Tenet: Iraq War "Like A Slow-Motion Car Crash"

"No Consensus Was Ever Reached, And No Clear Plan Ever Devised.....Cheney, Rumsfeld Aides Like "Schoolgirls In Love".....Tells "60 Minutes" Plame Outing "Big Time Wrong..."

Time April 29, 2007 08:00 PM
I first flew into Iraq just about the time Jerry Bremer took over as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, or CPA, during the third week of May 2003. I took a helicopter ride with Jerry right over Baghdad. It was daylight. The helicopter door was wide open, and I was looking out as we flew. On the ground, the environment was strikingly permissive, considering that a foreign army had just invaded the capital and deposed the country's long-term dictator. People were going out, eating in restaurants. You half expected to see double-decker buses rolling down the main streets, with curious tourists gaping out the windows.
When I returned to Iraq in February 2004, the environment had changed dramatically. We flew into Baghdad at night, because you couldn't come in during the day. The C-17 bringing us there made a full-combat landing--a steep dive, quick on the ground. I was seated far forward, wearing flak jacket and helmet. There was no sightseeing this time. In those intervening ten months, Iraq had become a very different place, but not at all in the way that the U.S. government had intended. How did it get that way? Through a series of decisions that, in retrospect, look like a slow-motion car crash.

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