Once again, a rare voice of sanity and balance from the Wall Street Journal about the abrupt departure of CIA director George Tenet. As the Journal suggests, it was right for Tenet to walk the plank not just because of the egregious mistakes made by the Agency before and after 9/11, but because of the utterly appalling and desperately dangerous chaos of buck-passing, back-minding and blame-shifting that is currently engulfing its operatives, imperilling the coalition's whole war effort.

As a result, the Agency's apparent genuine incompetence and errors, such as failing to predict, for example, the terrorist insurgency in Iraq, have become conflated with specious charges of error levelled against it, such as over Saddam's WMD programme -- whose non-existence certainly has not been proved by its non-discovery. But by failing to get a grip on the Agency and allowing it to descend into factional in-fighting and score-settling, Tenet allowed the anti-war propagandists falsely and malevolently to tar the whole of the intelligence effort, and thus the war itself, with the same brush of grievous error. As the Journal observes, the recent furore over Ahmad Chalabi has owed little to logic or common-sense:

'The most recent stories offer the amazing theory that the CIA, Colin Powell and the New York Times were all somehow gulled on WMD by one man--former exile Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress. We are apparently supposed to believe that our $40-billion-a-year intelligence services were duped by the same person our spooks have insisted could not be trusted ever since he called them out for a botched coup attempt in the middle of the 1990s. This is bad enough as political posterior-covering. But the blame-shifting has also done serious damage to U.S. policy in Iraq, by fanning internal warfare and unleashing prosecutors on colleagues. The Joe Wilson-Valerie Plame affair turned a trifling dispute over yellowcake uranium in Niger into a debilitating criminal hunt for "leakers." And the latest attacks on Mr. Chalabi have now led to an FBI investigation of Pentagon officials who have a war to win. Whether or not Mr. Tenet has participated in any of this, he has been unwilling or unable to stop it.'

Of course, the world of intelligence being necessarily opaque, none of us can know exactly where in the world of spookery the truth actually resides. But, trying to squint through the murk, it seems that, time after time, the Agency reached precisely the wrong conclusion from the facts it was amassing. It failed to join up the dots. That's some failure; and Tenet should surely have been fired long ago for this. But that does not mean the raw intelligence it was collecting was wrong, on for example links between Saddam and al Qaeda. On the contrary, it may have been that its real failure was to understand what it was looking at, let alone how to respond to it. The Journal's own conclusion therefore seems apposite:

'Former Reagan CIA official Herbert Meyer put it well in these pages shortly after September 11 when he wrote that "the CIA must be changed from a defensive agency into an offensive one." The World War II predecessor to the CIA, the famous OSS under "Wild Bill" Donovan, was a small outfit intent on defeating the enemy. Over the decades the CIA has evolved into a huge bureaucracy that values consensus over risk-taking. Mr. Meyer's suggestion that we need an OSS "within the CIA" makes eminent sense in this era of terrorists who have access to WMD but can't be deterred.'

Let's hope Tenet's successor has the wit to fashion an intelligence agency that is fit for the struggles that lie ahead. But meanwhile, a torrid and dangerous summer looms as Washington proceeds to tear itself apart over the CIA's record, in the middle of a war which depends above all on unfied and steadfast resolve.