Be Suskind to Bush
June 20th, 2006I’m not afraid to say it: Ron Suskind is the best journalist currently covering the Bush Administration. The Price of Loyalty is a book that every American should read so as to understand the manner in which the Bush White House operates. But, before we get to his newest book, The One-Percent Doctrine, the Washington Post has insight to the Administration’s character.
Just after the lightning takeover of Baghdad by U.S. forces three years ago, an unusual two-page document spewed out of a fax machine at the Near East bureau of the State Department. It was a proposal from Iran for a broad dialogue with the United States, and the fax suggested everything was on the table — including full cooperation on nuclear programs, acceptance of Israel and the termination of Iranian support for Palestinian militant groups. But top Bush administration officials, convinced the Iranian government was on the verge of collapse, belittled the initiative. Instead, they formally complained to the Swiss ambassador who had sent the fax with a cover letter certifying it as a genuine proposal supported by key power centers in Iran, former administration officials said.
As my friends at This Century Sucks put it, why negotiate from a position of strength when you can negotiate years later in a quagmire? The Post revealed that Iran was intimidated by the fact that we’d defeated an army in three weeks that they’d stalemated against in eight years, but the Bush Administration took no note of this and merely laughed it off, assuming that Iran was on the verge of collapse, just like they did for years with North Korea. How reassuring.
Now, the Doctrine. It reveals, first and foremost, that al-Qaeda cased New York’s subway and was ready to gas it, but suddenly stopped for reasons that no one knows. That, however, isn’t what this book really reveals to the public, as it’s more about the Bush White Houses’ modus operandi. Here.
This book augments the portrait of Mr. Bush as an incurious and curiously uninformed executive that Mr. Suskind earlier set out in “The Price of Loyalty” and in a series of magazine articles on the president and key aides. In “The One Percent Doctrine,” he writes that Mr. Cheney’s nickname inside the C.I.A. was Edgar (as in Edgar Bergen), casting Mr. Bush in the puppet role of Charlie McCarthy, and cites one instance after another in which the president was not fully briefed (or had failed to read the basic paperwork) about a crucial situation.
During a November 2001 session with the president, Mr. Suskind recounts, a C.I.A. briefer realized that the Pentagon had not told Mr. Bush of the C.I.A.’s urgent concern that Osama bin Laden might escape from the Tora Bora area of Afghanistan (as he indeed later did) if United States reinforcements were not promptly sent in. And several months later, he says, attendees at a meeting between Mr. Bush and the Saudis discovered after the fact that an important packet laying out the Saudis’ views about the Israeli-Palestinian situation had been diverted to the vice president’s office and never reached the president.
Keeping information away from the president, Mr. Suskind argues, was a calculated White House strategy that gave Mr. Bush “plausible deniability” from Mr. Cheney’s point of view, and that perfectly meshed with the commander in chief’s own impatience with policy details. Suggesting that Mr. Bush deliberately did not read the full National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which was delivered to the White House in the fall of 2002, Mr. Suskind writes: “Keeping certain knowledge from Bush — much of it shrouded, as well, by classification — meant that the president, whose each word circles the globe, could advance various strategies by saying whatever was needed. He could essentially be ‘deniable’ about his own statements.”
If this world were perfect, all reporters would be Suskind to Bush and investigate thoroughly. Since they don’t, I appreciate Ron’s work far more and will be picking it up very, very soon. For now, here’s an excerpt.