For those of us who are invested in the great battle over American strategy in the current war, there’s a certain grim satisfaction in the resignation of the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, in advance of a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee that is said to give a devastating reprise of his performance. Coming as it does after two weeks in which the DCI’s proxies have been mounting one of the most disgraceful whispering campaigns in memory against the principal spokesman for democratic idealism in Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi, Mr. Tenet’s departure is sure to be seen in the Middle East as a victory for Mr. Chalabi and his allies in the American debate, such as Richard Perle.

Such a perception, however, is no doubt too simple. There are persons we respect who reckon Mr. Tenet has been the best in a long line of directors. Like the directors before him, he bears the burden that it is mainly his defeats that become public. And it’s not only the right that has been critical of Mr. Tenet. Doves on the left have also been calling for Mr. Tenet’s resignation — or his firing — for years. Senator Kerry, in an October 27, 2003, appearance on “The Charlie Rose Show,” called for Mr. Tenet’s resignation, notwithstanding that Mr. Tenet entered politics by working for three years as an aide to Senator Heinz, whose widow is now Mr. Kerry’s wife.

Vice President Gore, in a May 26,2004, speech in New York, included Mr. Tenet among the list of Bush administration officials that he said should resign, notwithstanding the fact that Mr. Tenet was elevated to the leadership at Langley by President Clinton. And there were even relative centrists who were said to be losing confidence in Mr. Tenet, such as two members of the Intelligence Committee, Senators Snowe and Hagel. The report that will issue from their committee, our Eli Lake reports today, will be a scathingly critical assessment of the CIA’s handling of the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in the runup to the war in Iraq.

Of all the charges against Mr. Tenet, that one strikes us as the most bogus. After all, it wasn’t just America that deter mined that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It was our European allies and the United Nations, too. Officially, and wisely, the jury is still out. The discovery of a sarin shell, a vial of live C. botulinum Okra B., and a seven-pound block of cyanide salt in Iraq indicate that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

It may yet turn out that if there was an American intelligence failure, it came in failing to track the weapons as they were spirited to Syria or hidden in the final days of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Our own great disappointment, what we call the Tragedy of Tenet, relates to his handling of the Iraqi patriot Ahmad Chalabi, who has been the target of what looks like a smear campaign concocted by either Mr. Tenet’s own shop or the Iranian government. It’s a campaign that the legendary spymaster Duane Clarridge described to The New York Sun as “a political act of desperation to make sure Chalabi does not run Iraq.”

It may be some time before the disinfectant of sunlight is brought to bear on this episode. But it’s enough to make us think back to 1995, when Senator Moynihan introduced a bill called the Central Intelligence Agency Abolition Act. “Scientists have long understood that secrecy keeps mistakes secret,” Moynihan said then. “Openness of information is essential for great science.… Secrecy is a disease. It causes hardening of the arteries of the mind. It hinders true scholarship and hides mistakes.”

The senator was fond of reminding people that America got along fine without a CIA until after World War II and that when the Agency was created, as Moynihan noted, Secretary of State Acheson warned against it.

“I had the gravest forebodings about this organization and warned the President that as set up neither he, the National Security Council, nor anyone else would be in a position to know what it was doing or to control it,” recalled Acheson, as quoted by Moynihan. Before President Bush names a replacement for Mr. Tenet, he could profit by taking a careful look at the more fundamental question of what he really wants the director of central intelligence to do.