Too bad he didn’t say anything before now…
Via Washington Post:
Tell-all memoirs can be tough when they actually, well, tell all. But it would be hard to surpass the shot that Leon Panetta, President Obama’ s former CIA director and secretary of defense, takes at his former boss and the White House foreign policy team in his new book: “Worthy Fights.”
A book excerpt in Time Magazine Thursday recounts the internal battles over the timing of the withdrawal of U.S troops from Iraq and whether a residual force would remain. Panetta and other Pentagon officials argued for keeping that force.
“My fear, as I voiced to the President and others,” Panetta writes, “was that if the country split apart or slid back into the violence that we’d seen in the years immediately following the U.S. invasion, it could become a new haven for terrorists to plot attacks against the U.S.” He adds that his stance “reflected not just my views but also those of the military commanders in the region and the Joint Chiefs.”