One cheer for the hot new memoir: the uses of George Tenet's book.

FORMER CIA director George Tenet's new book is the most effective bipartisan initiative of the year. His At the Center of the Storm has been clobbered by the Left and the Right, and rightly so. The Left criticizes him for not speaking up when he was in power if he had so many misgivings about the Iraq War. The Right objects to his after-the-fact criticisms of Bush-administration figures and his neglect of the CIA's clandestine service--a neglect that played a major role in the intelligence disasters over which he presided. And both Left and Right recoil at Tenet's self-justification, which is extreme even by the standards of a Washington if-only-they-had-listened-tome memoir.

Yet there is a kernel of good in Tenet's book. Underneath the excuse-making and the score-settling, Tenet's portrayal of the pre-Iraq War intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons programs dispels key contentions of the "Bush lied, people died" crowd. He captures the essential nature of intelligence--that it's usually fragmentary and uncertain--and reminds us of the post-9/11 environment, in which policymakers were inclined to put the worst interpretation on incomplete information, lest they encounter another nasty surprise. Rather than undermine the case for war, Tenet's book--no matter how he has tried to market it during high-profile interviews--tends to support it.

Tenet's book certainly does not deserve three cheers, or even two. But it does deserve one--lonely and perhaps not very enthusiastic--cheer.

In a book that is hard on Bush-administration hawks, Tenet rebuts one of the persistent anti-administration charges, although one that's never had any evidence behind it: that the Iraq intelligence was skewed in reaction to pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney and others. "Intelligence professionals did not try to tell policymakers what they wanted to hear," he writes, "nor did the policymakers lean on us to influence outcomes."

The infamous Downing Street memos from 2002 quote the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, Sir Richard Dearlove, saying that "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." The word "fixed" became an obsession of anti-war conspiracy theorists. Tenet explains, "Sir Richard later told me that he had been misquoted. He reviewed the draft memo, objecting to the word 'fixed'in particular, and corrected it to reflect the truth of the matter." Dearlove had made the more pedestrian observation that he felt war with Iraq was coming.

Tenet is critical of Bush officials for going beyond the intelligence in several instances. There is Cheney's oft-criticized Veterans of Foreign Wars speech in August 2002. Cheney said, "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." But that is basically what the intelligence said too. A "key judgment" in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)--a consensus document of U.S. intelligence agencies--said "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons." Cheney also said, "Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon." This is alarming, but so was the consensus conclusion of U.S. intelligence--that, if Saddam had to produce his own fissile material, he could get a nuke as soon as 2007 (i.e., now), and that, if he got fissile material from elsewhere, he could have a nuke within a year.

Given what we know now, of course, Cheney's statements circa 2002 appear reckless. But he wasn't talking in an environment in which U.S. forces had scoured Iraq for WMD and come up empty. His aggressive posture was partly in reaction to the first Gulf War, after which it was learned that U.S. intelligence had badly underestimated how close Saddam had come to building a nuclear weapon. "No doubt that experience had colored the vice president's view of U.S. intelligence gathering ever since," Tenet writes, "but it also had a profound impact on my views and those of many of our analysts. Given Saddam's proclivity for deception and denial, we, too, were haunted by the possibility that there was more going on than we could detect."

This is one of many passages in which Tenet is more fair-minded than in his book-promotion interviews. To conclude that Saddam wasn't pursuing WMD, Tenet writes, would have meant ignoring "years and years of intelligence that pointed in the direction of active programs." In the north of Iraq, a CIA team managed to interview Iraqi military officers prior to the war. According to Tenet, "Every military officer we debriefed told us that Saddam did indeed possess WMD."

Langley certainly wasn't doing the work of the neocons. Tenet had doubts about invading Iraq. An intelligence officer named Bob Walpole managed the production of the 2002 NIE and told Tenet, "I just don't believe in this war." Even adjusting for his self-interest in explaining away failure, Tenet's bottom-line judgment about the WMD intelligence sounds about right: "We got it wrong partly because the truth was so implausible."

Tenet tours the most notorious flubs of the Iraq intelligence, many of which have been spun into "Bush lies" by critics of the war.

Prior to the war, the administration argued that Saddam attempted to acquire 60,000 high-strength aluminum tubes for the enrichment of uranium. That turned out not to be the purpose of the tubes--but this wasn't deception on the administration's part. Tenet explains that the CIA believed the aluminum tubes were indeed for enriching uranium. And it had brought in a team of experts from Oak Ridge National Laboratory who reached the same conclusion.

