Today’s Must Read

George Bush insulates himself from reality! The administration didn’t seriously entertain the notion that Iraq didn’t have WMD’s! Dick Cheney is an asshole!

OK, so the revelations in George Tenet’s new book aren’t going to shock anyone, but they are notable considering the source.

Tenet will appear on 60 Minutes this Sunday to roll out his new memoir, which will be released next week. The New York Times got a copy. And, well, are you shocked by this?

“There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat,” Mr. Tenet writes in a devastating judgment that is likely to be debated for many years. Nor, he adds, “was there ever a significant discussion” about the possibility of containing Iraq without an invasion.

I didn’t think so.

Most talk about the book so far has centered on Tenet’s head-scratching explanation for his “slam dunk” comment. It took place in a private 2002 White House meeting:

During the meeting, the deputy C.I.A. director, John McLaughlin, unveiled a draft of a proposed public presentation [on Iraq’s possession of WMDs] that left the group unimpressed. Mr. Tenet recalls that Mr. Bush suggested that they could “add punch” by bringing in lawyers trained to argue cases before a jury.

“I told the president that strengthening the public presentation was a ‘slam dunk,’ a phrase that was later taken completely out of context,” Mr. Tenet writes. “If I had simply said, ‘I’m sure we can do better,’ I wouldn’t be writing this chapter — or maybe even this book.”

I’m not sure that the distinction between Tenet’s intended meaning and the administration’s interpretation of the comment is quite as glaring as he wants it to be. But his broader point — that the “slam dunk” comment was far from the watershed moment it’s been made out to be because Bush’s and Cheney’s minds were already made up — is a solid one. But then, we already knew that.

Among other unsurprising revelations, the book portrays the president as slow to accept the reality in Iraq. This description comes from The Los Angeles Times, which got details of the book from two former CIA officials who’ve read it:

…[T]he book describes warnings from the CIA station in Baghdad that were greeted with dismay and mounting suspicion within the White House, including a November 2003 assessment that described the situation as an insurgency.

After that assessment was leaked to the press, Bush summoned Tenet and other CIA officials to the White House and warned that he didn’t want anyone in his administration to use the term “insurgency,” according to the officials.

“There’s a lot of stuff in the book that paints a picture of an administration wrapped in its own beliefs, not being able to handle information that was contrary to those beliefs,” said the former official who commented about Tenet’s view of Cheney.

Shocked?