The One Percent Doctrine - Part 3

This is the final chapter of my serial comments on Ron Suskind’s book, The One Percent Doctrine, and it is the most frightening. You may recall last week’s review of James David Barber’s The Presidential Character and John Dean’s reference to it in which he placed George W. Bush in Barber’s Active/Negative category along with Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, and Dean’s own employer, Richard Nixon. Based on the assertions made by Dean and my own reading of the Barber book, I agreed with the designation.

To digress for a moment to the Iraq War, Cheney’s One Percent Doctrine gave the administration the cover needed to launch an attack that all of the key players had dreamed of for years. The war on terror and the doctrine also provided the President, Vice President, and Rumsfeld with a rationale for recovering power in relation to the Congress and the courts. Cheney and Rumsfeld, veterans of the Nixon White House, wanted to take full advantage of the new wartime environment to reassert lost executive power, and Bush, a less than happy observer of his father’s presidency, was quick to sign on.

The Suskind book is a work of journalism rather than history and, therefore, does not have a bibliography, but after reading all of his references to President Bush there can be no doubt that the author is very familiar with Barber’s work and that he carefully assessed it and – without directly stating it - came to the independent conclusion that John Dean’s placement of the President in the Active/Negative category was correct. Suskind assesses Bush as a feeling rather than analytic president and describes events from his formative years that demonstrate that he is a risk taker. He points out that Bush saw early on that Iraq would provide the opportunity for a `game changer,’ and he was more than ready to move on linking Iraq to the war on terror. In a key section of the book (pps. 211 – 216) Suskind’s analysis of Bush’s faith based character is subject to an almost Barber like examination and places him where Dean has spotted him.

Cheney comes off as the true heavy in this book, but the fault is as much the President’s. Bush operates from faith and his gut and demands action, leaving the required careful presidential analysis to the V.P. by default. It is a very sad thing to read how the President can barely read the complex reports prepared for him by the CIA and other agencies, and it becomes obvious that we should be wishing Cheney good health during the remainder of the term.

In reading Suskind’s book, I became far more empathetic to Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. They became aware early on after 9/11 that the nation is vulnerable to more attacks by al Qaeda and copy cat wannabes of all kinds. They come across as true patriots absolutely intent on defending us, but, sadly, like all of us, they are prisoners of their own character flaws and experience. Instead of merely doing their damnedest to defend the nation, they seized on 9/11 as an opportunity to rectify every single problem that they saw as coming from a diminished presidency dating from the power shift that emanated from Watergate.

There are so many problems that grow from this flawed analysis that a complete recitation would be a waste of your time. Suffice it to say they have a president far from stupid but one unable to do the personal analysis that goes with the job; they used flawed reasoning on their own doctrine to rectify a burr under America’s saddle in the person of Saddam and the government of Iraq; they used the doctrine to undermine their intelligence agencies and the flow of presidential decision making information; and they used the war on terror to rectify what they saw as a terrible imbalance between the branches of government.

I could go on, but it would be more of the same. Three chapters of a review are more than sufficient for you to determine if you wish to read the book.

From my perspective, it is an extremely sad and frightening book and I cannot praise it highly enough.

Blog on!

Wild Bill