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Zinni was not the only one taken aback by Cheney's words. Then-CIA Director George Tenet says Cheney's speech took him completely by surprise. In his memoir, Tenet wrote, "I had the impression that the president wasn't any more aware than we were of what his number-two was going to say to the VFW until he said it." Tenet added that he thought Cheney had gone well beyond what U.S. intelligence was saying about the possibility of Iraq acquiring a nuclear weapon, adding piously, "Policy makers have a right to their own opinions, but not their own set of facts. ... I should have told the vice president privately that, in my view, his VFW speech had gone too far." Tenet doesn't tell us whether he ever summoned the courage to tell the President, although he briefed him several times a week.
Actually, Cheney's exaggeration could not have come as a complete surprise to Tenet. We know from the Downing Street Minutes, leaked to the press on May 1, 2005, that on July 20, 2002, Tenet himself had told his British counterpart that the president had decided to make war on Iraq for regime change and that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
When Bush's senior advisers came back to town after Labor Day, 2002, the next five weeks were devoted to selling the war, a major "new product" of the kind that, as then-White House chief of staff Andy Card explained, no one would introduce in the month of August. Except that Cheney did.
After assuring themselves that Tenet was a reliable salesman, Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld allowed him to play a supporting role in advertising bogus claims of yellowcake uranium from Niger, aluminum tubes for uranium enrichment, and mobile trailers for manufacturing biological warfare agents, in order to scare Congress into voting for war. It did on Oct. 10 and 11, 2002.
Was President George W. Bush not warned of the likely impact of his attack on Iraq? He had been earlier, but the malleable Tenet opted to join the Groupthink and told his minions that, if the President wants to make war on Iraq, it's our duty to provide the "evidence" to justify it. Forgotten or suppressed were earlier warnings from the CIA about how an attack on Iraq would mean a growth industry for manufacturing terrorists.
In a major speech in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002, four days before Congress voted for war, the President warned that "the risk is simply too great that Saddam Hussein will use instruments of mass death and destruction, or provide them to a terror network." In a sad irony, on that same day, a letter from the CIA to the Senate Intelligence Committee asserted that the probability is low that Iraq would initiate an attack with such weapons or give them to terrorists -- UNLESS: "Should Saddam conclude that a US-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions."
In a same-day assessment of Colin Powell's deceptive speech at the UN on February 5, 2003, we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) warned the President to beware of those who...
"...draw a connection between war with Iraq and terrorism, but for the wrong reasons. The connection takes on much more reality in a post-US invasion scenario. Indeed, it is our view that an invasion of Iraq would ensure overflowing recruitment centers for terrorists into the indefinite future. Far from eliminating the threat it would enhance it exponentially."
We continued:
"We recommend you re-read the CIA assessment of last fall [2002] that pointed out 'the forces fueling hatred of the US and fueling al Qaeda recruiting are not being addressed,' and that 'the underlying causes that drive terrorists will persist.' We also noted that a 'CIA report cited a Gallup poll last year of almost 10,000 Muslims in nine countries in which respondents described the United States as 'ruthless, aggressive, conceited, arrogant, easily provoked and biased.'"
But Groupthink set in. And courage at senior ranks in the military was in short supply. No one had the guts to properly discharge the responsibility of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the principal military adviser to the President. This is the role that Gen. Martin Dempsey stepped up to a year ago and, in the process, prevented wider war in the Middle East.
One can only hope that President Obama, in current circumstances, will keep listening to aides that know something about war.
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