Ron Suskind: The One Percent Doctrine

Before we were so rudely interrupted, I read and was going to comment on Ron Suskind's The One Percent Solution. This book is an account of the War on Terror, from a quasi-insider perspective, where the insider view closely resembles that of George Tenet at the CIA. A reviewer at the New York Times called the book a "quarter Woodward" -- meaning an insider account like those Bob Woodward does, but with far fewer sources. The similarity may be true, but it also means far fewer deals and compromises with his sources. Suskind certainly makes an effort at rehabilitating Tenet, stressing his interpersonal talents and work ethic, but he's not interested in apologia so much as getting to what happened, and what went wrong.

I've quoted what for me were the most revealing quotes in the book in a post already: Bush's Israel policy -- "We're going to tilt back toward Israel" -- and encouraging words for Ariel Sharon, Bush's belief that, "Sometimes a show of force by one side can really clarify things." We've seen just how that policy and those words have played out in the last few weeks. It's useful to be able to link them back to Bush's pre-crisis outburst.

The rest of this post will be more sections I marked while reading the book. The first is on the genesis and scope of the War on Terror (p. 19):

Washington, day by day, had already become the bustling capital of a twilight struggle -- the so-called "war on terror," a term that was settling unevenly into the global vernacular. Close facsimiles had been floated for a week or so after the attacks and before President Bush used it, just so, in his landmark speech of September 20, 2001, declaring before a joint session of Congress that "Our 'war on terror' begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach had been found, stopped and defeated."

Since the list of terrorist groups soon came to include Hamas and Hezbollah, this suggests that the plan to vanquish Israel's enemies was part of Bush's program from the very start. The first heady days of Israel's pounding of Hezbollah may have looked like the belated opening of another major front of the War on Terror, to go with the much touted "central front" in Iraq. But in doing so, the War on Terror became a joint US-Israeli production, with the US picking up all of Israel's liabilities in the bargain. Given how Iraq has gone, the Bush braintrust may have figured that Israel is the only route forward. Not limiting the scope at the start opened the door for Iraq, for Palestine, for Lebanon, for Syria, for Iran, for the neocon's whole shopping list. It also ensured the tragic failure of endless war. Of course, that was part of the point -- they just thought they'd do better at it, in large part because they viewed Israel's ability to stretch their wars out from 1947 or 1937 to the present as a measure of success.

I marked the part where Suskind quotes Bush from the "axis of evil" speech (pp. 80-81):

"Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens -- leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections -- then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.

"States like these and their terrorist allies," he went on, "constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophe."

[ . . . ]

And then the President offered something beyond Cheney's portfolio, something more personal than the sweeping ideologies. In an evidence-free realm, he would draw his certainty from the deep well of faith. This was all him:

"Those of us who have lived through these challenging times have been changed by them. We've come to know truths that we will never question: evil is real, and it must be opposed." The crowd erupted.

This gives the speech a church revival air, with the applause at the end erupting as spontaneous self-congratulation for taking such a staunch stand against sin. But the effect is that Bush deliberately tied his hands to avoid any temptation to shortchange the good fight. Concentrating on the enemy's evilness left whatever we might have done unexamined and irrelevant. But revivals are far more impressive to those who participate than to outsiders, who easily see through the chest-thumping. Like so many accomplishments of the Bush reign, this one was a chimerical victory of rhetoric over reality.

One merit of the Suskind book is that it marches us back through events with a little added information, albeit with a CIA slant. On Afghanistan (pp. 96-99):

Similarly, what had happened at Tora Bora -- how the CIA's advice was ignored, and how both the civilian and the uniformed leadership of the U.S. military had miscalculated badly, allowing bin Laden to escape -- was indisputable for anyone with involvement and the right security clearance.

On April 17, The Washington Post printed the first, preliminary report suggesting how the U.S. Army had failed to surround the Tora Bora caves and that such a move might have prevented bin Laden from escaping. That day, at a press conference, Donald Rumsfeld disputed that assertion, saying he did not "know today of any evidence" that bin Laden "was in Tora Bora at the time, or that he left Tora Bora at the time, or even where he is today."

That was also false. [ . . . ] In the wide, diffuse "war on terror," so much of it occurring in the shadows -- with no transparency and only perfunctory oversight -- the administration could say anything it wanted to say. That was a blazing insight of this period. The administration could create whatever reality was convenient.

Reality construction has been a major concern of the Bush cabal from the beginning, so this is just one example. On to Iraq (p. 123):

The primary impetus for invading Iraq, according to those attending NSC briefings on the Gulf in this period, was to make an example of Hussein, 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.

