|
He
Was a Hack
June
10, 2004
By Raul Groom
 "He's
mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf." — The
Fool, King Lear
As I sit in the cab of my stinking, gas-guzzling monstrosity
of a rental car, breathing the noxious mix of exhaust and
sewage that prevails in the streets of Olde Towne Alexandria
on a Friday evening, a crazed gunman is rampaging around a
sleepy little Colorado town in a bulldozer, trying to knock
down the library. Utter madness, of course, but we would all
be well advised to get used to it. June is here, and with
it the savage weirdness that grips this country as the days
stretch out like caramel and the sun's gentle spring rays
begin to crash into our bodies at a more authoritative angle,
causing many of us, it's sad to say, to lose our minds entirely.
And who do we find getting a nice jump on the summer insanity
but world-renowned Early Bird George W. Bush? White House
aides spent the week whispering over Kir Royale in dark Capitol
Hill bars, wondering why their fearless leader, once a firm
believer in regular sleeping habits, has taken to wandering
the halls of the West Wing at night, singing Methodist hymns
and jabbering on about Nixon's ghost.
Just as things were coming to a head and folks were wondering
if perhaps the President didn't need to see someone, Boy George
got into a shouting match with his CIA Director, and when
Tenet wouldn't back down, Bush sent him packing. At least
that's what's being leaked to the vaguely disreputable Capitol
Hill Blue by folks who are in a position to do such things.
If that's really what happened, Tenet can be commended, in
a twisted way, for prudently jumping at the chance to get
off the ship of state just as Cheney and his hapless first
mate prepare to crash it into an onrushing iceberg and drown
everyone aboard. Of course, the mainstream press is trying
very hard to pretend that the timing of Tenet's resignation
makes sense as anything except the rash flailings of a monstrously
unfit and increasingly unstable Chief Executive, but at press
time no one had provided a convincing alternative version
of the events leading to Tenet's ignominious departure.
I use that word with great confidence, Dear Reader, for
while the official particulars of Tenet's resignation have
yet to be established, the ignominy of his exit is not in
doubt. Kennedy once said of Nixon - prematurely, as it turned
out, though eventually even more accurately than JFK could
have ever realized - "He went out like he came in. No class."
It could just as easily be said of Tenet that he went out
like he came in - a useless tub of guts whose only real talent
was deflecting political heat, however temporarily, from the
man at whose pleasure he served.
One could almost see Tenet's son cringing with disgust as
his father nodded in the lad's direction while delivering
his final self-serving salvo of lies, alleging that the real
reason for his departure was so that he could finally "be
a great dad" to the high school senior, who will be leaving
for college in about two months. Let it never be said of George
Tenet that he did not know how to shut the corral gate after
the horses were already gone.
In that sense, Tenet's hilariously hackneyed and half-assed
excuse for resigning his post as the world's most powerful
spymaster was a fitting epitaph to a career that began and
ended with everyone trying pitifully to pretend that there
was anything at all about the situation that was not nakedly
and acerbically political. Despite the generous treatment
Tenet's CIA tenure is currently receiving in the press, history
will likely record that most if not all of the successes that
the intelligence community notched during the last seven years
were achieved not because of Tenet but in spite of him. From
the first, and to the last, he was a hack.
Perhaps it is unfair to blame Tenet for the fact that in
the months leading up to September 11th, he was unable to
raise sufficient alarm among the single-minded, Iraq-obsessed
denizens of the Bush White House to mobilize the forces that
would have been necessary to short-circuit the terrorist attack
that killed almost three thousand people. Perhaps it is too
harsh to hold him accountable for a situation in Afghanistan
where the U.S.-backed government cannot function due to the
lack of any coherent command network in the country. Perhaps
he is not truly culpable for the reality that the United States
invaded a sovereign nation in the most volatile region in
the world without a shred of hard evidence that any of the
stated pretexts for the war were actually based in fact.
But his high-profile exit at the kickoff of the true professional
political season makes obvious what he could have and should
have done at any of these moments in his regrettable and forgettable
tenure as U.S. Director of Central Intelligence under George
W. Bush. When Bush and Cheney were too obsessed with Iraq
to listen to reason in early 2001, Tenet could have resigned
in protest, and been remembered as a visionary and a hero.
Indeed, the FBI's counter-terrorism chief John O'Neill took
this very action in August 2001, leaving his post after trying
unsuccessfully to convince the administration that Osama bin
Laden should remain a high-priority focal point of U.S. intelligence
gathering. Tenet needn't even have gone the extra mile, as
O'Neill did, being martyred in the September 11th attacks
when a plane struck his Manhattan office building.
When the White House refused to pay sufficient attention
to evidence that the situation on the ground in Afghanistan
was deteriorating, Tenet could have resigned and worked to
help elect some congressmen who might have pressured Bush
to follow through. And most of all, when Tenet saw that his
"slam dunk case" against Saddam had in fact evaporated into
the dry Iraqi air, he should have resigned and apologized
to the world.
