The One Percent Doctrine
Yesterday, I posted a piece about Ron Suskind's new book, The One-Percent Doctrine.
The book has generated some buzz, mostly about the story it tells of an aborted al-Qaeda plan to attack the NYC subway system with poison gas. The traditional media has trumpeted this story as proof that Dear Leader is still protecting us. On the other hand, Sen. Shumer used it to demand that full funding be restored to NYC after the DHS sent their money to, um, Wyoming instead.
In his interview with Wolf Blitzer, Susskind details how, in the months following 9/11, "Dick" Cheney formulated something called the One-Percent Doctrine:
A key feature of the Cheney Doctrine was to quietly liberate action from such accepted standards of proof and it was effective. Suspicion, both inside America and abroad, became the threshold for action.In other words, if there was a one-percent chance that terrorists had gotten WMD, then the US had to treat it as a certainty -- but not just in our analysis, but also in our response.
This makes sense up to a point.
When evaluating risk, one looks at three factors:
- the likelihood of a catastrophic event occuring
- the enormity of the resulting consequences, and
- the degree of vulnerability that you have to that potential catastrophe.
But what bothers me is that in the one and only instance in which the Cheney Doctrine was put to the test, it failed miserably. Cheney's one-percent probability was significantly closer to zero percent.
And the resulting response resulted in a catastrophe of its own making.
And, ironically, Hurricane Katrina (itself a catastrophe with a likelihood quite a bit greater than 1%) made a further mockery of Cheney's doctrine.
P.S. There was a corollary to Cheney's doctrine: 99 innocent men are worth arresting so that one guilty man is captured. The backlash from that, and the resulting loss of trust in the US, will last a generation or more.
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