The One Percent Solution, er, Doctrine

Froomkin, in today's White House Briefing discusses Ron Suskind's new book "The One Percent Doctrine" and how Cheney is running the foreign policy show:

But the longer-term significance of Suskind's new book -- his second major expose of the Bush White House in three years -- will likely be how it documents Vice President Cheney's singularly dominant role in the foreign policy and national security decisions typically attributed to President Bush.

Where other journalists smarmily imply that Cheney is in charge, or credulously relate White House assurances that he's not, Suskind appears to have gotten people with first-hand experience to actually describe how Cheney operates -- and what he has wrought.

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Writes Suskind on his Web site : "What is the guiding principle of the world's most powerful nation as it searches for enemies at home and abroad? The One Percent Doctrine is the deeply secretive core of America's real playbook: a default strategy, designed by Dick Cheney, that separates America from its moorings, and has driven everything -- from war in Afghanistan to war in Iraq to the global search for jihadists."

-snip-

"Absorbing the possibility that al-Qaeda was trying to acquire a nuclear weapon, Cheney remarked that America had to deal with a new type of threat -- what he called a 'low-probability, high-impact event' -- and the U.S. had to do it 'in a way we haven't yet defined,' writes author Ron Suskind in his new book, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11.

"And then Cheney defined it: 'If there's a 1% 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. It's not about our analysis . . . It's about our response.' Suskind writes, 'So, now spoken, it stood: a standard of action that would frame events and responses from the Administration for years to come.' "

Allow me to point out that this idea is crack-head crazy. And yet this crack-pot idea has shaped foreign policy for the past few years. Why doesn't our media find this the least bit controversial? We've apparently made the calculation that american lives are so much more precious than the rest of the world's, that we reserve the right to respond even if there's only a 1% chance that we're right.

That's appalling. The reason to be judicious and careful is that military responses kill people. And as we've seen the past several years, military responses frequently kill innocent people.

I watched the news this evening, and Froomkin is correct, all the attention is on the aborted cyanide plot. The news that Cheney is dictating foreign policy with crack-head ideas? It barely caused a ripple.

Buy Suskind's book here: The One Percent Doctrine