He could have resigned. He should have resigned. By leaving
now, whatever the specific circumstances of his resignation,
he becomes just another rat deserting the sinking ship that
is the Bush administration, and for that he deserves his fate
- obscurity, humiliation, and ruin. No one can stand between
a man and his harvest. Tenet's lack of vision had many grave
consequences for the nation and for the world, but in the
end, the one that did the most damage to him personally is
the most inexplicable - he could not see that in a confrontation
between his porcine friends in high places and his lupine
charges in low ones, it would be the wolves, and not the pigs,
who would carry the day.
Satisfied as we may be at having disposed of Tenet, consigning
him not so much to the dustbin of history but to its outhouse,
we are faced with the much more unsettling question - the
implications for the rest of us. What will be the effect of
Tenet's cowardly and dishonest flight? The war between the
CIA and the neoconservative core inside the White House has
escalated in recent weeks, with the CIA finally bringing low
the man who stood, in a sense, at the head of the neoconservative
plan for the Middle East since the blueprint was first drawn
up by Cheney and Rumsfeld during the first Bush administration.
With Chalabi out of the picture, Iraq's interim government
is now under the control of CIA favorite Ayed Alawi, whose
first major address to the Iraqi people, which focused on
talking up the hugely unpopular presence of American and British
troops in the country, was titled "Please, Please Do Not Blow
Me Up." Suddenly the situation on the ground in Iraq is much
more interesting. Rumsfeld's Pentagon, which has until now
run the entire Iraq operation with an iron fist, finds itself
without a direct line to the ear of the new head of Iraq's
transitional authority at the very moment when the future
of Iraqi representative government is about to be decided.
Meanwhile, back in the States, Patrick Fitzgerald is calmly
and fastidiously putting the finishing touches on a grand
jury investigation of the Bush administration's involvement
in burning deep cover CIA operative Valerie Plame. It is this
and only this development that has Bush and Cheney feeling
as if they were perched atop a leaky oil drum above a raging
bonfire. Cheney has already been interviewed in the probe,
though he was not under oath, and no one is yet saying what
exactly happened during the Q&A.
The only thing that is known is that shortly after Cheney
got through with his obligation to the Plame grand jury, Bush
consulted outside counsel, a move that struck just about everyone
in Washington as a pretty ominous sign. The White House was
not particularly deft in deflecting speculation that perhaps
this development meant that our head of state really might
have something very serious to hide from prosecutors, and
that the secret is related to Bush's knowledge of the actions
of the Vice President's office.
Tenet, weak and pitiful though he was, had until now acted
as a sort of firebreak between the growing conflagration of
anger in the CIA ranks and the increasingly dry, crackling
bundle of sticks that is the Bush White House. With Tenet
gone, it's only a matter of time before the place goes up
and reduces the whole gang down to charcoal.
Indeed, though it pains me to break it to all of the other
political junkies in the audience, we may be about the witness
a premature end to the competitive portion of this summer's
presidential race. If, as I suspect will be the case, Fitzgerald
files an indictment in the Plame case this month, Cheney,
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle and company are essentially finished,
regardless of whether any of them actually glimpse the inside
of a jail cell. No one survives a tussle with the spooks,
though we have certainly not seen the last self-styled Machiavelli
who'll get it in his head to try.
Bush himself will come out clean enough, of course - if
there is one fact to be gleaned from the extensive and disgusting
history of The Family, it is that the rules do not apply to
them. But with his handlers and leg breakers spending the
next six months fending off Pat Fitzgerald and his rabid band
of subpoena-toting do-gooders, Little George has no chance
of being reelected. Kerry will win a yawner, and those of
us addicts who can't get through a 4-divisible year without
a mudslinging, hateful horse race to watch will have to content
ourselves with the handful of contests that will decide control
of the U.S. Senate.
Shakespeare got it right, you know - what brings us down,
in the end, is never some outside factor, but is merely a
manifestation of those aspects of our personalities that we
have not yet learned to control. In Cheney's case, a near-constant
need for revenge, treachery and endless money was always bound
to do him in, but with Dubya, the reasons are a bit more complicated,
and more than a little sad.
Like Tenet, Little George lacked the vision to see what
was happening in front of his face. But even if he had seen
it, would he have had the wisdom to know that his conniving,
plotting "friends" would eventually turn upon their blue-blooded
benefactor, casting him into a swamp of recrimination and
attrition for which his comfortable, responsibility-exempt
career cannot possibly have prepared him? Bush is no fan of
Shakespeare, and has never had much time for the common-sense
advice of lowly fools anyhow.
Thus there is a lesson in Little George's impending demise
for all of us. In clinging only to what was familiar to him
- a gang of avaricious, conscienceless sycophants - Dubya
only made himself miserable and wretched. And like Falstaff,
that other famous slacker, the only thing that will protect
him now is a kind of alacrity in sinking.
Visit Raul Groom's blog at raulgroom.blogspot.com.
|
