Fundamentally, Tenet's line is that the administration decided to go to war against Iraq based upon reasons other than Iraq's purported WMD programs and therefore, while the intelligence community was indeed wrong about Iraq's capabilities, that failure was not the cause of the war. As he argues, "The leaders of a country decide to go to war because of core beliefs, larger geostrategic calculations, ideology, and, in the case of Iraq, because of the administration's largely unarticulated view that the democratic transformation of the Middle East through regime change in Iraq would be worth the price. WMD was, as Paul Wolfowitz was quoted as saying in Vanity Fair in May 2003, something that ‘we settled on' because it was ‘the one issue that everyone could agree on.'"

The evidence supports Tenet's storyline that the war was undertaken for reasons broader than Iraq's alleged WMD programs. Whether or not Richard Perle did actually say to Tenet on September 12, 2001, that Iraq would pay for 9/11, it is well-established that Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and others of like mind were pushing this policy immediately after the attacks. After Afghanistan fell, these advocates grew stronger, so that by the middle of 2002-according to sources as diverse as Tenet, Bob Woodward and the British-the march towards war was well underway. Why was this? Certainly the almost universal conviction that Iraq was clandestinely rebuilding its WMD capabilities was a significant element. But it was not sufficient. War hawks weren't calling for action against North Korea, which had WMD programs that were clearly much further advanced. More important were the other factors: Iraq's alleged links to Al-Qaeda and even 9/11, Iraq's oppression of its own people, its resistance to U.S. and UN direction, its challenge to U.S. regional primacy, its opposition to Israel, its status as a counter-example to pro-Western movements in the Middle East, and so forth. Different war advocates proceeded from different premises: Wolfowitz and the neoconservative idealists from a desire to remake and modernize the Middle East, Rumsfeld and perhaps Cheney from a conviction of the necessity of demonstrating American supremacy and resolve, Feith and others in the Department of Defense from a belief that Iraq lay behind much of the anti-Western terrorism of the preceding decades.

This explains why, through much of 2001 and especially 2002, war advocates at the Pentagon pushed the intelligence community to sign off on the assessment that Iraq was cooperating with Al-Qaeda-a push that the intelligence community commendably resisted. Rebuffed there, however, war advocates coalesced around the one rationale that all could agree on-Iraq's pursuit of WMD. The intelligence community was already there, having for years judged Iraq to be working on reconstituting its banned capabilities. The hawkish types wouldn't have to rely on astonishingly liberal-sounding arguments for humanitarian intervention. And the American people and their representatives would surely understand the appeal of a war undertaken to stop a supposed madman from launching a nuclear or biological attack.

The irony of all this is that the intelligence community's very resistance to the push to associate Iraq with Al-Qaeda made the public case for war rest disproportionately on Iraq's alleged WMD programs. This reached its apotheosis with Colin Powell's speech to the UN, when the initial draft's sections on Iraq's violation of human rights and ties to terrorism were well-meaningly slashed, leaving the speech focused entirely on Iraq's purported WMD programs.

Of course the intelligence community was wrong about Iraq's WMD programs, which Tenet forthrightly admits. (He doesn't have much choice!) But the bottom line is that this error, while very serious and troubling, was not what actually drove the decision to go to war, and therefore should be kept in perspective. While it is likely true that the intelligence community's assessments on Iraq's WMD programs were a necessary cause of the war, it is also true that they were neither sufficient nor primary. Tenet and the CIA therefore deserve criticism for getting the intelligence wrong, but not for leading the country to war. Those were policy decisions made for much broader reasons.

And even the intelligence error should not be over-emphasized. The real fault of the intelligence community was in not making more clear the limited evidence underlying their assessments and in not being more skeptical about their own estimates. The error was in allowing a legitimate inference-that Iraq, a consistent defier of UN inspection resolutions, was attempting to preserve and expand its WMD capabilities-to harden into a practical certainty. Effectively no one thought Saddam Hussein had dispensed with all his WMD, and Saddam did everything he could to hide that fact. (He was a very talented deceiver.) But the intelligence community allowed its working hypothesis to become dogma. It is unrealistic to expect our intelligence services to penetrate and understand the WMD capabilities of a nation in which, according to Charles Duelfer's Iraq Survey Group Report, perhaps only Saddam himself knew the actual status of their programs. But it is very reasonable to demand that the intelligence services be forthright in what they know, what they don't know and what they can reasonably guess.

Tenet's memoir is not a work of great literature. Its merit is in its message, rather simply and earnestly delivered: that the United States faces a determined, fanatical, persistent, intelligent and implacable foe who is trying and will for the foreseeable future continue to try to kill as many Americans as possible. Our nation's response to this grave threat has not, cannot and will not be determined by the decisions and actions of a single U.S. government agency and its leaders. Rather, we ourselves, the citizens of the United States, along with and through our elected representatives and through our own day-to-day mindset and activities have determined and will continue to determine our nation's response. Is the threat severe enough to continue to use "enhanced interrogation techniques" and to overhaul our archaic Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act system? Are we willing to pay more in taxes to lessen our dependency on Middle Eastern oil? What is the proper balance of civil liberties and security in light of the terrorist threat? It is not simply George W. Bush and a few other convenient caricatures who will decide these questions. The decisions rest also in the hands of Congress, the media, the bureaucracy and, ultimately, with the citizenry itself.

The often puerile finger-pointing that has accompanied the release of this book therefore misses the main point. We can debate who should have known or said what when until we collapse from exhaustion. But the important questions of how we as a society and government are to confront the threat of catastrophic terrorism are staring us in the face. Tenet's book is a bracing reminder of the reality of this grave threat, of the ways and means needed to combat it and of our obligation to address these matters forthrightly and responsibly.

Elbridge Colby was a staff member in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and on the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction.  He is currently an adjunct staff member at the RAND Corporation.  The views expressed in this article are his own and do not reflect the views of the U.S. Government or the RAND Corporation.

¹ "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" - Excerpt from President Bush's 2003 State of the Union.