Who's in charge here?

Oh lucky day! Thanks to a confusing placeholder title on the Multnomah county library catalog, I was the first to place a hold on Ron Suskind's new book the One Percent Doctrine. Ok, even with the title it remains a bit obscure. The title refers to VP Cheney's belief that even if there was a 1% chance that a state or terrorist organization had WMD, policy should assume they do. The book concerns the influence of the office of the VP over national security policy, and how it is far out of whack. Take a look at this video (don't read the transcript!) for a little more insight. Amazing we don't hear more about things like this.

You can have your Haliburton conspiracy theories, you just need to read the National Security Strategy of 2002 to understand why the US went to war. The rise of extreme terror, the continued existence of rogue states and the proliferation of WMD created a new existential threat to the US, or so the report says. The invasion was meant as a first step to prevent these three factors from converging. For getting into the mindset of the Bush team, I recommend Rise of the Vulcans (and it's even bargain priced at Powell's, you can't afford not to read it).