Tenet takes the fall as
Bitter division opens over Iraq quagmire
By Fred Goldstein
On June 3, CIA Director George Tenet became
the first high-level member of the Bush administration's group
of war conspirators to resign. It was just 14 months since
Washington opened up its war of conquest against Iraq.
Whether he was pushed out or jumped, the resignation of
Tenet, one of the inner circle who was highly instrumental in
justifying the war, is a major setback for Bush--particularly
in the midst of an election campaign. It is a confession of
failure and bitter division at the summit of the capitalist
state.
But it is only the most dramatic expression of the growing
pressure on the Bush administration by the ruling
class--pressure brought about by discontent and disillusionment
over the failure of the Iraq adventure to bring about the
anticipated rapid imperialist victory and all the spoils of war
that were expected to follow.
On one level, Tenet is a victim of the inner struggle within
the Bush administration and can be viewed as a scapegoat for
Bush. But on a more basic level, Tenet is a casualty of the
heroic Iraqi resistance.
With respect to the Iraq war, the charge against Tenet is
that he oversaw the furnishing of unreliable information about
the possession of weapons of mass destruction by Saddam
Hussein's government--information that turned out to be false.
The truth came out in a report by David Kay, whom Bush had
assigned to be in charge of searching for the weapons after the
war.
But the real failure--not only of Tenet and the CIA, but of
Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the entire group of
war makers--was not to anticipate the predictable Iraqi
resistance, which has startled the U.S. ruling class by tying
up the world's mightiest military power and to this day denying
them and their puppets control over the country.
Niger forgeries and State of the Union
The depth of the failure on the part of the administration,
and the way in which Tenet was victimized by it, is indicated
by the handling of the so-called Niger uranium issue, in which
Saddam Hussein was alleged to be importing enriched uranium
from that African country.
In the fall of 2002, Tenet called Condoleezza Rice's chief
aide, Stephen Hadley, to warn Bush not to put anything in an
upcoming speech about the alleged Iraqi attempt to purchase
uranium. That sentence was struck out of the speech. But later,
when Bush gave his State of the Union speech in January 2003,
two months before the Pentagon's invasion, the line about the
uranium reappeared. After the war, a scandal broke: the
documents substantiating the charges about Niger uranium had
been forged.
Condoleezza Rice tried to get out of it by saying that Tenet
had not read the speech and had to take the blame. But Tenet
had already told Rice's highest aide that the allegation was
false. Yet it had appeared in Bush's annual speech to
Congress.
How could such a risk be taken? Only if the Bush
administration was absolutely confident that the U.S. would
gain immediate, total victory in Iraq and the question of the
justification for the war would never be raised. Military
triumphalism, patriotic chauvinism such as followed the Gulf
War of 1991, would prevail and the ruling class would not care
one bit about how or why Washington got into the war.
Had it not been for the Iraqi resistance, the question of
the phony evidence about non-existent weapons of mass
destruction would have been a minor footnote in history,
brought up only by bourgeois dissidents and the left. The
ruling class would never have paid attention to it. They would
have been too busy counting their profits from the oil, from
the takeover of the Iraqi economy, and from the payola flowing
from construction of military bases and so on.
Tenet, who had moved with caution early in the campaign to
promote the war, as witnessed by his warning to Bush about the
uranium lie, came around to be a crucial and indispensable part
of the conspiracy to go to war.
Maneuvers over inspections
The Bush administration hoped to wage the war on the grounds
that Saddam Hussein would defy UN resolutions on inspections.
To this end, the U.S. manipulated a Draconian resolution that
gave the inspectors almost absolute freedom to completely
violate Iraq's military security while it was under threat of
war. Bush expected a refusal and was geared up for war.
But Saddam Hussein maneuvered to prevent the war. He allowed
the most intrusive inspections demanded by the U.S. The Iraqi
government even allowed the destruction of newly purchased
missiles. It complied with every demand. The regime basically
foiled the provocative strategy of the Bush administration.
Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector, could produce no
evidence of weapons of mass destruction.
It is unusual, if not unprecedented, for the head of the
CIA--an agency cloaked in secrecy, whose function is to carry
out espionage, sabotage and subversion undercover--to have its
director come publicly and dramatically on the world stage to
support a war policy. But the only way to counter Iraq's
maneuver and the testimony of Hans Blix and justify the war was
to get Tenet and the CIA to swear to the world that Iraq had
weapons of mass destruction.
Tenet did his job when he made a forced appearance, sitting
behind U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell at a UN Security
Council meeting, to demonstrate that he was the underwriter of
the speech in which Powell made the final pre-war indictment of
the Iraqi government, diagramming the existence of so-called
mobile biological weapons factories--another charge that turned
out to be false.
