Tenet falls on his sword
"Today, George Tenet, the director of the C.I.A., submitted a letter of resignation," President Bush said on the South Lawn of the White House in a midmorning announcement that stunned Washington by its timing. "I met with George last night in the White House. I had a good visit with him. He told me he was resigning for personal reasons."
I doubt it. Tenet's resignation is probably motivated purely by election year politics. With Bush sinking lower and lower in the polls recently because of the problems in Iraq, his campaign managers must be ordering antacids by the case. Last week they tried to push the numbers upwards by dwelling in public on the possibility of another terrorist attack, but the reaction (especially, in a refreshing change from the past, from the media) was not what they must, given past successes, have anticipated.
So now it's on to Phase 2. One of Bush's great achievements as a politican is that (despite all the evidence to the contrary) a lot of Americans perceive him as honest and possessing personal integrity. The only event that's made a big dent in those particular poll numbers is the suggestion that he might have misled the American public about the existence of WMDs in Iraq. [Late last summer, when the WMD scandal first reached critical mass, there was an interesting week in which, almost every day, the administration came up with a different explanation for how the WMD disinformation entered the State of the Union address. Each time, when no-one bought what they were selling, they were forced to change the product and try again.] George Tenet has, through his resignation, implicity accepted responsibility for the Iraq WMD affair and Bush's people can now go to work on the electorate with a weapon they can use to dissociate the President from the failings of his subordinate.
If anyone were paying attention, which they're probably not, this wouldn't work. The Washington Post, the New York Times, and salon.com last year traced the problems with WMD as high as the Vice President's office. It'll be interesting to see, when Bush starts his "It's time to put all this behind us" spiel, whether anyone remembers the contents of those reports.
I doubt it. Tenet's resignation is probably motivated purely by election year politics. With Bush sinking lower and lower in the polls recently because of the problems in Iraq, his campaign managers must be ordering antacids by the case. Last week they tried to push the numbers upwards by dwelling in public on the possibility of another terrorist attack, but the reaction (especially, in a refreshing change from the past, from the media) was not what they must, given past successes, have anticipated.
So now it's on to Phase 2. One of Bush's great achievements as a politican is that (despite all the evidence to the contrary) a lot of Americans perceive him as honest and possessing personal integrity. The only event that's made a big dent in those particular poll numbers is the suggestion that he might have misled the American public about the existence of WMDs in Iraq. [Late last summer, when the WMD scandal first reached critical mass, there was an interesting week in which, almost every day, the administration came up with a different explanation for how the WMD disinformation entered the State of the Union address. Each time, when no-one bought what they were selling, they were forced to change the product and try again.] George Tenet has, through his resignation, implicity accepted responsibility for the Iraq WMD affair and Bush's people can now go to work on the electorate with a weapon they can use to dissociate the President from the failings of his subordinate.
If anyone were paying attention, which they're probably not, this wouldn't work. The Washington Post, the New York Times, and salon.com last year traced the problems with WMD as high as the Vice President's office. It'll be interesting to see, when Bush starts his "It's time to put all this behind us" spiel, whether anyone remembers the contents of those reports.