|
EXCERPTS Review of The One Percent
Doctrine by Ron Suskind License to Lie In his devastating new book, Ron Suskind shows how 9/11 allowed George
W. Bush and his shadowy courtier, Dick Cheney, to "create whatever reality
was convenient." By Gary Kamiya, Salon, June 23, 2006 If there are any
observers who still deny that the Bush administration is the most secretive,
vengeful, reality-averse, manipulative and arrogant government in U.S. history,
they will have a lot of fast talking to do after reading Ron Suskind's new
book, "The One Percent Doctrine." A meticulous work of reporting,
based on interviews with nearly 100 well-placed sources, many of them members
of the U.S. intelligence community, Suskind's book paints perhaps the most
intimate and damning portrait yet of the Bush team. At this point, one
could forgive readers for asking, "How many more damning portraits of the
Bush administration do we need?" From yellowcake to Joe Wilson to Abu
Ghraib, the list of Bush scandals and outrages is endless, but nothing ever
seems to happen. As the journalist Mark Danner has pointed out, the problem is
not lack of information: The problem is that Americans can't, or won't,
acknowledge what that information means. In "The Price of Loyalty," Suskind
broke the major news that at Bush's very first National Security Council
meeting, long before 9/11, he was already planning to remove Saddam Hussein
from power -- the ur-text of a long line of revelations, culminating in the
so-called Downing Street memo, showing that Bush's claim that he was going to
war only as a last resort was a lie. Suskind's fine-grained reporting in that
book revealed Bush as a superficially charming but singularly unpleasant character,
at once ignorant, smug and aggressive, the kind of man who uses nicknames like
"Pablo" as a way of reinforcing his own unearned, but all the more
aggressively asserted, place as dominant primate. The really dark portrait,
though, is of Cheney: the unseen power behind the throne, contemptuous and
careful, unreadable and implacable. Those portraits are only deepened in Suskind's new book. But Suskind's
subject here is more momentous. While much of "The Price of Loyalty"
dealt with the Bush administration's duplicitousness and myopia on the economy
and the environment, "The One Percent Doctrine" focuses on its
response to 9/11 -- the "war on terror" and the invasion of Iraq. And
on George Tenet. "Many
reasons have been advanced for why Bush decided to attack Iraq, a third-rate
Arab dictatorship that posed no threat to the United States. Some have argued
that Bush and Cheney, old oilmen, wanted to get their hands on Iraq's oil.
Others have posited that the neoconservative civilians in the Pentagon, [Paul]
Wolfowitz and [Douglas] Feith, and their offstage guru Richard Perle, were
driven by their passionate attachment to Israel. Suskind does not address these
arguments, and his own thesis does not rule them out as contributing causes.
But he argues persuasively that the war, above all, was a 'global experiment in
behaviorism': If the U.S. simply hit misbehaving actors in the face again and
again, they would eventually change their behavior. " 'The primary
impetus for invading Iraq, according to those attending NSC briefings on the
Gulf in this period, was to create a demonstration model to guide the behavior
of anyone with the temerity to acquire destructive weapons or, in any way,
flout the authority of the United States.' This doctrine had been enunciated during
the administration's first week by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who had
written a memo arguing that America must come up with strategies to 'dissuade
nations abroad from challenging' America. Saddam was chosen simply because he
was available, and the Wolfowitz-Feith wing was convinced he was an easy
target. "The choice to go
to war, Suskind argues, was a 'default' -- a fallback, driven by the 'realization that the American
mainland is indefensible.' America couldn't really do anything -- so Bush and
Cheney decided they had to do something. And they decided to do this something,
to attack Iraq, because after 9/11 Cheney embraced the radical doctrine found
in the title of Suskind's book. '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,' Suskind quotes Cheney as
saying. And then Cheney went on to utter the lines that can be said to define
the Bush presidency: 'It's not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance
of evidence. It's about our response.' " It was Tenet's finest hour: the embattled spymaster facing
down the White House and the Pentagon to defend his agency and the truth (except
for the yellowcake and the tubes). But in the end, what comes across
inescapably is that Tenet, for all of his down-to-earth, likable qualities,
failed the crucial test: He did not stand up to Bush and Cheney's abuse of
intelligence, and he allowed himself and his agency to take the fall for the
White House's intentional misdeeds. The reason: blind loyalty. (This book could
have borne the same title as Suskind's first.) After 9/11, Bush did not blame
Tenet for the CIA's failure to stop the attacks, and "At that point,
George Tenet would do anything his President asked. Anything. And George W. Bush knew it." Suskind's book
is a potent reminder of how seemingly laudable human emotions can affect the
fate of nations. The disasters of the Bush presidency are due not just to
ideology, faith and venality, but to office politics. Suskind all but comes out and says what many have suspected:
that Bush, although a man of deep faith -- he reads Scripture or a religious
tract every morning -- is grossly intellectually unqualified to be president.
