The One Percent Doctrine

Ron Suskind, Copyright 2006.

I like to read political type books usually a few years after the publication.  It helps to have a little breathing room from the mercurial present to reflect on events that have transpired.  Unfortunately the subject of this book, the post 9/11 "War on Terror", is even now still too fresh to have a lasting, historically accurate portrait and bias is still too weighty and intrusive in the investigation.

Mr. Suskind follows the post 9/11 response to the most egregious attack on U.S. soil in this century.  It had no real precedent in it's scale and ugliness and our response was and probably still is as a nation finding its way in the dark.
The "One Percent Doctrine", if it is an actual doctrine, is coined from a phrase spoken by Dick Cheney as he contemplated the nexus of terrorism's unfathomable desire for human destruction, the ease of flow of information, money and persons across borders and the post-Cold War lack of controls over weapons of mass destruction.  Basically, the logic of Cheney's argument is:  Even if there is only a one percent chance that a terrorist can find the means and opportunity to detonate a massive weapon, we must act as if it is a certainty.  Ergo, we invade Iraq, even if the intelligence is not conclusive.  Ergo, we subscribe to "aggressive" investigation of culprits to glean whatever information we can get.  Even if that information lacks any standard of verification.  We react.
The book follows the pressures of "notables"; those directors and secretaries that report directly to the President, those that must make the public statements, and contrasts it with the "invisibles"; those agents that must stalk a stealthy, unknown enemy from the far flung and disjointed corners of the earth.  I found the book to be a marvelous insight into how these worlds operate and how their objectives can at times be at loggerheads.
The author makes for riveting reading.  The style is almost like a Grisham or Clancy novel, where the plots twist, villains and heroes circle each other and the action is always moving.  The author will jump from subject to subject, department to department, country to country, agent to agent, notable to notable.  It is well written, and it engages you, but I wonder if the style is appropriate to the subject.
For further criticism, the book is based entirely on interviews with "nearly one hundred well placed sources..." whose identities cannot be revealed.  This is understandable in an environment where livelihoods may be lost by being off message or prosecution may ensue from revealing classified information.  The problem created, is however, credibility.  How much can be trusted from an interview, when you have definite motives for your interviewees?    I can glean from reading the book that George Tenet was probably a major source.
In all, I did enjoy the book.  I do have to wonder, long term, what we will really know 20 years from now about how America reacted during the first several years of this new millennium.