Radio Free Newport

Salon’s recent review of the new Ron Suskind book, “The One Percent Doctrine” is an absolute must-read. Suskind, you’ll remember, is the reporter who was told the infamous “reality-based community” quote by a Bush staffer. A few excerpts below the fold:

Many reasons have been advanced for why Bush decided to attack Iraq, a third-rate Arab dictatorship that posed no threat to the United States. Some have argued that Bush and Cheney, old oilmen, wanted to get their hands on Iraq’s oil. Others have posited that the neoconservative civilians in the Pentagon, Wolfowitz and Feith, and their offstage guru Richard Perle, were driven by their passionate attachment to Israel. Suskind does not address these arguments, and his own thesis does not rule them out as contributing causes. But he argues persuasively that the war, above all, was a “global experiment in behaviorism”: If the U.S. simply hit misbehaving actors in the face again and again, they would eventually change their behavior. “The primary impetus for invading Iraq, according to those attending NSC briefings on the Gulf in this period, was to create a demonstration model to guide the behavior of anyone with the temerity to acquire destructive weapons or, in any way, flout the authority of the United States.” This doctrine had been enunciated during the administration’s first week by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who had written a memo arguing that America must come up with strategies to “dissuade nations abroad from challenging” America. Saddam was chosen simply because he was available, and the Wolfowitz-Feith wing was convinced he was an easy target.

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But this is not news. Suskind’s more momentous disclosure is the degree to which Cheney deliberately kept Bush in the dark, so as to be able to achieve his desired ends. For example, when Crown Prince Abdullah, the de facto Saudi ruler, visited Bush in 2002, the advance packet sent by the Saudis to prepare Bush for the meeting was mysteriously diverted to Cheney’s office. Bush never read it. As a result, he had no idea what the agenda of the meeting was and failed to respond to the Saudi’s requests for American help with the exploding Israeli-Palestinian crisis, which severely weakened Abdullah’s position as an ally in the “war on terror.” Nor did he extract any concessions from them. For Cheney, it seems, the less Bush was prepared for Abdullah, the less chance he would make any concessions to the Arab leader. Or perhaps Cheney simply wanted to control the meeting for the sake of control.

Cheney and Rumsfeld, Suskind writes, viewed Bush as an inferior, the child of their contemporaries. A master at bureaucratic stealth, Cheney quietly orchestrated the war, which was “about the only matter on which all three agreed … So, as America officially moved to a detailed action plan for the overthrow of Hussein, only three men would be in the know: Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld.”

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Suskind’s coup de grâce on this subject is his reminder of Osama bin Laden’s message to the American people just before the 2004 elections. The CIA’s consensus: “bin Laden’s message was clearly designed to assist the President’s reelection … On that score, any number of NSC principals could tell you something so dizzying that not even they will touch it: that Bush’s ratings track with bin Laden’s ratings in the Arab world.” When Bush speaks, bin Laden’s popularity soars — and vice versa.

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