Tenet: 'It is not possible to protect everything'

TENET:  Chris, you know—

MATTHEWS:  You’ve got to tell me, because nobody will tell me.

TENET: I don’t—you know, I can’t tell you how that—you know, it’s ironic.  I sit here, I can’t tell you how that decision was made. 

Here’s what I need to tell you:  when we understood what was going on on the ground, was the intelligence clear?  Did we ring the ball?  Did we say, You have an insurgency?  Did we say we needed a program of Sunni outreach?  Did we say, We need to figure out a way to get this army back together as fast as we can?  The answer is, yes.  And the moral of the story is, is when the data gets bad, you have to make more agile decisions than we made.

MATTHEWS:  Okay, who got into the president’s company and, despite all the knowledge of history—it must have been available to him about how difficult an occupation would be, how there would be—even the president said, Nobody likes to be occupied—and put in his idea this idea that—this dreamy idea that we, the American people, with our vast military—although it’s not always useful on the ground—we could go into a Third World country and create a democracy where there has been none before, can create this spirit of sacrifice on behalf of democracy, that can bring peace among the warring factions in the interests of democracy, because we’ve got more guns than they do?  Who told him that that would be true?

TENET:  Chris, if you—I don’t know—

MATTHEWS:  Was it Wolfowitz?

TENET:  -- who was (INAUDIBLE) --

MATTHEWS:  But you’re with him!

TENET:  Chris, I don’t know who told him this would be true, but here’s the lesson you have to—

MATTHEWS:  Somebody did.

TENET:  Let’s just talk about this part of the war—

MATTHEWS:  Am I right, that somebody told him this?

TENET:  I don’t know if somebody—

MATTHEWS:  Well, why—he says it in all his speeches.

TENET:  Chris, let me just—let me just make a very important point to you.  What have we learned?  If democracy is only equated with elections, and we scream, We’re going to have elections, it’s never going to work.  You’re never going to re-make the world in your image in the absence of a vibrant civil society, institutions, educational systems, the preparation and the ground work.  Simply having votes is not going to work in this part of the world.

You have to prepare people with a foundation that makes a difference.  And here’s—at the end of the day, these countries are all different.  They have a different cultural history, they have different religions.  They’re going to do this in their own ways.  Is it important—if you tie it back to the terrorist phenomenon—

MATTHEWS:  Did you ever give this lecture to the president, when it mattered?

TENET:  No, I don’t lecture—I don’t—

MATTHEWS:  No, because I think we could’ve all benefited from that.

TENET:  Well, Chris, you know, I’ve written a book where I’ve reflected -- (INAUDIBLE) --

MATTHEWS: I know—here’s your book, and I hope people read it.  I hope people buy this book, because there’s so much of this in there, “At the Center of the Storm.”

But, this information would have been very valuable in a sit-down with the president—a couple cigars, talk about the world and what happens when you invade an Arab country.  It would have been helpful.

TENET:  Chris, I think that, if you look at what we said before we understood what it was going to do, and you looked at our analysis, we said a lot of these things all over town.

MATTHEWS:  I don’t hear it from the president.  I hear the same delusional talk that we heard from the neo-conservatives, before we went in the war, from the president now.  That’s what worries me.  We haven’t learned our lesson.

TENET:  We’re in a tough place, and we’ve got to come together as a country and get to a better place.

MATTHEWS:  George—best of luck.

TENET: Thanks.

MATTHEWS:  Thank you for coming on HARDBALL.

TENET:  Thanks.  Appreciate it.

MATTHEWS:  Thank you, George Tenet.

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