In Oval Office meetings, the President would often call Iraq a "game changer." More specifically, the theory was that the United States -- with a forceful action against Hussein -- would change the rules of geopolitical analysis and action for countless other countries.

Again, the belief that force would clarify things. Bush shaped both policy and information in peculiar ways, as evidenced by this quote about CIA executive briefings (p. 182):

Briefing Bush each morning in gory detail -- enabling him to "go operational" -- was now part of CIA procedure. Tenet brought a variety of briefers; some Bush seemed to respond to more than others. Most presidents, in their morning intelligence briefings, sit with analysts. The details of an operation are described, then the analyst works through the architecture of what it means to a state, a region, U.S. strategy, and Bush certainly saw plenty of analysts. But he likes operators, the people, virtually all men, involved in the struggle, the face-to-face and hand-to-hand.

Briefers, all the way to principals and department heads, feel bush's itch, his impatience, and pick up his cadence. They all start talking like operators, no matter what's being reported. These are men who, on balance, never experienced the bracing effects -- humbling, uplifting, oddly settling -- of military action. The few who have, like Powell, and his deputy Rich Armitage, smooth over these disparities -- piquant at a time of war -- by joining in the tough talk that they know, from experience, is hollow at its core.

Bonhomie swirls, led by the chief, animating the room and, in some cases, the action that flows from it.

There are many stories in the book about instances where Bush presses for operational details on various suspects or threats or, mostly, unsubstantiated rumors. His preference for action over analysis is singular. But one thing he never asks is why someone would engage in terror or, for that matter, opposition to the US. That question was answered a priori, by faith. Again on Iraq, but really on the underlying precepts (pp. 214-215):

America was, in sum, ready to act, with hard evidence or not, to thwart any possible challenge. Thus, the job of every country, just to be safe, is to avoid at all costs even an implication that it is not aligned with the interests of the United States. Saddam, felt by Wolfowitz, Feith, and company to be an easy mark, was simply a demonstration model to show the new resolve of the United States and its postmodern rules of international behavior. That's the way you change behavior. The way you do it, any behavioral scientist will tell you, is to enforce the desird behavior, over and over, no matter what the subject does. Then the desired behavior becomes ingrained, reflexive, impulse.

This is the way you buy time in a futile struggle -- whether stopping the unstoppable spread of destructive weapons or keeping terrorists, with or without state sponsors, off our shores. You can't fight them all. You have to change the way everyone thinks, everywhere.

And the way you do that is through action -- continuous, forceful, unrelenting. That's the "game changer," and where George W. Bush's character fits so neatly with this global experiment in behaviorism.

You need a certain type of leader to run this protocol.

One thing that Suskind is relatively sharp at is in drawing out the connections between Bush's personality and policy. The book has many stories about people identified as terrorists and captured or missed. One was Yusef al-Ayeri, a Saudi known as "Swift Sword" (p. 235):

First, it was discovered that this al-Ayeri was behind a Web site, al-Nida, that U.S. investigators had long felt carried some of the most specialized analysis and coded directives about al Qaeda's motives and plans. He was also the anonymous author of two extraordinary pieces of writing -- short books, really, that had recently moved through cyberspace, about al Qaeda's underlying strategies. The Future of Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula After the Fall of Baghdad, written as the United States prepared its attack, said that an American invasion of Iraq would be the best possible outcome for al Qaeda, stoking extremism throughout the Persian Gulf and South Asia, and achieving precisely the radicalizing quagmire that bin Laden had hoped would occur in Afghanistan. A second book, Crusaders' War, outlined a tactical model for fighting the American forces in Iraq, including "assassination and poisoning the enemy's food and drink," remotely triggered explosives, suicide bombings, and lightning strike ambushes. It was the playbook.

Of course, we don't need to take al Qaeda's word that the Iraq war played right into their hands. One question no one has addressed so far is who, if anyone, in the US government made an effort to seriously raise the question. Given that CIA al Qaeda experts like Michael Scheuer have opposed the Iraq war, you'd think that they'd take the lead, but their usual critique stops with misdirection of resources. But then they were as committed to violence against their targets as Cheney and Rumsfeld were against Iraq. As far as I know, only antiwar leftists raised the issue.

Suskind quotes Rumsfeld's Oct. 16, 2003 memo with questions about how to measure success in the Global War on Terrorism. Two that strike me as particularly interesting are: "How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?"; and "Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madrasses to a more moderate course?" Such abiding faith in the power of propaganda to manipulate people, and so little interest in addressing any real issues that may be bothering people, and that would continue to bother people even after massive investments in propaganda! Suskind comments (pp. 276-277):

Yet the most stirring passage -- to know if we are winning or losing the global "war on terror." Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us? -- is a wily Rumsfeldian response to the President's "bring them on" and "rather fight them there than here."

