CIA Director George Tenet surprised the country today by announcing that he is resigning his position as head of the Agency. Tenet has taken quite a bit of heat lately due to intelligence lapses concerning the September 11 terrorist attacks and weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Now, amidst rising criticism of the Bush administration and calls for resignations of many high ranking officials, Tenet is stepping down.

Despite speculation that Tenet was pushed out or is being used as a scapegoat, Tenet and Bush both insist that his departure is for “personal” reasons. Of course, there are ways of letting a person know he should leave without ever saying so. The entire Bush administration is built on groupthink. Until now the example of groupthink that has been used in every psychology textbook is President John F. Kennedy’s decision making leading up to the Bay of Pigs. I can’t help but think the Bush administration will become the new Bay of Pigs for future psychology texts.

According to many reports, Secretary of State Colin Powell, one of the few people in Bush’s cabinet who objected to the war in Iraq, has become isolated from others in the administration. According to Bob Woodward, speaking in an interview for 60 Minutes, Powell was not informed about the decision to go to war in Iraq until after it had already been made. Said Woodward, “Powell says to him, somewhat in a chilly way, ‘Are you aware of the consequences?’ Because he’d been pounding for months on the president, on everyone - and Powell directly says, ‘You know, you’re gonna be owning this place.’ And the president says, ‘I understand that.’ The president knows that Powell is the one who doesn’t want to go to war. He says, ‘Will you be with me?’ And Powell, the soldier, 35 years in the army, the president has decided and he says, ‘I’ll do my best. Yes, Mr. President. I’ll be with you.’ And then, the president says, ‘Time to put your war uniform on.’”

Former anti-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke has also commented on this. “The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, ‘I want you to find whether Iraq did this,’” Clarke said. “Now he never said, ‘Make it up.’ But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.”

What Bush has created in the White House without ever saying so directly is an atmosphere that lets everybody know to either get onboard or get out. It’s easy to feel good about a decision when nobody is willing to disagree. So while I’m certainly no fan of Tenet’s, it strikes me that he simply did what the average person would do in this situation. He got onboard.

I suppose that is the worst part of this situation. Tenet might have been part of the problem. But he wasn’t the cause of the problem. The issue of the war in Iraq is not an issue of intelligence. Bush had all of the information he needed to know that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, that they were not a threat, and that they had absolutely no connection to al Qaeda. He knew that all of his rationales for going to war were lies, and he did it anyway. This is not a matter of faulty intelligence. This is a matter of a group of greedy old men who had been aiming for Iraq since long before 9/11 taking advantage of the situation to fulfill their own political agendas. And if anybody should resign because of it, it’s Bush and Cheney who orchestrated the whole thing from the beginning.