This is an Atriotic post. Everyone should go read Michiko Kakutani’s book review of Ron Suskind’s The One-Percent Doctine, Personality, Ideology and Bush’s Terror Wars and then come back here to discuss it.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Dan Froomkin is must read too.
This reminds me of what Daniel Ellsberg wrote 30 years ago in Papers on the War (forget the exact title). People with significant offices (like Tenet in this case) will hold back obvious negative info in order to keep their positions, and in almost no cases will they resign (and even if they do resign, a la MacNamera then or Colin Powell now), they won’t go public with their dissent, so they can stay insiders.
The details reported by Suskind are important, but the basic mechanism is depressingly familiar.
we are at war with al queda.
our children will live in a shit country if we lose.
we are dealing with dirty savages that keep ALL their women in all black beekeeper suits ALL day everyday.
these orks of modern civilization believe in a form of islam that is from the 13th CENTURY.
have you ever tried talking sense into a jesus freak?
it doesn’t work. imagine trying to talk sense into one of these al queda’s.
i like the one percent doctrine. if there s a small chance anyone has some funky weapons. we should go in there and fuck them up. SOMEONE has to lead. EVERYTING can’t be discussed and decided and voted on. give me a break. we got rummy, cheney, and W. those are our leaders. together they have a lot of experience in government. it’s like training fight dogs and then letting them go fight. one percent just explains the core principle of the bush doctrine(the new national security strategy) which he explained to the american people on sept 20th 2002.
everyone wants to critisize but NO ONE has put together a cohesive counter-doctrine that we can the american people can at least understand. if the democrats can say,” we don’t like that doctrine, here’s what we think and why..” the cool. but they don’t.
so i say get ready, cause I GUARANTEE we will attack north korea BEFORE they attack us. and IRAN is going to get bombed because they have been giving us MAJOR problems for YEARS. everything changed on 9/11.
EVERYTHING.
so hold on. cause the military is preparing to go apeshit.
oh, and as for pulling out of iraq. we are NEVER leaving Iraq so don’t even bother discussing it. we got 35,000 soldiers in korea right now. we are always gonna be in Iraq.
motherfuck al queda. they want to bomb new york. fine. now the whole islamic bullshit world will feel our wrath and power. the wrath and power of the american people channeled into weapons of ass-destruction.
Where do you think radiation will go to if we use the nuclear option which is, in this case REALLY NUCLEAR? I suppose we could move to mars, but it looks as if homo so-called sapiens already fucked it up.
At what point do you figure we have tipped old momma earth into tipping us completely off? I wonder if you live on a coast line that might suddenly disappear?
And what fucking happened to diplomacy in your vision of the world? Jeez, I think you also have a suicide wish as well. Yes, lets us just anger EVERYBODY in the whole world. China owns us, baby. They have been buying up our deficits and they will be right pleased to call in the debts. Hope you like your mandarin lessons.
You think we could lose to al-quaeda? the rest of your post isn’t worth addressing, but you believe that? how little faith you have in the United States. Do you wet your bed? Is that why you need to cling to the false belief that bush, cheney, rummy are “leaders?” Because they’re not. I hate to take that belief away from you if it’s your security blanket, but it’s time you grew a backbone and realized we could never lose to al-quaeda. I see right wingers espouse such nonsense all the time and it makes me wonder how distorted their view of reality is.
The ‘One Percent Doctrine’ is based on the mistaken idea that we are a terrorist target because of who we are, not because of something we as a country have done.
This is dangerous for 2 reasons : First, because the basis for that reasoning isn’t true. Second, because it will turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy if we maintain it : the things that we need to do to keep our nation safe, under that doctrine, are the things that will cause more people to want to attack us. We are seeing that in Iraq right now.
In addition, you can see the fruits of this doctrine in the administration’s domestic policy in addition to the foreign policy. The added powers of domestic surveillance granted to the intelligence agencies, the idea that citizens can be held without a trial for indeterminate lengths of time, even the constant invocation of the state secrets act to keep the workings of these programs opaque, all bely a government that has turned paranoid and is no longer capable of telling what is a threat and what is not. So they assume everyone is a threat to them. Every one of ‘them’ and every one of ‘us’.
I’m not sure I can be as articulate as you, but I agree with what you’re saying.
If we constantly explain away the fact that we are a terrorist target by saying they hate our freedoms, they hate our country, they hate our morals and beliefs, it becomes a matter of who we are as a country, rather than what we have done to engender this much bad will. After all, we can’t change who we are, and who would want to? We’re the best country in the world. At least that’s what I’ve been told since I was 5 years old.
Exactly. I’m not sure if they (meaning the administration) truly believe this, or if they’ve just realized it is the easiest sell to the public. I suspect the latter, as it completely fits with the other messages coming out of their noise machine, but I’ve seen no limit to their hubris yet so I’m not willing to discount the former.
