The One Percent Doctrine ... You bet!!!!

Yes, you may blame my brother, Richard, in Connecticut for this one. He was discussing a book he was reading with me on the telephone (a "must read" book, he said) when I noticed that I had an unopened package from Amazon.com and ... you guessed it! Within a few seconds (that package was ripped open faster than I used to open my Christmas presents when I was ten), we were comparing the book(s) that we both pledged to begin (actually, in Richard's case, to continue) reading last night.

And I did, and I'm sure he did.

And let me tell you ... "one percent" isn't only a good title for our foreign policy doctrine ... it's also a good description of the success our foreign policy has enjoyed [sic] over the past several years and in Iraq, particularly.

I'll write far more about this marvelous book (at least the first three chapters are marvelous, in my opinion) when I complete reading it sometime in the next week. It's a page-turner, but has so much meat that I found myself reading entire passages over and over well after midnight last night ... uhh, this morning, I should say. And its sources are very, very good!

In any event, it has already changed my "standard" answers as to why we invaded Iraq. I would normally say, when asked for my opinion as to why we were in Iraq, that its rationale was "possibly oil" or "a mistaken thought that Saddam was a terrorist ally of Osama" or "some sort of revenge for an attempted assassination of GWB's father" or even in a charitable moment that its rationale was "the real possibility that Bush believed in his heart of hearts that Iraq possessed WMDs."

But now (at least from the first few chapters of one little book), I believe that it (the invasion of Iraq) was little more than a "payback" to the neocons with strong DOD connections (particularly, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz) for the major emphasis put on intelligence -- insisted upon by Colin Powell, and at the expense of the Pentagon -- after 9/11.

In other words, unless the book takes some dramatic turn in another direction, it was internal Republican turf wars and domestic politics and not foreign affairs or even the War [sic] on Terror that caused us to precipitously give television viewers worldwide the excitement of those multi-shades of a green and gray blur on our screens of the anticipated "shock and awe," followed by an ill-conceived incursion of insufficient ground troops into Iraq, an endless occupation and seriously questionable decimation of Iraq's civilian population ... the destruction of a nation that ... hadn't killed a single American for the entire decade before the night of "shock and awe" -- including its not having a thing to do with Al-Qaida's attacks on 9/11.

please bear with me as I continue reading and (hopefully) finish this book over the next week.

Thank you!