Economical and Financial News

The Epistemology of Cheneyism

Some months ago, in exchange for cash money I agreed to read Doug Feith’s book. It was a curious experience. At first, it leaves you wondering how ideas so dumb could possibly have survived the slightest contact with rational human beings. But then you realize that Feith’s ideas about how intelligence analysis should be done are so stupid that it’s difficult to even describe what he’s saying. You really need to read Feith going on and on and on to fully grasp that, yes, he really means this. But Spencer Ackerman is right, this passage he found in Bart Gellman’s book does a better job than anything else I’ve seen, though in this case he’s specifically talking about Feith’s underlying Doug Wurmer:

The spider chart was meant “to create a strategic picture, and that strategic picture is the foundation of policy change,” Wurmser said. “It helped you visualize, because if you saw, say, twenty relationships between X and Y, and twenty between Y and Z, then there’s at least a suspicion that Z and X are interacting through Y.” A map like that could bring insight, but there were perils in surmising too much. Suppose X and Y were Dick Cheney and Colin Powell. Twice they served in senior posts under presidents named Bush. In the early 1990s, they worked at the same address and were spotted together on international flights. They communicated frequently, encrypting their secrets. Back then, Cheney hired Powell for a very big job, elevating him over people far more senior. Ten years later, with Cheney in charge of recruiting, Powell got an even bigger job. From all this a person might figure that Powell was an agent of influence for Cheney. Lawrence Wilkerson, a colonel in Cheney’s Pentagon who became Powell’s State Department chief of staff, might be agent Z on Wurmser’s chart, taking Cheney’s instructions through a cutout. As it happened, though, Powell was Cheney’s bitter antagonist in the second Bush administration, and Wilkerson called Cheney every angry name from “ruthless,” “dangerous,” and “arrogant” to the “leader of a cabal. This business of links and relationships could get tricky.

I would only further add that underlying a lot of Feith/Wurmser/Cheney stuff about these webs and “one percent doctrines” is a totally inability to get risk analysis right. Or, rather, a failure to appreciate that constantly identifying false positives is dangerous. That if you invade and occupy 25 or 30 countries that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda on the theory that your combination of nutty charts and confessions extracted through terrorism indicated that each of them had a one percent chance of posing a serious threat, you’re going to wind up in a world of pain.