It's all Tenet's fault

The official war apologist talking points in response to David Kay’s flat assertion that Iraq had no weapons or programs on the eve of war:

• Clinton signed the Regime Change bill!
• Kay said the CIA said there was no pressure—it’s all Tenet’s fault!

Right. Except that Clinton didn’t start a war—he signed a bill that said we’d like to see Saddam gone, but aren’t going to do anything about it. Anyway, you hate the guy; stop hiding behind his skirts.

And the idea that mean old Mr. Tenet shoved the dirty weapons intelligence down poor Georgie and Dickie and Donnie and Paulie’s throats and forced—just FORCED!—them to go to war with their sloppy, sloppy work is so absurd as to threaten the fabric of spacetime itself. Because mean old Mr. Tenet would have had to go back in time to 1992 to start the shoving process, because that’s when Wolfowitz first started pushing the government to invade Iraq.

And yes, when you have information that is threatening but vague and uncertain and you depict that information as concrete and certain and urgent, that is a lie. When you are the president of the United States and you do that, then you have subverted democracy by denying the governed the opportunity to give their reasoned consent. And then when you blame the bad result of your bad action on your employees, you reveal that you are not just a liar, not just a closet autocrat, but a coward as well.

Filed under: politics/war