Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Dr. Strangelove alive and well in Washington DC
Looking for Enemies, Looking for Wars
The more we learn about the people who exploited and manipulated post 9/11 America the more scary they look. In their world the enemies lurk everywhere...enemies often created by them. In The Shadow War, In a Surprising New Light, Barton Gellman of the Washington Post writes about Ron Suskind's new book "The One Percent Doctrine". "This "Cheney Doctrine" let Bush evade analytic debate, Suskind writes, and "rely on impulse and improvisation to a degree that was without precedent for a modern president." But that approach constricted the mission of the intelligence and counterterrorism professionals whose point of view dominates this book. Many of them came to believe, Suskind reports, that "their jobs were not to help shape policy, but to affirm it." (Some of them nicknamed Cheney "Edgar," as in Edgar Bergen -- casting the president as the ventriloquist's dummy.) Suskind calls those career terror-fighters "the invisibles," and he likes them. His book is full of amazing, persuasively detailed vignettes about their world. At least a dozen former intelligence officials speak frankly in public here, as did former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill in Suskind's previous book, "The Price of Loyalty."
Where are they going to take us and how far are we going to let them go?