Those statements assumed a kind of quantitative yardstick, much like the one Lyndon Johnson embraced in the early days of the Vietnam conflict, that the enemy is static, measurable, readily identifiable. Kill them off, and you're done.

Rumsfeld's use of "dissuading" -- a favorite term in his memos from the earliest days of the administration -- turns "progress," appropriately, into an active term, a moving target.

And, by the fall of 2003, there had clearly been movement in an unintended, and undesirable, direction. One hundred fifty thousand U.S. troops in the center of the Arab world was a jihadist recruiting tool of almost unfathomable magnetism. Terrorist recruitment was on the rise, visibly and markedly, across the Arab world. CIA reports indicated that the madrassas in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Iran were overflowing, as were contributions to radical clerics and their operations. Images flashed to millions each day by Al Jazeera of U.S. tanks in Baghdad and Tikrit, and the carnage that was now Iraq, were dissuading young Arab men -- in Iraq and across the Gulf -- from standing on the sidelines. They were joining the global fight against the "crusader" Bush and his infidel army as the cause of their generation. Was our situation, in fact, one, as Rumsfeld queried, in which "the harder we work, the behinder we get?" No question mark needed there, either.

An unhistorical irony may be that after all the search and straddle to find common purpose between two grand initiatives -- the find them, stop them struggle and the overthrow of Hussein -- there was, finally, a connection between Iraq and the broader "war on terror." It was a catalytic relationship, like gasoline on a fire.

Well, "catalytic" wasn't the right word, and Suskind as well as Rumsfeld is hung up on those madrassas -- they're basically the equivalent of Christian home schooling over here, where the big problem isn't the bad stuff they teach but the ignorance they don't seek to overcome. But the memo does indicate that even Rumsfeld is beginning to there's something more going on beyond his precepts. Another interesting quote, following the Madrid bombings (p. 303):

And there was more. Inside the analytical shops at CIA, and NSC, the Madrid bombings and swift follow-up investigation flowed neatly into another growing consensus -- a conclusion that was the last thing anyone in the White House wanted publicized: al Qaeda might not, at this point, actually want to attack America.

Of course, this wasn't publicized (pp. 304-305):

In any event, myriad key facts, such as al Qaeda's status and real strategy, would remain submerged in the spring of 2004. A justification for this secrecy -- and, at this point, the shadow cast over a continent of actions and rationales in the conduct of the "war on terror" -- was a hard, tactical extract from the cult of message-discipline: that to let al Qaeda know certain things we knew, including that we knew that they might not actually have a desire to attack the U.S. mainland, would be valuable in helping them plot their strategies. And, because al Qaeda, its supporters, imitators, and adherents, are members of a vast, nonvoting global constituency that the U.S. President had now assumed, no one could know.

That meant that the dictates of "information warfare" that apply to an enemy in combat would also apply on the U.S. mainland, even though it was now democracy's quadrennial opportunity for citizens toassess the conduct of their leaders. The American public had no more right to know the government's intentions than a mid-rung al Qaeda lieutenant. If all that happened to benefit those in power, so be it.

And far be it from someone like Kerry to question this and risk breaching national security, opening America up to another 9/11 attack. Also unpublicized was the CIA's analysis of how bin Laden's pre-election message served Bush's interests -- a story that has been widely quoted from the book.

The book winds down with a few pages on the post-Tenet CIA and Porter Goss (pp. 334-335):

Goss's people, called "the Gosslings," were running loyalty tests. Goss made clear to top brass what he would later write in an all-agency memo: that CIA is there to support the policies of the administration. Period.

[ . . . ]

In fact, almost all of the dozen or so people at this meeting -- even those most valuable operational bosses who'd built eyeball-to-eyeball relationships with reluctant friends around the world -- would soon be gone, and the people who'd replaced them as well. The agency's role, like that of much of government, would now be to serve and support policy rather than to help create it.

I reading this book I have to admit that sometimes I found what the CIA was doing to be reasonable and useful, even though most of the effort ranged from wasted to counterproductive. But the core problem at CIA and everywhere else was, and still is, the notion that you can fix the problem of terrorism by some combination of intelligence gathering, force, and propaganda, without ever having to consider, let alone change, any of the behavior that inspired terrorists in the first place. That falls back to first assumptions not just of Bush but the whole right wing in America.

posted 2006-07-29

I've finished reading Ron Suskind's book, The One Percent Doctrine. The book basically tracks the War on Terror from the viewpoint of sources in the CIA -- George Tenet is the more/less tragic hero of the story, and evidently a major source. I'll have more to say on this, including various sections I marked, in a later post. For now I just want to start with a couple of quotes that involve Bush's Israel policy. They are especially noteworthy these days.

