Even If the Odds Are 100 to 1

Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine has been getting its share of attention lately, and God knows there are plenty of reviews to be had. I've not had a chance to read it, but by all accounts I've seen, it's another eye-opening account of the Bush administration and they've been running the country for the past few years. (How many eye-opening accounts are we going to need before our eyes, y'know, open?) But among the growing body of growing body of analysis on the book, Kevin Drum has an interesting take on the title phrase itself:

[The phrase] originates with Dick Cheney, who explained early on that if a terrorist event had even a one percent chance of happening, "we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response." This is obviously a justification for taking a hawkish approach to terrorism, but Suskind says there's much more to it than that. After all, the Bush administration has obviously not reacted to every one-percent threat as if it were a certainty.

More than a broad rationalization of mere hawkishness, the One Percent Doctrine is actually a justification for ignoring unwanted analysis. After all, nearly anything has a one percent chance of happening, and if that's the threshold for action, it means we can take action anytime we want. Under the OPD, there is literally no reason to waste time with analysis or policy discussions.

This, of course, is where Suskind ties in this book with his earlier one, The Price of Loyalty. The single most defining characteristic of George Bush's personality is his belief in his own instinct and his corresponding disdain for serious policy analysis. For Bush, the One Percent Doctrine is tailor made. He is contemptuous of policy discussions, and the OPD is the perfect excuse to ignore them.

It still disturbs me that, after all this time, the Prez seems to have no second thoughts whatsoever about anything his administration has wrought. Drum's explanation is a good start at explaining why that might be.