| THE ONE PERCENT DOCTRINE Deep Inside America's Pursuit of its Enemies Since 9/11 Ron Suskind New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-7432-7109-7 | ||||
| ISBN 0-7432-7109-7 | 367pp. | HC | $27.00 | |
In sharp contrast to Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City, which is all about our occupation of Iraq, this book devotes very little attention to that beleaguered country. That is as it should be. Although our misguided effort in Iraq has large effects on the "War on Terror", it has nothing to do with the willful strategic blindnesses that have hampered our conduct of that wider war.
Ron Suskind shows us those blind spots in this impressive book. He gives us keen insights into America's top men in the struggle, and the processes they've put into place or disrupted in order to pursue it. Suskind shows us, as well, the complex origins of that flawed strategy. It is not due simply to overweening pride or neoconservative ideology (though he confirms their contribution to the debacle.) He writes of "a catalog of CIA failures and foolish pride dating back twenty years" — a probable influence on Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's decision to set up an independent source of intelligence within his office. He takes us to Kandahar where, in mid-August 2001, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri (the two top al Qaeda leaders) sat around a campfire with two other men. The CIA believed those other two men to be Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Abdul Majid: the head of Pakistan's atomic energy commission and his associate. There was thus some reason (or at least plausible pretext) for Bush and Cheney to warn of al Qaeda's use of nuclear weapons inside the U.S.
And he takes us back to Operation Shamrock1. Begun during World War II, that intelligence operation involved copying all the international telegrams entering the U.S for examination. It continued after the war and was unknown to Congress for some years after that. When Congress did learn of it, it crafted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to restrain such abuses while still giving the executive branch the flexibility to conduct espionage. Shamrock was the ancestor of the Bush administration's warrantless wiretaps. Suskind hints, but does not actually explain, that the sheer volume of intercepts was the logistical justification for not advising the FISA Court about them.
We learn about new CIA failures (as with Mohammed Sidique Khan) as well as successes. The failures are mostly due to lack of cooperation between FBI and CIA, between Defense and State, between the U.S. and the House of Saud. The successes derive from good intelligence work (as with Urs Tinner) and luck (as when a walk-in gave Khalid Shekh Mohammed to the CIA.) Thus we come to know that the struggle has more complexities and ambiguities than is commonly understood.
The book is a very broad yet detailed look at the conduct of the "War on Terror" over the past five years. Through extensive interviewing, Suskind shows us the thoughts and actions of the men2 at the top (the "notables") such as Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld as well as those of people behind the scenes (the "invisibles"), like Don Coleman and Jami Miscik. We can be grateful that such men and women are on the job, putting in their ninety-hour workweeks, using every tool permitted them (and some that aren't)3 in the fight to identify, locate and apprehend those who wish to harm the citizens of this country.
A shortcoming of the book is that there are no endnotes. Many reviewers see this as a fatal defect. I do not. I think Suskind, with his novelistic emphasis on conversations and war stories, was aiming to paint a word picture of the operation of the White House and intelligence agencies rather than create an impeccably documented historical treatise. Another problem, according to some, is that Suskind was too generous in his treatment of Tenet (who obviously was a major source.) Again, I don't agree; but history will decide — just as it will judge the performance of Bush, Cheney et al. The book is very well indexed. There are some errors in the text, but the list is not overly long. Ron Suskind has done what I expect of a career journalist: he's produced a book that is both well researched and easy to read. It is one of the books vital to a thorough understanding of the "War on Terror" and I recommend it highly.
Every U.S. administration since World War II had fretted over the spread of weapons of mounting destructiveness. The fear prodded the United States, and other nations, to give up a measure of sovereignty to international agreements, a series of them, and to divide into counterbalancing coalitions: NATO and the Warsaw Pact. The concept of mutually assured destruction had long locked America and the Soviets into a dance of conflict and, at day's end, constraint. That bipolar balance—and the way it enforced order among nation-states on all sides—was all but gone by 2001. Nothing had risen to replace it. States still mattered, or course, but, small medium, and large, they were beginning to act across disparate regions of the globe in a loosened, entrepreneurial fashion, testing boundaries. In large measure, the U.S. policy makers felt similarly unbound at the start of 2001. In its early months the Bush presidency departed from its long-standing credo of muscular internationalism—of leading the community of nations primarily by relying on persuasion rather than force. A new mission had been born in neoconservative think tanks and in the pronouncements of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle and others during the 1990s, as they pined in exile. The idea, simply stated, was to be unashamed, and unfettered, in the use of power, now that America finally stood alone as the world's only superpower. Global accords on everything from greenhouse gases to international courts, many of which had long ago been designed and encouraged by the United States, now were seen as constraints, the threads binding Gulliver. Such agreements were for lesser countries. They were to be shaken off—which is what happened in early 2001 when the Bush administration took over. – Pages 63-64 |
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