Now that George Tenet has presented his version of a slam-dunk case against all the no-goods who recklessly rushed us into war, it’s time for the ex-CIA chief to start writing another book. This one should be a confessional. The theme should reveal how Tenet, a career intelligence professional, helped create the climate that placed this entire nation in the midst of a worsening storm.

The decision to invade Iraq seemed at the time not reckless, but reasoned. Colin Powell himself, while secretary of state, assured us that the case for war was solid.

And yet, the case for war was at best porous. Tenet acknowledges this now, and of course he knew it then. Even as he watched the Bush administration proceed with the plan to topple Saddam Hussein, Tenet understood that we did not have a clear-cut reason to fight.

We had insufficient intelligence. True, we had electronic surveillance; but we lacked the all-important human intelligence-gathering — the Humint — networks. How did Tenet know this? Because the former spy chief-turned-author — who held powerful intelligence posts for 21 years — helped oversee the gutting of programs that would have put spies on the ground in Iraq.

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In 1985, when Tenet joined the staff on the powerful Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the United States deployed a multitude of clandestine agents in the ongoing Cold War against communism. Tenet saw how the brave covert warriors risked and sometimes sacrificed their lives while keeping the Soviet Bloc at bay. He also saw how their work paid off.

In the late 1980s, the Cold War presented a seemingly lesser threat. The intelligence overseers — Tenet included — adopted what can only be described as severe myopia, reading a reduced Soviet threat to mean that we needed fewer covert operations overall.

Even as the CIA was in crisis — it had become obvious that a dangerous Soviet-controlled mole was at work within the agency — the clandestine services took major budget and personnel hits. Key spy networks fell into disuse, and recruitment efforts dropped significantly. We still had agents in the USSR and elsewhere, but on a far smaller scale than needed.

In 1994, with Tenet now holding a top position on President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council, the intelligence community was shaken by the discovery that the long-burrowed CIA mole was a high-ranking counterintelligence agent, Aldrich Ames. The traitor was arrested before he had the chance to defect, but the episode showed that we could not even monitor our own people.

The Ames affair should have jolted America’s spookmeisters into revamping our Humint capabilities. Instead, the intel managers did nothing. The programs continued to founder, and did so through 1997 — when Tenet took over the CIA — and through Sept. 11, 2001.

By then, of course, it was too late to tap into a covert Middle Eastern spy network. These types of secret cadres take years — decades — to develop. Tenet knew this, and he also knew that the lack of Humint capability was an entrenched problem with previously demonstrated consequences.

All the more startling, then, are Tenet’s admissions — revealed as far back as 2004, in a speech at Georgetown University — that only a few human sources supplied the dicey information that helped propel us to war.

The meager sourcing and information shortfalls should have been enough to keep our soldiers at home, where they can train for when they’re really needed. Now we are left with a political and social storm that is spiraling ever stronger.

It’s too soon to predict how bad the storm will get; but the time is long overdue for at least one critical figure — George Tenet — to confess his part in what got us to this point.

Veteran journalist Susan Katz Keating is a People magazine correspondent and author of “Prisoners of Hope: Exploiting the POW/MIA Myth in America.”