Tenet’s case for absolution on Iraq is not a slam dunk

George Tenet’s effort to absolve himself from blame for the Iraq fiasco is running into trouble. Critics of the the former CIA director’s role in promoting the war, including those who point to his new book as confirmation that the Bush administration, in particular Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, came into office determined to invade Iraq, say he had a responsibility to go public with the manifest doubts he now claims he had about the wisdom of the venture. Supporters of the war say he’s revising that role now that the invasion is viewed by most Americans as a mistake. Several prominent former CIA officials — Larry Johnson, Michael Sheuer and Ray McGovern, among others — accuse Tenet not just of failing to speak out against the war but of actively participating in the twisting of intelligence used to make the case for it, damaging the agency in consequence.

The most peculiar of Tenet’s claims, at least as used in his own defense, is that his famous remark that the intelligence on Iraq’s banned weapons was a “slam dunk” was taken out of context by the administration officials who used it to support their own claims that “everyone got it wrong.”

Tenet first said he didn’t remember making the remark. Now, he says that he didn’t mean the intelligence was unassailable; only that it could be used to make an unassailable public case for undertaking an invasion that he says was in his view at the time highly problematic if not doomed. He seems to have thought of himself not as an independent, honest broker of intelligence but more as the head of a PR firm whose responsibility was to provide his client, the White House, with what they needed to market their product even though he harbored private doubts about the utility of it. It’s as if Ralph Nader were making Corvair ads at the same time as he wrote Unsafe At Any Speed.

If Tenet’s book tour isn’t doing his reputation any good, neither is it helping the administration. Aside from adding to the already voluminous evidence that invading Iraq was a priority for the Bush administration before it even was an administration, it has forced administration officials to defend themselves against his charges, something that’s much harder now than it was when former treasury secretary Paul O’Neill made similar comments following his tenure. And true to form, that defense tends toward fantasy over fact, as when Condoleezza Rice told Wolf Blitzer that UN weapons inspectors agreed that Iraq was hiding banned weapons. (Equally true to form, Blitzer didn’t challenge Rice’s contention.)

As we noted yesterday, Tenet has received an invitation from Henry Waxman’s Oversight and Government Reform Committee to expound and perhaps expand upon the issues he raises in his book. It’s likely he’ll accept, either voluntarily or under subpoena, and it’s certain that no one with a stake in rehabilitating Tenet’s or the administration’s reputations will describe his testimony as a slam dunk.