by CKR
Some of the best reporting these days comes to us in books like State of War, Ghost Wars, and Cobra II or in magazine articles, like those by Murray Waas and Seymour Hersh. The longer forms allow reporters more time for investigation and thought than does the 24/7 world. The longer forms provide both new information and analysis.
Books, however, take longer to publish than a web site or newspaper. They may be harder to focus when recent events don’t easily add up to a big picture. Reporters may not be the best interpreters of the facts they arrange for us. But as facts are formed into a story, interpretation is inevitable.
Ron Suskind has been trying to penetrate the actions and motivations of the players in the Bush Administration. First with The Price of Loyalty, and now with The One Percent Doctrine, with a notable New York Times magazine article in between, he pieces together almost a story.
The One Percent Doctrine contains a mass of material across several smaller stories. Suskind has organized the material chronologically, which obscures the continuities of the smaller stories. The alternative, presenting each story line on its own, would shortchange the connections between them. In his place, I’d find it hard to choose. Both the smaller stories and the larger picture are important.
Many reviews have focused on the title conceptualization by Vice President Cheney. The idea that all actions that might result in large consequences must be followed up, no matter how small the probability, explains much about the flipflops and bizarre twists we’ve seen in the Bush administration prosecution of the war on terror. Other reviews have focused on individually newsworthy items like Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation and the reports of a possible chemical weapons attack against New York City.
There are other stories in the book that deserve attention: the US contacted Libyan officials in October 2001, leading eventually to Libya’s eventual renouncing its WMD programs; Sudan, which issued passports to Osama bin Laden’s wife and sons, was supposed to be cooperating with the United States; and why all those airline flights were kept on the ground in Europe during the Christmas holidays of 2003.
It’s the bigger story that deserves attention, though. Nadezhda looks at the administration’s eagerness to ignore professionals as it develops policy, a side-effect of applying the one percent doctrine, and the resulting willingness of those professionals to leak their deep concerns about the safety of the nation and the legality of administration actions to Suskind and others. That’s part of it.
There’s more about how the White House operates under a secrecy resembling omerta. There’s more about George Tenet’s role in presenting the WMD intelligence to George Bush, and a question as to whether he really used the words “Slam Dunk.” Cheney is, of course, central in this book, as strategist. Bush is portrayed as preferring action to analysis, “gut” to policy.
In contrast, Suskind repeatedly reminds us of the concrete ways in which al-Qaeda plans. This is a function of any competent organization. Possible actions are envisioned, the pros and cons of those actions examined, and routes chosen to achieve objectives. This has not, according to Suskind, been the method by which the Bush administration operates. The reason why it’s looked like, in many cases, there are no plans is that in fact there are none, only shoot-from-the-hip action justified by that one percent possibility.
Chasing all possibilities exhausts and inflames fear and paranoia; the paranoia imagines still further possibilities. The FBI is alerted, the president is shouting, and they find that the one percent danger in Kansas, Middle-Easterners, are in fact flea market operators.
This highly emotional response to 9/11, understandable in the immediate aftermath, must give way to analysis and policy development, along with competent and conventional governmental measures to carry out the policies. The Supreme Court, in Hamdan, has reminded us of this process.
Without such a process, as Nadezhda observes, the professionals have been leaving the government or are leaking their concerns to the press. They are the who have the specialized knowledge necessary for analysis and policy development. They have been ignored in the rush to track down the most emotionally satisfying one percent leads, which too often turn out to be worthless.
The book touches on the question of why there have been no large terrorist attacks on the United States since 9/11 but fails to answer it. Has the flailing at undifferentiated dangers been successful? Has the behind-the-scenes action of professionals in various government agencies damaged al-Qaeda to where it cannot mount such attacks? Is it waiting for the opportunity to mount the really big attack?
We don’t know, and if Suskind is right, the government doesn’t know either. We don’t know what works and what doesn’t because so little has been done systematically. We’re stuck in a mess in Iraq that has no clear solutions, which limits our ability to deal with other one percents or worse that might arise. The administration seems to be finding its enemies more and more within the United States, like the New York Times. More gut, more distraction from what really might endanger the United States.