was
attempting to preserve and expand its WMD
capabilities - to harden into a practical
certainty. In effect, no one thought Saddam
Hussein had dispensed with all of his WMD, and
Saddam did everything he could to hide that fact.
(He was a very talented deceiver.) But the
intelligence community allowed its working
hypothesis to become dogma.
It is
unrealistic of Americans to expect their
intelligence services to penetrate and understand
the WMD capabilities of a nation in which,
according to Charles Duelfer's Iraq Survey Group
Report, perhaps only Saddam himself knew the
actual status of their programs. But it is very
reasonable to demand that the intelligence
services be forthright in what they know, what
they don't know, and what they can reasonably
guess.
Tenet's memoir is not a work of
great literature. Its merit is in its message,
rather simply and earnestly delivered: that the
United States faces a determined, fanatical,
persistent, intelligent and implacable foe who is
trying and will for the foreseeable future
continue to try to kill as many Americans as
possible. The United States' response to this
grave threat has not, cannot and will not be
determined by the decisions and actions of a
single government agency and its leaders. Rather,
the citizens of the United States themselves,
along with and through their elected
representatives and through their own day-to-day
mindset and activities, have determined and will
continue to determine their nation's response.
Is the threat severe enough to continue to
use "enhanced interrogation techniques" and to
overhaul America's archaic FISA system? Are
Americans willing to pay more in taxes to lessen
their dependency on Middle Eastern oil? What is
the proper balance of civil liberties and security
in light of the terrorist threat? It is not simply
George W Bush and a few other convenient
caricatures who will decide these questions. The
decisions rest also in the hands of Congress, the
media, the bureaucracy and, ultimately, with the
citizenry itself.
The often puerile
finger-pointing that has accompanied the release
of this book therefore misses the main point. We
can debate who should have known or said what when
until we collapse from exhaustion. But the
important questions of how the United States as a
society and government are to confront the threat
of catastrophic terrorism are staring Americans in
the face. Tenet's book is a bracing reminder of
the reality of this grave threat, of the ways and
means needed to combat it, and of Americans'
obligation to address these matters forthrightly
and responsibly.
Note 1.
"The British government has learned that Saddam
Hussein recently sought significant quantities of
uranium from Africa." - excerpt from President
Bush's 2003 State of the Union address.
At the Center of the Storm: My Years at
the CIA by George Tenet. New York:
HarperCollins, 2007. ISBN-10: 0061147788. Price
US$30, 576 pages.
Elbridge Colby
was a staff member in the Office of the Director
of National Intelligence and on the Commission on
the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States
Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. He is
currently an adjunct staff member at the Rand
Corporation. The views expressed in this article
are his own and do not reflect the views of the US
government or the Rand Corporation.
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