License to lie

In his devastating new book, Ron Suskind shows how 9/11 allowed George W. Bush and his shadowy courtier, Dick Cheney, to "create whatever reality was convenient."

By Gary Kamiya

Read more: George W. Bush, Books, Politics, Iraq, CIA, Gary Kamiya, Reviews, Book reviews, Ron Suskind

Salon photo collage

Former CIA director George Tenet and President George W. Bush

June 23, 2006 | If there are any observers who still deny that the Bush administration is the most secretive, vengeful, reality-averse, manipulative and arrogant government in U.S. history, they will have a lot of fast talking to do after reading Ron Suskind's new book, "The One Percent Doctrine." A meticulous work of reporting, based on interviews with nearly 100 well-placed sources, many of them members of the U.S. intelligence community, Suskind's book paints perhaps the most intimate and damning portrait yet of the Bush team.

At this point, one could forgive readers for asking, "How many more damning portraits of the Bush administration do we need?" From yellowcake to Joe Wilson to Abu Ghraib, the list of Bush scandals and outrages is endless, but nothing ever seems to happen. As the journalist Mark Danner has pointed out, the problem is not lack of information: The problem is that Americans can't, or won't, acknowledge what that information means.

But despite the Bush administration's apparent imperviousness to reality, the publication of "The One Percent Doctrine" is an important event. Even if we have to wait decades for historians to pass judgment on the Bush administration, it is vital that the record on which that judgment is made be compiled. And "The One Percent Doctrine," along with Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies," George Packer's "The Assassins' Gate," Suskind's earlier "The Price of Loyalty" and a few others, will be one of the key documents on which that devastating judgment will be based.

"The Price of Loyalty" focused on former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and what he observed during his unhappy tenure with the Bushites -- the mania for loyalty, the true-believer ideology, the aversion to any truth that blocked their righteous plans. O'Neill was the book's protagonist and hero -- an outspoken maverick who refused to toe the Bush party line, and was fired for his disloyalty.

"The One Percent Doctrine" also has a central figure, but a far more problematic one: former CIA director George Tenet. Suskind paints as sympathetic a portrait of Tenet as any fair-minded journalist is likely to; indeed, in the end, he's a little too sympathetic to him. Referring to the tension between the CIA's role as an objective gatherer of information and the "fierce undertow toward war in Iraq," Suskind writes, "The dilemma of Tenet's role was diabolical." Just why rejecting the distortions and lies demanded by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld in their push to make a case for war constituted a "diabolical dilemma" for Tenet, rather than just being part of his job, is never explained, beyond the fact that he was a loyalist -- a breed for which Suskind typically has little patience. But Suskind does not conceal the fact that Tenet ultimately failed to prevent the White House and the Pentagon from corrupting and misusing intelligence. And in the end, most readers will probably feel that they have a clear enough impression of Tenet's strengths and weaknesses that they will forgive Suskind's somewhat sentimental tilt toward him as the courtesy due a key source.

As in "The Price of Loyalty," Suskind's great achievement here is to reveal how the Bush administration short-circuited and ultimately corrupted the way America's government is supposed to work. Actual coups d'état are lurid and violent and attract attention. As Suskind reveals, Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice and Rove pulled off a much more sophisticated job: a bureaucratic coup d'état. Without firing a shot, they silenced critics, squelched unwanted facts, and created their own false but salable reality. As a result, they were able to launch a war justified by lies and driven by nothing more than Bush's ignorant whim. It is, truly, the heist of the century.

In "The Price of Loyalty," Suskind broke the major news that at Bush's very first National Security Council meeting, long before 9/11, he was already planning to remove Saddam Hussein from power -- the ur-text of a long line of revelations, culminating in the so-called Downing Street memo, showing that Bush's claim that he was going to war only as a last resort was a lie. Suskind's fine-grained reporting in that book revealed Bush as a superficially charming but singularly unpleasant character, at once ignorant, smug and aggressive, the kind of man who uses nicknames like "Pablo" as a way of reinforcing his own unearned, but all the more aggressively asserted, place as dominant primate. The really dark portrait, though, is of Cheney: the unseen power behind the throne, contemptuous and careful, unreadable and implacable.

Those portraits are only deepened in Suskind's new book. But Suskind's subject here is more momentous. While much of "The Price of Loyalty" dealt with the Bush administration's duplicitousness and myopia on the economy and the environment, "The One Percent Doctrine" focuses on its response to 9/11 -- the "war on terror" and the invasion of Iraq. And on George Tenet.

Suskind opens the book with a damning scene in which a CIA analyst warns Bush in August 2001 that bin Laden was planning to strike the U.S. Bush's response: "All right. You've covered your ass, now." That dismissive reply displayed not just Bush's frat-boy boorishness but his poor judgment. And after the terrorist attacks came, all constraints on Bush -- and Cheney -- vanished. Suskind depicts Bush as unbound, liberated by 9/11: While before the attacks senior staff worried that he wasn't thinking things through, now improvisation, not rational thought, was called for. This let Bush be Bush. "Left unfettered, and unchallenged, were his instincts, his 'gut,' as he often says, and an unwieldy aggressiveness that he'd long been cautioned to contain."

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.

The choice to go to war, Suskind argues, was a "default" -- a fallback, driven by the "realization that the American mainland is indefensible." America couldn't really do anything -- so Bush and Cheney decided they had to do something. And they decided to do this something, to attack Iraq, because after 9/11 Cheney embraced the radical doctrine found in the title of Suskind's book. "If there's a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response," Suskind quotes Cheney as saying. And then Cheney went on to utter the lines that can be said to define the Bush presidency: "It's not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence. It's about our response."

Next page: An administration that makes up its own God-like reality