The Department of Energy disagreed and thought the tubes were for rockets. But its representative at a meeting to consider the import of the tubes, according to Tenet, "was unable to explain the basis of his department's view in anything approaching a convincing manner." He adds, "Whatever their intended use, under UN sanctions, Saddam was prohibited from acquiring the tubes for any purpose. All agencies agreed that these tubes could be modified to make centrifuge rotors used in a nuclear program."

Then there was the brouhaha over Saddam's supposed attempt to acquire yellowcake from Niger. The case that Saddam was developing nuclear weapons didn't rest on this claim. "The Estimate noted that Saddam already had access to large amounts of yellowcake in Iraq--550 tons of it, enough to produce as many as 100 nuclear weapons," Tenet writes.

But yellowcake took on an outsized significance in the post-war debate. The CIA had told the White House to take the Niger claim out of the speech the president delivered in Cincinnati in October 2002. British intelligence had reported that Saddam tried to make the purchase, but the CIA was dubious. As Tenet puts it, "The allegation was worthy of investigation. Based on what we found, however, it was not worthy of inclusion in a presidential speech."

The claim made it into the 2003 State of the Union address anyway when the CIA reviewed the speech but didn't wave the White House off, and White House officials forgot that they had been warned about the information previously. This erupted into the scandal over the "16 words" that gave Joe Wilson his 15 well-coiffed minutes.

Wilson, of course, argued that he had made a trip to Niger that had definitively discredited the yellowcake claim. But his report had been so "inconclusive" that when the press began inquiring about it, the CIA "press office had trouble finding people who remembered the details." Wilson hadn't filed a written report, instead briefing two CIAanalysts at his home over Chinese food. The report was such a non-event that it wasn't briefed to Cheney, and Tenet doesn't remember hearing about it at the time.

Iraq's relationship with al-Qaeda has been another perennial controversy. Critics argue the administration tried to imply Iraqi culpability for 9/11 by talking about Iraq and al-Qaeda in the same breath. The opposite seems closer to the truth: The critics dishonestly imply that because Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, it also had nothing to do with al-Qaeda. Tenet stipulates that Iraq had "no authority, direction, or control" over al-Qaeda, but he counters the conventional wisdom that cooperation between the two was a fantasy.

According to Tenet, "There were, over a decade, a number of possible high-level contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda, through high-level and third-party intermediaries. Our data told us that at various points there were discussions of cooperation, safe haven, training, and reciprocal nonaggression." In the post-9/11 world, this was alarming, and it wasn't the worst of it: "There were solid reports from senior al Qaeda members that raised concerns about al Qaeda's enduring interest in acquiring chemical and biological expertise from Iraq."

In the end, all of the reasons we got the picture on Saddam's WMD wrong are cold comfort. We still got it wrong. But as Mario Loyola of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies recently emphasized, ultimately the responsibility rests with Saddam Hussein. It was his obligation to be transparent about his weapons programs, and so long as he wasn't, it would be difficult for us to get definitive proof of his programs or the lack of them.

We obviously could have done better. We needed more intelligence assets on the ground. Abetter intuitive sense of the way the Iraqi government worked (or didn't work) would have given the data context. Former U.N. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, who headed the post-war hunt for Saddam's weapons, told Tenet that when he heard Colin Powell's presentation at the U.N., he knew half of it was wrong: "I just didn't know which half. With the Iraqis there was often some wacky, implausible, but true explanation for the way things seemed." And it would have helped if more people had been questioning the fundamental assumptions behind the intelligence, instead of almost everyone, with the White House farthest out front, pulling the same way.

There is a disturbing exchange between CIA officials and Condoleezza Rice near the end of 2002 in which she appears finally to understand that the CIA was producing estimates, not statements of fact, about Saddam's weapons programs. Making unmodulated pronouncements based on these kinds of estimates is very risky. This is a nuance that tended to get lost in the political debate, but also--less forgivably--lost by the CIA.

If the CIA wasn't going to emphasize the uncertain nature of the intelligence, who was? If Cheney went too far in his VFW speech, Tenet didn't even speak to him about it afterward. If the NIE turned out to be too unnuanced, as Tenet concedes, it was conservative compared with other CIA products. "We at CIA had written pieces in key publications, such as the President's Daily Brief, that were very assertive about Iraq's WMD programs," Tenet writes, and "much more assertive ... than we had been in some of our other publications, including the NIE."

In the end, intelligence will rarely be perfect. And policymakers have to decide where to draw the inevitably nebulous line between the risk of action and inaction based on it. As Tenet writes of the war, "It was never a question of a known, imminent threat; it was about an unwillingness to risk surprise." Through his serial deceptions, Saddam pushed us beyond our willingness to risk surprise, and the rest is history.