It’s no secret that I think George Tenet was one of the most incompetent blithering idiots ever to run the CIA. In 2004, when he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, I wrote this: Undeserved Medal for Tenet.

Now Tenet, with his absolutely terrible record of failure and weakness, has thrust himself into the public eye with a series of history-challenged accusations against almost everyone in the Bush administration. Charles Krauthammer’s column today is an excellent refutation of Tenet’s dishonest whining: Rewriting History.

In his just-released book, and while hawking it on television, Tenet presents himself as a pathetic victim and scapegoat of an administration that was hellbent on going to war, slam dunk or not.

Tenet writes as if he assumes no one remembers anything. For example: “There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat.”

Does he think no one remembers President Bush explicitly rejecting the imminence argument in his 2003 State of the Union address in front of just about the largest possible world audience? Said the president, “ Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent” — and he was not one of them. That in a post-Sept. 11 world, we cannot wait for tyrants and terrorists to gentlemanly declare their intentions. Indeed, elsewhere in the book Tenet concedes that very point: “It was never a question of a known, imminent threat; it was about an unwillingness to risk surprise.”

Tenet also makes what he thinks is the damning and sensational charge that the administration, led by Vice President Cheney, had been focusing on Iraq even before Sept. 11. In fact, he reports, Cheney asked for a CIA briefing on Iraq for the president even before they had been sworn in.

This is odd? This is news? For the entire decade following the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Iraq was the single greatest threat in the region and therefore the most important focus of U.S. policy. U.N. resolutions, congressional debates and foreign policy arguments were seized with the Iraq question and its many post-Gulf War complications — the weapons of mass destruction, the inspection regimes, the cease-fire violations, the no-fly zones, the progressive weakening of sanctions.