When the resistance to the occupation started up in earnest,
the entire pack of lies fell apart and the conspirators were
all suddenly responsible for their pre-war claims.
Tenet's fate is ironic because much of the false
intelligence that has been uncovered comes from Ahmad Chalabi,
who is a creature of the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Feith group in the
Pentagon--a group at war with the CIA.
It is a measure of the relationship of forces inside the
administration and also the caution with which the ruling class
is handling the crisis that Tenet has resigned, while Rumsfeld
is still standing.
The self-styled Cabal
Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker, who helped in initially
exposing the torture scandal and who has authoritative sources
in the military, revealed in the magazine's March 12 issue the
existence of a little known, but crucial, operation in the
Pentagon.
"They call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal--a small
cluster of policy advisers and analysts now based in the
Pentagon's Office of Special Plans. In the past year, according
to former and present Bush administration officials, their
operation, which was conceived by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy
Secretary of Defense, has brought about a crucial change of
direction in the American intelligence community. These
advisers and analysts, who began their work in the days after
Sept. 11, 2001, have produced a skein of intelligence reviews
that have helped to shape public opinion and American policy
toward Iraq. They relied on data gathered by other intelligence
agencies [such as Israel--F.G.] and also on information
provided by the Iraqi National Congress, or I.N.C., the exile
group headed by Ahmad Chalabi. By last fall, the operation
rivaled both the CIA and the Pentagon's own Defense
Intelligence Agency, the DIA, as President Bush's main source
of intelligence regarding Iraq's possible possession of weapons
of mass destruction and connection with Al Qaeda."
This group had contempt for Tenet and the CIA as soft. The
CIA had torn apart their findings. It is said that Rumsfeld
forbade the Pentagon staff from attending CIA briefings. Thus
the now-famous "slam dunk" remark attributed to Tenet in Bob
Woodward's book, "Plan of Attack"--that when Bush asked "How
confident are you, George?" about the intelligence, Tenet
replied, "Don't worry, it's a slam dunk"--is only a tiny part
of the picture. If he actually made this intemperate remark,
and Bush and Rice were the only others in the room, according
to the book (!), Wood ward's rendition was calculated to set
Tenet up for the blame.
Tenet was the most vulnerable and the weakest personality
within the administration. But it was the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld
group that orchestrated the war and miscalculated the people of
Iraq and their long-standing hatred for and struggles against
being colonized, from the days of the Turkish empire to the
British empire and now the U.S. empire.
The ruling class, which was wildly for the war before the
resistance, is now growing disillusioned. The exit of Tenet is
only one sign of the pressure.
Ashcroft and torture
John Ashcroft is now under pressure from Congress to reveal
a startling 50-page document, prepared for Rumsfeld by Justice
Department lawyers, that openly claimed the right of the
president, as commander-in-chief, to supersede any laws against
torture. These charges, while being pursued modestly right now,
are of My Lai and Watergate proportions--should the bourgeoisie
decide to escalate the struggle.
There's more. Rumsfeld himself is beginning to feel the heat
of the investigations into torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and
Guantanamo. Time magazine recently publicized an e-mail showing
that Cheney had a direct and traceable hand in awarding no-bid
Iraq contracts worth billions to the Halliburton Co. And Bush
himself has had to hire an attorney in connection with the leak
that led conservative columnist Robert Novak to reveal that
Valerie Plame, the wife of Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, was
a CIA agent.
The numerous investigations demonstrate the bitter strife
within the ruling class and their deep concern about the
competency and ability of the present group to retrieve the
situation in Iraq. All this comes as the result of the struggle
of the Iraqi people and the world-wide anti-war movement that
supports them.
The attempts to keep the Bush administration off balance now
may also be calculated to inhibit them from trying to save
themselves by carrying out a pre-election military adventure
based upon some provocation.
John Kerry's program for Iraq is none too appealing to the
bosses, either. His program to internationalize the occupation
has little promise for them. The European imperialists show no
inclination at all to send troops or money into the Iraqi
quagmire. Kerry's call for 40,000 more troops is hard to
reconcile with the enormous strain upon the rank-and-file
soldiers and the growing resentment against "stop-loss"
orders.
Bush has tried to gain a respite by carrying through the
charade of turning over "sovereignty" to a puppet group, headed
by a CIA terrorist who has been revealed to be the architect of
bombings, killings and sabotage. The fact that the Bush
administration could come up with nothing better than this
discredited group is a sign of weakness.
All the maneuvering in the UN Security Council to get a
unanimous resolution agreeing to the U.S. occupation has not
stopped the resistance and is strictly the result of
negotiations among the imperialist powers in typical colonial
fashion. It can only evoke the further disgust and hatred of
the Iraqi people and will strengthen the resistance in the long
run.
Reprinted from the June 17, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
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