The first quote is background for an April 2002 meeting between Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah and Bush in Crawford (pp. 104-105):

Relations between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United States were in tatters. The Saudis had been stewing for more than a year, in fact, ever since it became clear at the start of 2001 that this administration was to alter the long-standing U.S. role of honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to something less than that. The President, in fact, had said in the first NSC principals meeting of his administration that Clinton had overreached at the end of his second term, bending too much toward Yasser Arafat -- who then broke off productive Camp David negotiations at the final moment -- and that "We're going to tilt back ward Israel." Powell, a chair away in the Situation Room that day, said such a move would reverse thirty years of U.S. policy, and that it could unleash the new prime minister, Ariel Sharon, and the Israeli army in ways that could be dire for the Palestinians. Bush's response: "Sometimes a show of force by one side can really clarify things."

This faith in the clarifying power of force has long since become a Bush trademark, and seems more than anything else to be the common bond between the Bush and Sharon/Olmert regimes. It's noteworthy that this was Bush's attitude before Sharon took office and sent the IDF into Palestinian territories seeking not just to crush the Intifada but to dismantle the Palestinian Authority and the last vestiges of the Oslo Peace Process. In other words, Bush gave Sharon the green light, and he did it precisely because he believed that Israel should use such force.

Suskind then goes into some background on the US-Saudi relationship, which I won't bother quoting, not least because it's rather off base. This then leads to the relationship between the Saudis and the first President Bush, leading up to a dinner with Bush and Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia's long-time ambassador to the US, and consequently to the relationship of Bush père et fils (pp. 106-107):

The discussion between the elder Bush and the Saudi princes was wistful, largely about a world washed away by 9/11, and also a generational passage. Privately, the current President had railed against his father's alliances, and his mistakes. Living, and leading, in reaction to his namesake was a guiding principle. In a defense of his tilting toward Israel, for example, Bush told an old foreign policy hand, "I'm not going to be supportive of my father and all his Arab buddies!"

Next up was a dinner meeting with Abdullah and a rather passive, noncommittal Cheney. Finally, the meeting with Bush at Crawford (pp. 109-111):

The Saudis had specific demands. Abdullah had recently offered his own peace plan: a two-state solution, a recognition of Israel by the Arab world -- and, also a nonstarter about the return to the 1967 borders, leaving East Jerusalem as the capital of a new Arab state, and a host of things he expected in terms of the crisis on the West Bank. The United States, now deep into the "war on terror," had its own set of issues. Though Saudi Arabia was home to fifteen of the nineteen hijackers -- and to bin Laden -- the kingdom was being less than cooperative, barring the United States from interviewing the families of the hijackers and blocking efforts to trace terror finance, most of which tracked through the country's labyrinth of charities and hawalas. First, though, the Saudi started on their list -- a long one, which included the United States distancing itself from Sharon, and acts that would support the Palestinians.

Bush listened, but not really. This was not where he wanted to be. He was marking time. "Let's go for a drive," he said to Abdullah, after a few minutes. "Just you and me. I'll show you the ranch."

And they marched off, in midsentence, to Bush's pickup truck, leaving behind a phalanx of slack-jawed advisers with what one later called "monarchy blues" -- a realization, as he described it, that ideals of representative government fade at moments like this into a feeling that things haven't changed all tha tmuch since foreign affairs were the affairs of kings -- how they got along, or didn't, determined the fate of nations."

Bouncing in the cab of the Chevy pickup -- Bush, wearing a suit and tie for the visit of a foreign leader, Abdullah in a tweed jacket over his gown -- they seemed to get along just fine. Bush loves doing this: showing the 1,600-acre ranch, cutting this way and that over the central Texas scrub in teh pickup, making snap decisions on which path to take, where to go first, and last. There are seventeen varieties of trees. He pointed them out, told Abdullah of his love of the land, his desire for peace. They stopped and talked at one of Bush's favortite spots. They saw a wild turkey.

Then, after an hour or so, they were back for lunch. And everyone settled at a long table on the glassed-in porch -- Colin, Condi, Andy Card, Cheney, Bandar, Bush, Saud, Abdullah, and Jordan -- and Bush asked Abdullah if he could say a prayer. Abdullah nodded, and Bush prayed, and then they ate beef tenderloin and potato salad, brownies and ice cream.

