You Can’t Make It Up
From Michiko Kukatani’s New York Times review, June 20, 2006:
[ http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/20/books/20kaku.html ]
“The title of Ron Suskind's riveting new book, "The One Percent Doctrine," refers to an operating principle that he says Vice President Dick Cheney articulated shortly after 9/11: in Mr. Suskind's words, "if there was even a 1 percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction — and there has been a small probability of such an occurrence for some time — the United States must now act as if it were a certainty." He quotes Mr. Cheney saying that it's not about "our analysis," it's about "our response," and argues that this conviction effectively sidelines the traditional policymaking process of analysis and debate, making suspicion, not evidence, the new threshold for action.”
From Gordon and Trainor’s Cobra II:
“The war planning took about eighteen months. The postwar planning began in earnest only a couple of months before the invasion. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Tommy Franks spent most of their time and energy on the least demanding task - defeating Saddam’s weakened conventional forces - and the least amount of the most demanding - rehabilitation of and security for the new Iraq. The result was a surprising contradiction. The United States did not have nearly enough troops to secure the hundreds of suspected WMD sites that had supposedly been identified in Iraq or to secure the nation’s long, porous borders. Had the Iraqis possessed WMD and terrorist groups been prevalent in Iraq, as the administration so loudly asserted, U.S. forces might well have failed to prevent WMD from being spirited out of the country and falling into the hands of the dark forces the administration had declared war against.”
So we’re talking probabilities here, right? A one percent probability is sufficient to launch an effort conducted in such a way as to produce a virtual one hundred per cent certainty the feared outcome will result.
11:35:49 PM 
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