<<decisions are made with the best info at hand.
<<The director of the cia said wmd's were a slam dunk>>
We've been through this many, many times.
It is extremely unlikely - - I would say possible in theory only - - that Bush really accepted Tenant's "slam dunk" assessment. The likeliest scenario, consistent with the evidence of former staffers and people present at meetings, is that Bush, Cheney and their team decided to invade Iraq, figured out in broad outline what evidence they would need to justify the action and told Tennant their needs. He orchestrated the cooking up of the necessary opinions, neutralized any conflicting opinions still floating around and then served up his or his agency's "conclusions" to them as ordered.
However, we've gone round the block numerous times on that issue and you're one of the last guys in the U.S.A. who can't see the obvious truth and logic of it, and that's OK because I'm just not gonna waste any more time on this. I've given up on you.
But even your alternative theory (Tennant says "it's a slam dunk," Bush buys into it and the U.S. invades) is ludicrous in the extreme. As if Bush, the C.E.O., deciding life and death, war and peace, would just take Tennant at his word. Bush was the CEO. Tennant worked for him. He had a duty of CEO, especially on such an important issue, to take nothing for granted. To probe and grill whoever says "slam dunk" but especially the guy at the top. Given the flimsiness of the case, the fact that crude forgeries had already been produced to support it, the fact that all the information could be traced to a single source, and a very interested single source, the Iraqi National Congress, it's clear that ANY kind of detailed probing would have unravelled the case. The failure to probe Tennant and detect the fraud would itself (if it ever happened) would have been negligence and dereliction of duty of such a high order of magnitude that impeachment would have been the nation's only appropriate recourse. They found themselves at war because the "President," the CEO, took Tennant at his word? TENNANT was effectively the guy who made the decision to go to war against Iraq? Ridiculous.
Which of course is the strongest indicator that we have that even Bush could not have been that stupid or that negligent. Obviously he did not interrogate or grill Tenant because he already knew what Tenant had to say. He and Cheney had TOLD Tennant what to say. Everyone knows this. Otherwise everyone would be howling for Tennant's scalp. Instead, he goes out with a "Medal of Freedom."
Blaming it all on Tennant and "bad intelligence" is real low-class. "The buck stops here" is something that Bush probably wouldn't even know the meaning of. But hey, if that's the best lame-ass excuse you can think of to cover an obvious lie, go with it. Won't help ya none. He's busted. Most people have figured out that he lied anyway.
