I confess, George Tenet’s book on the CIA involvement in
counter-terrorism and the war in Iraq, At
the Center of the Storm is something I have been wanting to read for some
time and this week, I finally got to it. I would particularly recommend the
chapter entitled “The One Issue that Everyone Could Agree On” about the WMD
diagnosis in Iraq.
I have to say that I appreciated Tenet’s ability to take
blame and refuse to take blame based on whether he believed he deserved blame
or did not deserve blame. Taken as a whole, the book admits mistakes and yet at
the same time refuses to take bullets in the chest for the mistakes that others
made. And I do not get the impression that he is the sort of person to take
advantage of the mistakes of others when they admit them either. The book is
full of “This is why we thought what we thought. This is why we said what we
said. This is how we drew our conclusions.” Some of the impressions that I
finished the book with are as follows.
One, People cannot be blamed for sub-par work that they did
not receive the support or time to do and few things are more frustrating than
being so blamed. Secondly, it is always easier to see in hindsight what
questions you should have been asking if you only had the resources to ask a
few. But any of us who look at our own lives know that. Thirdly, Tenet makes it
clear that there are those in the Islamic world who are just as, if not more,
concerned with the ideology of al-Qaeda as we are. “There were a few countries
that got it long before 9/11” Tenet writes:
“The Jordanians, Egyptians, Uzbeks,
Moroccans, and Algerians always understood what we were talking about. It was ironic that, pre-9/11, we had more
success in getting help within the Islamic world than elsewhere.” P. 230
I also learned just how deeply offended those in the CIA are
at the notion that they catered their intelligence to executive expectations. Tenet
argues that the idea of regime change in Iraq was not something that was the result
of Bush and Cheney demanding supporting intelligence for.
“The focus on Iraq by senior Bush
officials predated the administration.
Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle were among 18 people
who had signed a public letter from a group they named the Project for the new American Century calling for Saddam's
ouster. It is often forgotten, but
regime change in Iraq was also the explicitly stated policy of the Clinton
administration, and was the goal of the Iraq Liberation Act, passed by Congress
in 1998. $100 million was appropriated
to the State Department for the express purpose of seeking an end to Saddam's
regime. . . . America's promise to topple Saddam remained the law of this land
from halfway through Bill Clinton's second term right up until US troops
invaded in March 2003.” P. 302
To the contrary, Tenet insists that the Iraq War was more
the result of the executive branch NOT relying on the CIA for its intelligence.
He says that key advisors to Bush and Cheney were developing their own
pseudo-CIA analysis.
“For many in the Bush
administration, Iraq was unfinished business.
They seized on the emotional impact of 9/11 and created a psychological
connection between the failure to act decisively against Al Qaeda and the
danger posed by Iraq's WMD programs. The
message was: we can never afford to be surprised again.” P. 305
“In looking back, there seemed to
be a lack of curiosity and asking these kinds of questions, and the lack of a
disciplined process to get the answers before committing the country to
war. And in hindsight, we in the intelligence
community should have done more to answer those questions even though not
asked. One of our senior analyst
subsequently told me that the impression given was that the issue of ‘should we
go to war’ had already been decided in meetings in which we were not
present. We were just called in to
discuss ‘how’ and occasionally the ‘how will we explain it to the public.’
There was never any doubt of the military outcome, but there was precious
little consideration, that I'm aware of, about the big picture of what would
come next.” P. 308
On several occasions, Tenet reiterates the problem with
funding side-CIA’s and not the institution itself.
“Feith’s team, it turned out, had
been sifting through raw intelligence and wanted to brief us on things they
thought we had missed. Trouble was,
while they seem to like playing the role of analysts, they showed none of the
professional skills or discipline required.
Fieth and company would find little nuggets that supported their beliefs
and seize upon them, never understanding that there might be a larger picture
that they were missing. Isolated data
points became so important to them that they would never look at the thousands
of other data points that might convey an opposite story.” P. 347
“Trained analysts would ask
questions like, ‘What is the source?
What do I know about the source?
Do they have the access that they claim?’” p. 356
At the heart of his message about mis-information in the
executive branch’s decision to go to war, is the fear that the Nitro of the unfounded
assurance of the President’s advisors was being combined with the Glycerin of qualified
guesses of the official intelligence services to produce the lethal combination
we know now was the decision to go to war. “Policymakers have a right to their
own opinions, but not their own set of facts.” Tenet states in several places.
And yet, he takes responsibility for the mistakes while
setting them in their historical context.
“Because of the impending vote on
the use of force, scheduled for early October, a production process that
normally stretched for six to ten months had to be truncated to less than three
weeks. Even that was not fast enough for
some of the unsympathetic members of Congress who wanted the NIE, delivered
almost instantly. . . . Had we started the process sooner, I am confident we
would have done a better job highlighting what we did and did not know about
Saddam's WMD programs, and we would have sorted out some of the inconsistencies
in the document. The lack of time,
however, did not relieve us of the responsibility to get the information
right. The flawed analysis that was
compiled in the NIE provided some of the material for Colin Powell's February
5, 2003, UN speech, which helped galvanize public support for the war. ” P. 323
“We allowed flawed information to
be presented to Congress, the president, United Nations, and the world. That never should have happened.” P. 383
One of the interesting insights I gained from my reading was
how impossible it is to predict what will happen in a certain region without
knowing what YOUR OWN government is going to do when it gets involved there.
“Our prewar analysis of postwar
Iraq was prescient. The challenge for
CIA analyst was not so much in predicting what the Iraqis would do. Where we ran into trouble was in our
inability to foresee some of the actions of our own government.” P. 426
I particularly appreciated his suggestion that the problems
of post-war Iraq were a surprise to the administration because they had
expected the appearance of a ‘Muhammad Jefferson’ who would do for Iraq what
Washington had done for post Revolutionary War America. The problem was, and
the CIA probably knew this as well as anyone, that Saddam had shot all the ‘Muhammad
Jeffersons’ in the course of his several decade regime.
All in all, a good book. It certainly will not heal the
wound in the hearts of those who have lost loved ones as a result of the lack
of good intelligence but it is a reminder that it could have been worse. It
could have been much worse …. Had there not been people willing to make it
their life’s passion to protect us.
Question for Comment: How are you at accepting blame when blame is deserved? How are you at defending yourself from blame when it is not?
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