Mr. George J. Tenet

The story in The New York Times today, April 27, 2007 that former CIA director, Mr. George J. Tenet has used his book billed to be published Monday by HarperCollins to accuse particularly Vice President Dick Cheney—and others in the Bush White House—of rushing America to war in Iraq without a “serious debate” is hardly news. That fact is well known here and abroad. Mr. Cheney himself has neither denied nor apologized for his role in the rush to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussien. Mr. Tenet’s accusation is yet another confirmatory pointer to the credibility problem that every one of all the powerful players in the Bush White who are associated with the invasion of Iraq will carry for the rest of their lives.

This 549-page book, that he entitled: At the Center of the Storm, which the Times described as: “By turns accusatory, defensive, and modestly self-critical” may not be sufficient to put out Mr. Tenet apart from the others who were in the center of what is seen by many people as a wrong war. He is insisting that his “slam dunk” “remark about the evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction” was put out of context by a White House that was already braced itself up to invade Iraq when he made it.

If Mr. Tenet has been listening attentively to stories of Mr. Paul D. Wolfowitz’s travails at the World Bank he will no doubt take time off to ponder that his own future in any public service capacity may not be starkly different. After his retirement from the CIA, Mr. Tenet got the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which he says in the book that he was “not at all sure I wanted to accept” from Mr. Bush, and he has now got $4 million dollars advance for his book from HarperCollins. Meanwhile the war in Iraq rages on.