History as a Cartoon

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

It is no secret that the attacks of September 11, 2001, resulted in two wars. The first was the one in which the United States finally engaged with Islamic terrorists, who had declared war when they bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. The second is the war against the war.

This latter is an internecine executive branch struggle, pitting insurgent factions of the intelligence community and veterans of the foreign service bureaucracy against Bush administration policy-makers. So sordid has it become that strategic leaks were a staple of the 2004 presidential campaign. Failing their transparent design to topple a sitting president, the renegades have nonetheless continued apace, recently exposing key programs aimed at penetrating Al Qaeda’s international communications and money movements.

The insurgency thrives due to its ideological soul mates in the mainstream press. One of the brightest stars in its firmament is Ron Suskind. A past winner of the club’s coveted Pulitzer Prize, which is now awarded annually for the best leaking of national security information, Mr. Suskind in 2004 authored “The Price of Loyalty,” which, courtesy of a disgruntled cat’s paw (a former treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill), painted an election-year portrait of President Bush as a dimwit whose strings were pulled by dark forces: principally, Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney.

Mr. Suskind is back again with “The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11” (Simon & Schuster, 367 pages, $27), another explosive best seller on the same overarching theme. If the far-left anthem “Bush lied and people died” is where you’re coming from, if you think your country and its “visceral, emotive, non-substantive and faith based” president have been hijacked by wild-eyed neocons bent on an American empire that serves Israel’s interests, this is the book for you.

While today’s politicized press has embraced Mr. Suskind’s Bush-bashing, the press of a bygone day, one more objectively critical, might instead have asked whether one can ever arrive at a semblance of truth by only talking to one side of a heated historic dispute. In this regard, Mr. Suskind’s book, however unintentionally, is hilarious.

In an “author’s note” at the very end, Mr. Suskind thanks the “nearly one hundred well-placed” sources whom he has chosen to accommodate by not identifying. Let’s leave aside the broad license to mutilate that this confers on the author, who vents his own considerable prejudices through seemingly authoritative accounts from raconteurs whose anonymity renders them conveniently unimpeachable. There is not, here, even a fig leaf of objectivity. It is pluperfectly obvious whose versions of events Mr. Suskind values, and whose – no matter how central to the story – were readily substituted by caricature.

So we learn in lush detail, including extensive quotations from private conversations, of the thoughtful, agonizing, nuanced deliberations and frustrations of such luminaries as a former CIA director, George Tenet (likable, passionate, and able … but compromised because he owes Mr. Bush, who did not fire him despite the CIA’s abysmal performance prior to September 11), Brent Scowcroft (a former national security adviser and still confidant of President George H.W. Bush who, we learn through Mr. Scowcroft, has a cold and distant relationship with his less able son), various CIA upper and middle managers, and even some FBI grunts. Their conversations are rendered in rich, frequently self-serving detail.

To the contrary, the powers to whom they valiantly try to speak truth are metaphors, not people: “Imperial America” is fighting a “so-called ‘war on terror.'” (In case you miss the point that Mr. Suskind doesn’t believe we’re in a real war, he helps you by repeating it every few paragraphs.) It is ruled by Mr. Bush, a barely literate Bible thumper whose refusal to read even short memos has created an “evidence-free realm” that he rules by drawing on “the deep well of faith.” His then-national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, is “a fierce academic-bred achiever, alone at 46, bemused and appraising, cool and sealed each morning in a snug Oscar de la Renta.” Defense Secretary Rumsfeld is the sharp-elbowed, Machiavellian infighter, singularly responsible for the failure to capture Osama bin Laden out of petty resistance to playing second fiddle to the CIA. Mr. Suskind reports that Mr. Rumsfeld has allegedly told the Joint Chiefs, “Every CIA success is a DoD failure.” In all manner of machinations, “Don” is joined at the hip with “Dick.” That would be Mr. Cheney, of course, the villain of the book. Indeed, when Mr. Suskind wants to convey how effective Al Qaeda’s ruthless no. 2 terrorist, Ayman al-Zawahri, is, he can’t resist describing him as “bin Laden’s Cheney.”

Mr. Cheney is the father of the book’s gravamen, the “one-percent doctrine.” This is the device by which the administration has supposedly dispensed with evidence-based decision making, the mooring that, for Mr. Suskind, made President Clinton’s America a nation of laws, not men. It is, for Mr. Suskind, the colossal blunder that has led to the misadventure in Iraq and a national hysteria over terrorism. According to Mr. Suskind, Mr. Cheney has decreed that if a situation presents a 1% risk of a “high-impact” event, the government must treat the threat as if it were a certainty and move to preventive measures rather than dawdling over such niceties as, well, proof.

The notion is absurd, and it is manifestly false that anything close to it has ever been an operating principle. There can be no gainsaying that the attacks of September 11 shifted the nation’s priorities. Though Mr. Suskind chooses not to dwell on it, when terrorism was treated as he prefers – i.e., like a crime rather than the “war” he ceaselessly belittles – the United States managed to convict less than three dozen operatives (mostly low-level) while the nation was attacked repeatedly and Al Qaeda’s ranks swelled. Plainly, with a committed enemy and righteous fears about weapons of incalculably destructive power, the focus had to shift to prevention rather than prosecution. But the thought that an obsession over prevention has meant the death knell of reason, and that error in high-pressure judgment is the tell-tale sign of deceit, is a nearly libelous oversimplification.

For all his repetitive snipes at the president’s supposed lack of sophistication, the irony is that Mr. Suskind has given us history as a cartoon.

Mr. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. He last wrote for these pages about post-September 11 public safety.


The New York Sun

© 2024 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use