Ha! Best new word I’ve heard in a while. Nice coinage. Please don’t turn into Atrios, Boo. I mean, he’s smart and all, but the blog’s gone downhill. I come here to see what’s on folks’ minds (yes, even when I disagree with them, I still appreciate their sharing), not to be fed cryptic links to MSM stories.
i’ll probably be drinking a beer with Duncan in about 4 hours. Should I tell him his blog has gone downhill? I love his site because he always is on top of the latest outrage. Anyway, my big problem is that the k on my keyboard requires pounding in order to work.
I figured he already knows better than I do what’s happened to his site. I also figured that might be partly because he’s off doing better things with his time than blogging (no offense to all of us who do put time and effort into our blogs š ). Besides, the kids in the comments seem to have lots of fun, so I say let them . And, yeah, I still check it out on a daily basis for the same reason you say you love it.
How about this, tell him I started going there because he was one hell of an economist, and I’d be ever-so-grateful if he could piece together a post every week or two where he lays out his thoughts and analysis… like the old days. Also, may I have a pony?
I’ll tell him more ponies and an economics article once every two weeks.
Did Bush really need deniability? It’s likely he wouldn’t understand the NIE (and other documents/information) even if he had read them. Deniability via stupididty, and who could argue otherwise?
So the CIA calls Cheney ‘Edgar’…pretty creepy isn’t it..not surprising but to think that apparently everyone in the know knows that bush isn’t the one in charge makes me wonder what other stories will come out about our uncurious(polite way of saying stupid isn’t it?)preznit.
The idea laid out in the book is about Cheney basically believing that his policy is quite simply pre-emptive action against anyone/any country and pretty much no real reason needed except to further his own interests and worldview of US as dominating force. 9/11 simply helped speed up his plan of dominance…and has nothing to do with the reality of any given situation here in the US or around the world. In this regard Cheney is as deluded really as bush is about the ‘real’ world.
And as I’ve wondered time and time again..just what is it exactly that Charlie McCarthy does all day long? He doesn’t read/talk to leaders(or Laura) and is only briefed on occasion for maybe 5 minutes..WTF does he do all day?
was really chilling. No wish to Know, not just incurious, but needing to be ignorant (equates to innocence in our right wing religio fanatics – is there a tie?)
Well it confirms many people’s opinions that Bush was a puppet. I’ve always belived personally that Bush was plausibly deniable as the real leader of this White House.
just kidding….I actually wanted to read the TIME article but didn’t have the patience.
But I’ll check out the review and be back…..
These say it all, as far as I am concerned:
and
These are the children and jackasses who are running this country, and world, into the shitter. Lord helps us all…..
I am not sure that the reveiwer grasps the enormity of that passage. (He very well might and is just too polite to say it directly.) That passage is simply astonishing.
Again, I am sure this is not news to anyone, but I have never seen it put this bluntly in a sourced book: We have to toss out the entire narrative. All of it. Every single thing the Administration has ever said about Iraq. It has to go in the dustbin.
Their intentions. Their goals. Their stated reasons. All of it. It’s not that they’re lying — we knew that — it’s that they were deliberately, cleverly, carefully lying about absolutely everything. They planned it for months in advance.
Even the apparent sincerity on ancillary points is an utter sham.
Begin with the most obvious question: “Why would the President need ‘deniability’?”
Move on to the next most obvious question: “How could the President or Vice-President have known in advance that the President would need ‘deniability’?”
Now a less obvious question, but perhaps the most frightening one: “Why would reading the full NIE have hemmed-in the President’s rhetoric?”
Think about that one for a while. The President did not read the full NIE — and in general, info was kept from him — because it would have hemmed-in his rhetoric.
On the face of it, that claim is utterly insane. It also speaks of a malice so weird that it is hard to grasp. This is not Nixonian lying. This is something closer to a Sunday-School student trying to talk his way out of Hell. He wants to be able to slaughter nations . . . with a straight face???
And it fits perfectly with Cheney’s ambitions, we are told. May I repeat how freaking weird this is?
Who is King Abdullah of SA? Really I thought he was the King of Jordan.
Now that all of thsi has been said, have we not known some of this feces already??!! How long has it been said that Cheney runs the show int he WH and that Bush is just the cheerleader for this administration.
It was done this way for dubya was a dumba** and he really does not know what he is talking about if it bit him squarely on the nose. He is always reading from bib cards even when he is nominating a new person an how he loves this person and what good qualities this person has. He reallllllly doem’t know jack, in my opinion except that whick absorbs from osmosis on simple occassions. The whole world knows this. That is what the shame is all about. We have a brain dead VP who is only interested in corp. profit and a potus who doesn’t know jack about anything.