Tenet on the Staircase with the Neocons
My column in response to George Tenet's "60 Minutes" interview is available at Salon.com.
Excerpt:
The French call it "the spirit of the staircase" (l'esprit d'escalier), the clever reply to someone that comes to you on your way up to the bedroom after a cocktail party. In his new book, released Monday, former CIA Director George Tenet has delivered himself of hundreds of pages on the staircase, imagining what he should have said or could have said to Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and the other neoconservatives who marched the country to war in Iraq using the pretext of Sept. 11. In his April 29 interview with "60 Minutes" touting the book, Tenet came across as a spectacularly tragic Walter Mitty, daydreaming about how things would have been different if only he had spoken up, if he'd only been a James Bond-style spymaster instead of a timid, fawning bureaucrat. But of course, when it really mattered, at the critical juncture of his seven-year tenure as CIA chief, Tenet said nothing.
Read the whole thing.
posted by Juan Cole @ 4/30/2007 09:08:00 AM
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3 Comments:
The phrase, "shouldn't cry over spilled milk" doesn't really work for blood, does it?
"I regret. I apologize. I blame myself. I continue as before."
--Mason Cooley .
"Our repentance is not so much regret for the ill we have done as fear of the ill that may happen to us in consequence."
--François, duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
"What is the price-current of an honest man and patriot to-day? They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have to regret. At most, they give only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and God-speed, to the right, as it goes by them. There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man. But it is easier to deal with the real possessor of a thing than with the temporary guardian of it."
--Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), “Civil Disobedience,” originally published as “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849).
KING RICHARD III
Slave, I have set my life upon a cast, And I will stand the hazard of the die: I think there be six Richmonds in the field; Five have I slain to-day instead of him. A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!
RICHARD III
Act 5. Scene IV
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
There will be many switching sides now to save their skins.
Not very important, but "l'esprit de l'escalier" I have always understood as the wit you think up as you are going down the staircase when leaving the cocktail party, as in the grand houses, the salon was always approached by a monumental staircase, or was situated in a grand Parisian apartment. Not like US houses.
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