The One Percent Doctrine: Part One

by tristero

One of the most remarkable things about Run Suskind’s remarkable new book, The One Percent Doctrine, is what he omits. The book focuses a good deal on Tenet’s role in the post 9/11 period and is loaded with serious new indictments of the Bush administration’s incompetence. But Suskind’s book, at least for me is just as relevant to understanding the pre-9/11 Bush administration.

Let’s start – I hope to write a series of posts on this terrific book and urge all of you to buy and read it – with the one percent doctrine itself. It’s November, 2001 in the Situation Room, during a meeting with Cheney, Rice, Tenet, and a CIA briefer. They are reviewing some of the new intelligence. Suskind writes (p.61):

Cheney sat for a moment, saying nothing. “We have to deal with this threat is a way we haven’t yet defined,” he said, almost to himself. “With a low-probability, high-impact event like this….I’m frankly not sure how we engage. We’re going to have to look at it in a completely different way…

“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,” Cheney said. He paused to assess his declaration. “It’s not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence,” he added. “It’s about our response.”

So now spoken, it stood: a standard of action that would frame events and responses from the administration for years to come. The Cheney Doctrine. Even if there’s just a one percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it’s a certainty. It’s not about “our analysis,” as Cheney said. It’s about “our response.” This doctrine – the one percent solution – divided what had largely been indivisible in the conduct of American foreign policy: analysis and action. Justified or not, fact-based or not, “our response” is what matters. As to “evidence,” the bar was set so low that the word itself almost didn’t apply. If there was even a one percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction – and there has been a small probability of such an occurrence for some time – the United States must now act as if it were a certainty. This was a mandate of extraordinary breadth. Everyone sat for a moment, rolling it over in their minds, sketching the implications.

The one-percent doctrine, the Cheney Doctrine. From here, Suskind will immediately begin detailing all the incredibly bad decisions that immediately followed from its acceptance. If there’s even a one-percent chance that, say, an Iraqi agent met Atta in Prague, treat it as a certainty…and respond.

Since Suskind only reports on events post 9/11, he lets readers draw their own conclusions. Most importantly he doesn’t mention, but he surely realizes, that during the summer of 2001, and the spring before that, the highest levels of the Bush administration treated a high-probability, high-impact event – an imminent al Qaeda terrorist attack in the US – as if it had a one percent chance of occurring and did nothing. In Bush’s words (page 2) to a CIA briefer that August who interrupted his vacation to impress upon Bush how serious the threat was,

“All right, you’ve covered your ass, now.”

Let’s look a little closer at how “one percent thinking” may inform Bush administration behavior from the getgo. In fact, contrary to what Cheney asserts, it’s pretty clear that a one-percent doctrine was in place from Day One of the Bush administration. And, while focusing on threats they had been told were highly improbable (such as Saddam funding WMD terrorist attacks against the US), they missed the highly probable, going so far as to marginalize, deliberately, many of those who were warning them the loudest about imminent al Qaeda attacks (John O’Neill and Richard Clarke are only two of the most prominent).

In other words, the one-percent doctrine, in force from the beginning of the Bush era, failed to prevent 9/11, as it has failed to make the world any safer since. And it will continue to fail for a very simple reason: The one percent docrtrine is not based on anything resembling consensual reality.

It is hard escaping the conclusion that the Cheney Doctrine, the one percent solution is utterly irrational. Although Suskind probably wouldn’t go this far, I see it as the muddled reasoning of panicked cowards who have no business commanding the most powerful armed forces in the world. Ever.

There’s more, much more. But let’s stop here for now.

[Edited slightly after original posting.]