Again and again, Suskind describes scenes that display his disengagement, his
lack of curiosity, his ignorance of the most rudimentary facts. His inner
circle knew his weaknesses, and assiduously prevented them from being known.
"He is very good at some things that presidents are prized for, and
startlingly deficient in others. No one in his innermost circle trusts that
those imbalances would be well received by a knowledgeable public, especially
at a time of crisis. So they are protective of him -- astonishingly so -- and
forgiving." But this is not news. Suskind's more momentous disclosure is
the degree to which Cheney deliberately kept Bush in the dark, so as to be able
to achieve his desired ends. For example, when Crown Prince Abdullah, the de
facto Saudi ruler, visited Bush in 2002, the advance packet sent by the Saudis
to prepare Bush for the meeting was mysteriously diverted to Cheney's office.
Bush never read it. As a result, he had no idea what the agenda of the meeting
was and failed to respond to the Saudi's requests for American help with the
exploding Israeli-Palestinian crisis, which severely weakened Abdullah's
position as an ally in the "war on terror." Nor did he extract any
concessions from them. For Cheney, it seems, the less Bush was prepared for
Abdullah, the less chance he would make any concessions to the Arab leader. Or
perhaps Cheney simply wanted to control the meeting for the sake of control. Cheney and Rumsfeld, Suskind writes, viewed Bush as an
inferior, the child of their contemporaries. A master at bureaucratic stealth,
Cheney quietly orchestrated the war, which was "about the only matter on
which all three agreed ... So, as America officially moved to a detailed action
plan for the overthrow of Hussein, only three men would be in the know: Bush,
Cheney and Rumsfeld." But Bush, in Suskind's portrayal, was hardly putty in
Cheney's hands (although Suskind reports that inside the CIA Cheney was
nicknamed "Edgar," after the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, whose famous
dummy was Charlie McCarthy). Bush played along with the game. He didn't want to
know any more than Cheney wanted him to know. "No one would dare say that
the President made it clear to his most trusted lieutenants he did not want to be informed, especially when the
information might undercut the confidence he has in certain sweeping
convictions." Once truth becomes a mere instrument, to be used or ignored
in pursuit of a desired end, there is no end to the lies and distortions. Suskind points out that two of Bush's
proudest claims -- that the invasion of Iraq scared Libya into renouncing its
WMD programs, and that a captured Arab named Abu Zubaydah was al-Qaida's No. 3
-- were known
by Bush to be false.
The Libya deal, Suskind explains, had been in the works for years. As for
Zubaydah, in one of the book's more shocking revelations, Suskind reveals that
U.S. agents quickly realized that Zubaydah was a madman with a split
personality -- but that did not deter the Bush administration from applying its
new, gloves-off interrogation methods. The result: "The United States
would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word
he uttered." Suskind's coup de grâce on this subject is his reminder of Osama
bin Laden's message to the American people just before the 2004 elections. The
CIA's consensus: "bin Laden's message was clearly designed to assist the
President's reelection ... On that score, any number of NSC principals could
tell you something so dizzying that not even they will touch it: that Bush's
ratings track with bin Laden's ratings in the Arab world." When Bush
speaks, bin Laden's popularity soars -- and vice versa. Suskind lays out an alternative to the Cheney-Bush doctrine:
George Kennan's "containment" policy for the Soviet Union, which
rejected calls for military confrontation. Suskind admits that Kennan's policy
might not be embraced by those who had to live under communism -- but it helped
prevent World War III for half a century, it avoided the moral horror of a
nuclear attack, and in the end the Soviet empire fell. http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/06/23/suskind/index_np.html ALSO SEE US allowed Zarqawi to
escape, former agent says http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/us-allowed-zarqawi-to-escape/2006/04/30/1146335608444.html Why did Bush repeatedly
refuse to kill Zarqawi? Former CIA agent Michael Scheuer worked in the CIA's
Counterterrorist Center and headed up its Osama bin Laden unit. He is also the
anonymous author of "Imperial Hubris,"
which exposed the administration's deception leading up to the Iraq War. Scheuer's
revelations are not new, but they do provide further confirmation of Jim
Miklaszewski's reporting in 2004 that the administration refused to kill Zarqawi several times: Military officials insist their case for
attacking Zarqawi's operation was airtight, but the administration feared
destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against
Saddam. Rumsfeld and administration officials (including the President)
repeatedly pointed to the presence of Zarqawi in Iraq as "evidence" of
a Saddam-al Qaeda link
(nevermind that Saddam Hussein was himself viewed Zarqawi as a threat and was trying to capture him). If the President killed Zarqawi, he
would have killed
the ability to falsely link Saddam and al Qaeda and convince the American people that war was a necessary
response to 9/11. http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/4/30/162629/321 |
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list Futurework@fes.uwaterloo.ca http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
