by CKR
I bought my copy of Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine last night, and I also watched the companion Frontline piece, "The Dark Side". I'm not far into the book yet, and Frontline didn't explore that one percent in particular, but since it's in the title, and since pretty much every book review (NYT, WaPo, more links by Froomkin) has mentioned that one percent, I'd like to point out a couple of things that I haven't seen said explicitly. Just as a reminder, here it is:
"If there's a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response."For an individual, applying such a doctrine to one's life amounts to neurosis. I don't know how Cheney arrived at a numerical probability for Pakistani scientists helping al Qaeda; I suspect that that one percent is figurative, so I'll enumerate, without numerical probability, some of the bad things that can happen if you go outside your house. Automobile accident, whether you are in your car or on foot; attack by a stray dog; slips and falls on slick pavement; breathing in car exhaust or other emissions from construction or cleaning operations along with second-hand cigarette smoke; eating poorly prepared and therefore bacteria-filled food in a restaurant, not to mention greasy fast food; colliding with rockfalls or wild animals in your car. Staying at home isn't much better: slipping in the bathtub; electrocution from careless handling of electrical fixtures; burns from various hot surfaces; a housefire from an uncleaned chimney or falling asleep with a cigarett in hand. Lots of things can go very badly wrong, and occasionally do. A couple riding motorcycles were sideswiped by a car in Santa Fe the other day; a month or so ago, a pickup truck ran, full speed, into a medical waiting room.
Some people are paralyzed by these possibilities, and that is called neurosis. It appears that Dick Cheney's one percent draws the nation closer to this sort of paralysis.
Nations, of course, aren't necessarily subject to the same precepts as individuals, so this isn't an entirely convincing argument, more a worrying analogy. Threats are customarily evaluated for national purposes through capabilities. During the Cold War, the focus was on the size of nuclear arsenals and other measures of military strength; capabilities, in other words. The US built more weapons, so the Soviets built more, and vice versa. The One Percent Doctrine stands the concept of capabilities on its head: there is no point in assessing capabilities; if there is a possibility that someone has been considering doing harm to the United States, then they must be annihilated.
Clearly this is where some of our recent craziness originates. Terrorists are a threat to the very existence of the United States, even if they are groups of several hundreds of people with access only to very primitive technology. Has Bin Laden spoken to some people about the possibility of getting a nuclear weapon? Probably? Did any of those people have any realistic possibility of access to usable nuclear weapons? Doesn't matter; keep that one percent (or less?) in mind.
The One Percent Doctrine also flies in the face of risk assessment. It's prudent to prioritize risks and to prepare for them according to which are most probable, but Cheney's words appear to indicate that he would prepare for all risks above one percent. This will, of course, require the entire Gross Domestic Product and more. Risks must be prioritized and resources applied to the most probable. Probability, to the extent that it can be quantified, is one way to do this.
Again, some of the craziness: the furor a couple of years back about vaccinating all first responders, and perhaps the entire population, against smallpox. Smallpox cultures exist only in secure national storage; it may be possible to culture smallpox from the graves of people who have died from smallpox. May be possible? Vaccinate everyone. The public health authorities and the public generally saw that the risks from the vaccine were probably greater than the risks from terrorists, not to mention the expense that would be incurred.
I'm looking forward to reading the book and may have more to say later, if it hasn't all been said already. I just wanted to get some basic and fundamental thoughts out first.