The enablers and the morally courageous
Toolbox
Published: May 6, 2007
When the final story of the Bush presidency is written, it is my firm conviction that future historians will conclude that George W. Bush was the worst American president of at least the last 100 years. I have written that sentence before. I use it again because my conviction has been reinforced by still another book about the Bush years, "At the Center of the Storm — My Years at the CIA" by George Tenet, former CIA director from 1997 to 2004.
The lead paragraphs in the initial news reports about the book in the two most important newspapers in America read as follows:
The New York Times: "George J. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, has lashed out against Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials in a new book, saying they pushed the country to war in Iraq without ever conducting a 'serious debate' about whether Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States."
The Washington Post: "White House and Pentagon officials, and particularly Vice President Cheney, were determined to attack Iraq from the first days of the Bush administration, long before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and repeatedly stretched available intelligence to build support for the war, according to a new book by former CIA director George J. Tenet."
For the last 10 days the Tenet book has been vigorously debated — generally praised by administration critics and panned by its supporters. It has been disputed by those to whom Tenet has not been kind — most notably Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. And a number of former CIA analysts have taken issue with some of the specifics of Tenet's justifications for his agency's failures. Considering that Tenet headed the CIA for seven years during a tumultuous period of history and the fact that he is the first member of the Bush War Cabinet to go public with his version of history, such reactions were completely predictable.
However, I must confess that while I had been eagerly awaiting Tenet's account of events leading up to 9/11, the decision to invade Iraq and the first three years of the occupation, I feel dissatisfied. As one would expect, Tenet is often defensive and self-serving. But what is the point of writing a memoir if not to get your side of the story out? He obviously is angry that the administration has made him the scapegoat for the faulty intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. So it is no surprise that he would try to settle some scores with Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice and their top aides.
Tenet is particularly incensed by Cheney who last year implied on national television that the administration "made a choice" to go to war, based on Tenet's declaration to the president that the intelligence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction was a "slam dunk." Tenet admits that he did use the words "slam dunk" at a White House meeting prior to the invasion. But he points out that the purpose of the meeting was to discuss the selling of the war to the American people — not to analyze the credibility of the actual intelligence. As he correctly notes, that meeting took place "ten months after the president saw the first workable war plan for Iraq" and "two weeks after the Pentagon had issued the first military deployment order sending U.S. troops to the region." Cheney was clearly making him the fall guy, and I accept Tenet's explanation of what happened. The problem is that I have read this all before in Bob Woodward's, "State of Denial" and in Ron Suskind's, "The One Percent Doctrine." In both of those books published last year, Tenet was clearly a primary source, so in a sense he has scooped himself.
But my real disappointment is that even though Tenet has good reason to feel betrayed by the Bush administration, he can not bring himself to direct his fire at the president. His treatment of Bush is forgiving. He says he and others sometimes failed to give Bush the information he needed. "The president was not well served," he says.
If one believes that the president, any president, is ultimately responsible for the policies of his administration, this notion that it wasn't really Bush's fault does not ring true. It certainly didn't for Michael Scheuer, a former CIA official, the founding head of the CIA's Osama Bin Laden unit and someone who once worked closely with Tenet.
Scheuer wrote last week in The Washington Post, "He seems to blame the war on everyone but Bush … Tenet's attacks focus instead on the walking dead, politically speaking: the glowering and unpopular Cheney; the hapless Rice; the band of irretrievably discredited bumblers who used to run the Pentagon." (Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith and Perle.) Scheuer goes on, "They're all culpable of course. But Tenet's attempts to shift the blame won't wash. At day's end, his finger pointing is designed to disguise the central tragic fact of his book. Tenet in effect is saying that he knew too well why the United States should not invade Iraq, and that he told his political masters and he was ignored. But above all he is saying that he lacked the moral courage to resign and speak out publicly to try to stop our country from striding into what would be an abyss."
That is a very harsh judgment. It is one that might also apply to Secretary of State Colin Powell which I hate to say because I know and admire him personally. Given his background as a career military man Powell simply could not bring himself to publicly challenge his commander in chief. Tenet said on NPR a few days ago that neither could he have broken with the president he was serving — on the eve of war.
Who knows if resignations by either or both of them would have prevented the invasion? It certainly might have. But I am sure that if either had had the moral courage to do so, history's judgment would be a lot kinder than it is otherwise likely to be — not just of George W. Bush but of those who enabled him, especially Tenet.
As it happens there is a new book just out that deals with the very issue of moral/political courage. "Troublesome Young Men — The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England" was written by Lynne Olson, former White House correspondent for the Baltimore Sun. Olson tells the long-forgotten story of a small group of young Tory members of Parliament, all very much a part of the British establishment, who had opposed appeasement before the war and in 1940 were doing the unthinkable — trying to topple Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, the leader of their own party.
"They knew they were courting political suicide," writes Olson. "They were challenging a powerful authoritarian prime minister who equated criticism of his policies with treason and employed a full complement of dirty tricks to stamp out dissent. Opponents branded the rebels as unpatriotic."
Nowadays we all tend to assume that Churchill's elevation to prime minister in May 1940 was inevitable. It was not. And Churchill himself was not willing to oppose Chamberlain at that point because he was part of his Cabinet. However, this small band of backbenchers believed that the loyalty they owed was not to their class, their party or their prime minister — but to their country. Against all odds, the rebels engineered a three-day debate on Britain's humiliating defeat in Norway, at the end of which Chamberlain was gone and Churchill was prime minister.
Olson explains the significance of this remarkable action: "If it hadn't been for those MPs … Churchill would never have been given the chance to rise so magnificently to the challenge and Britain might well have negotiated for peace with Hitler or even gone down to defeat."
In words that echo through the pages of history, she quotes Ronald Cartland, the youngest rebel who would soon be killed in action near Dunkirk. "No government can change men's souls," said Cartland. "The souls of men change governments."
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