Ethics, the “Reality-Based Community,” and the One Percent Doctrine

I’m happy to get the chance to post on Winston’s blog while he’s in Hawaii. I’m a long-time reader of this blog and I’ve always enjoyed the mix of philosophy and politics here. So I’ll try to stick to that format.

I just picked up Ron Suskind’s new book, The One Percent Doctrine, yesterday. I’ve read about a hundred pages and I haven’t been disappointed. The most interesting thing in the book so far is the so-called “one percent doctrine” itself, or the “Cheney doctrine.” A few months after 9/11, Cheney is sitting in the situation room with Condoleeza Rice, George Tenant, and a CIA analyst, discussing the Ummah Tameer-e-Nau (UTN) or “Islamic Revival,” a network of elite Pakistani nuclear scientists, engineers, and military officers. UTN’s intent is to spread nuclear technology to other Islamic nations besides Pakistan. In the August before 9/11, several members of UTN were sitting across a campfire from bin Laden and Zawahiri talking about—well, nobody knows. In any case, at this meeting in the situation room months later, Tenant is relaying how some members of UTN have been interrogated by Pakistani intelligence officers but so far without much result. The Pakistanis aren’t really putting much pressure on the UTN guys to talk. Then Cheney says,

“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. It’s not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence. It’s about our response.”

This is on page 62. I know that Suskind is not a big fan of the Bush administration (see his previous book, The Price of Loyalty), but so far this book has struck me as sympathetic to the dilemmas that Bush and company were faced with after 9/11. In the past, Suskind has documented how this administration heavily favors action over knowledge, and how it denigrates people in the so-called “reality-based community.” In the Price of Loyalty, this policy comes across as nothing but pure arrogance and contempt for people who are more inclined to accept complexity and shades of gray in public policy and foreign affairs. But in his latest book, it seems like Suskind is grappling with a “reality-based” principle put forward by the administration in favor of action over analysis—the one percent doctrine.

If this doctrine is supposed to justify the Iraq war and a possible future attack on Iran, I suppose the argument is this: the cost of acting on bad intelligence is less than the cost of not acting and waiting for good intelligence, even if the chance of terrorists successfully using a nuclear weapon on an American city were only one percent. On this view, the “reality-based community” is actually on the wrong side of the ethical line. I think this is one of the clearest defense-based (as opposed to humanitarian-based) arguments for the Iraq war, and I appreciate how well Suskind reconstructs it. It’s not new—we heard this many times before the Iraq war (“we can’t wait for the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” etc.), but Suskind presents the argument in a much more forceful way than I’ve seen it so far.

As events seem to be confirming, though, I think the costs/benefits assessment in the one percent doctrine is wrong in several ways. First, although sometimes there isn’t time to gather information before acting, I don’t think we are always in that situation in the war on terror, and so sometimes careful analysis of the facts takes priority over action. Let’s call this the, “don’t lose your head” doctrine. Take Iraq. I don’t think it was reasonable for the U.S. to terminate inspections and invade when the inspectors themselves were asking for more time to complete their inspections. Sure, one could argue that the longer inspectors were in Iraq, the more time Saddam may have had to give his weapons to terrorists (assuming he had them). But it was just as likely at the time (and there was a CIA memo backing this up) that Saddam would only give WMD to terrorists if he felt like his back was against the wall and he had nothing to lose anyway. So more time in the case of Iraq would not have increased risks, but could have averted a war and revealed Iraq to be without WMD.

That leads me to the next point. The costs of going to war with Iraq without solid information seemed to have exceeded the benefits of avoiding war, and the administration should have taken this possibility much more seriously. The administration emphasized the benefits of a war in Iraq without ever being clear about the costs. A Shiite-dominated Iraq that is pro-Iran may be more dangerous to American interests than Saddam ever was. A civil war and eventual break-up of Iraq along ethnic lines may also be worse for us than Saddam ever was. So the one percent doctrine also ignores the “law of unintended consequences.” The problem with acting without thinking is that your opponents can think ahead and outsmart you, as chess players know well.

So the one percent doctrine may make sense in some circumstances in the war on terror, but it seems like a horrible principle to act on in a lot of cases. If this is what is behind this administration’s strategy in the Middle East, I submit that we are going to make things much harder for ourselves to reduce the threat of terrorism. I’m gonna stick with the “reality-based community” on Iraq. An interesting case is Iran, but I don't have time to get into that now. Suffice it to say that we should all probably begin the debate. -Jared