Abdullah, dabbing his lips, snapped to attention as the brownies were cleared -- as though he'd lost track of what had brought him here -- as did Bandar and Saud. They had eight items on their list. They needed deliverables -- something to bring back to the roiling Gulf that would ease the Arab world. Would Bush back up his words with actions? Was he on Sharon's side, or was the United States still interested in supporting its Arab friends? Was America any longer the region's honest broker?

But the discussions could get no traction. The Saudis wanted pressure on Sharon to release Arafat from confinement in Ramallah. Saud went over possible steps the United States could take. Bush stared blankly at them. They went down the items. Sometimes the President nodded, as though something sounded reasonable, but he fofered little response.

And, after almost an hour of this, the Saudis, looking a bit perplexed, got up to go. It was as though Bush had never read the packet they sent over to the White House in preparation for this meeeting: a terse, lean document, just a few pages, listing the Saudis' demands and an array of options that the President might consider. After the meeting, a few attendees on the American team wondered why the President seemed to have no idea what the Saudis were after, and why he didn't bother to answer their concerns or get any concessions from them, either, on the "war on terror." There was not a more important conversation in the "war on terror" than a sit-down with Saudi Arabia. Several of the attendees checked into what had happened.

The Saudi packet, they found, had been diverted to Dick Cheney's office. The President never got it, never read it. In what may have been the most important, and contentious, foreign policy meeting of his presidency, George W. Bush was unaware of what the Saudis hoped to achieve in traveling to Crawford.

Suskind errs in referring to the Saudi peace plan as a nonstarter. The border alignments the Saudis proposed are precisely those mandated by UN Security Council resolutions following the 1967 war. Those are the basis of the international law that governs resolution of the war, and nothing has changed in that regard. Helena Cobban has a good summary of this in a recent post that also covers how international law applies to the recent escalation of hostilities. Her key points bear repeating here:

But the bigger question here, in my mind, is that all these conflicts have now gone on so long, and have so many very tangled sub-themes and potential triggers for escalation by either side, that surely it is time to get the whole darned conflict between Israel and neighbors finally resolved. That means the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the Syrian-Israeli conflict, and the Lebanese-Israeli conflict.

This is indeed do-able. If it is done, basically, on the basis of international law, then nearly all the parties to the conflict know what this is and are ready to go ahead and do such a deal. On the Arab side, all the Arab governments have signed onto the Beirut Declaration of 2002 -- and the most recent Hamas-Fateh agreement then endorsed all its main points.

The only party that is not basically ready to resolve the conflict on the basis of international law -- that is, with Israel withdrawing from just about all of the land it captured in the 1967 war -- is that portion of the Israeli public that still clings to the chauvinistic dream of a Jewish Greater Jerusalem that stretches from the Old City just about right down to the Jordan River . . . an outcome that would be unacceptable to the Palestinians in two major ways: it denies any meaningful Palestinian role or presence in Jerusalem, and it slices a huge wedge out of the West Bank, dividing what remains potentially for use by a Palestinian state into two.

The Beirut Declaration of 2002 referred to here is Abdullah's plan -- the same one he presented to Bush. So Cobban is slightly wrong here: Israel is not the only party opposed to so simple, straightforward, and obvious a deal. Bush is another party opposed. Or perhaps we should say Cheney is the one opposed, since he was the one who trashed the plan. Bush merely lacked the attention span of one of those turkeys he enjoys pointing out -- and by not caring, not understanding, by his ignorance and his gut faith in the clarifying power of force, he missed an opportunity that could have set the US in a far superior position in the Middle East, establishing a bit of credibility he sure could have used in Iraq. Instead, we've since seen what comes of his alliance with Israel, of his commitment to force and against justice.

posted 2006-07-16

Here's the key quote from Gary Kamiya's Salon review of Ron Suskind's The One Percent Solution, on the question of why Bush decided to invade Iraq:

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, Wolfowitz and 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.

That explanation relegates the decision to primal attitudes rather than rational interests. Sounds like the don't-spare-the-rod theory of raising children, which fits in nicely with all those training wheels metaphors -- but how many parents still follow that approach? Even so, the idea that whole nations are powerless children or dumb animals -- after all, that's where most behaviorist notions were developed -- is a grossly inappropriate analogy. Makes you wonder where they came up with such a theory. Oh yeah, Israel. The architects of Bush's GWOT aren't allies so much as unabashed admirers of Israel. Still makes you wonder why they think it works.

posted 2006-06-29