A few years ago, Vice President Cheney articulated his theory of security, which he called “the one percent doctrine.” He said that we should treat a one percent chance of a terrorist attack as though it were a one hundred percent chance of a terrorist threat. It makes for a great bumper sticker, but as a security method, it’s terrible. Because there is an economy of time and space, we can only worry about the things that are most likely to hurt us. This is why we’re more afraid of shark attacks than falling space debris. To inflate a 1% chance of something happening into a 100% chance of something happening is ludicrous beyond ludicrous. And yet, it seems to inform the way the Bush administration deals with risk assessment. Sometimes. It’s hard enough to translate such a stupid theory into intelligible foreign policy, but what makes matters worse is that the Bush administration only adheres to this doctrine when it’s politically expedient.

So Iran might have nuclear weapons, right? Maybe. But it may also be enriching uranium for civilian power generation, which is permitted under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. One of the only reasons that we think Iran might be enriching weapons-grade plutonium is its secretiveness. Iran refuses to let anyone from any international watchdog agency inspect its facilities to ensure that it’s complying with non-proliferation agreements. This could be because it’s actually making nuclear weapons, or it could be because it doesn’t want the international community to see its massive human rights abuses. It also doesn’t want to lose face and be seen as capitulating to foreign powers. The same was true of Iraq: as it turns out, Saddam didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction, but his secretiveness was because he didn’t want UN weapons inspectors to see the massive human rights abuses and because he wanted to appear powerful in front of his subjects. When you’re a dictator, you need to appear all-powerful, lest your subjects think they can overthrow you.

Half of the problem with Iran is President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Both he and President Bush can agree that “compromise” is a euphemism for “being a wuss.” Even if Iran isn’t developing nuclear weapons, Ahmadinejad certainly behaves as though it is. Two weeks ago, there was about a 50-50 chance that Iran was secretly developing nuclear weapons, not enriching uranium for civilian power generation. With the release of last week’s national intelligence estimate and the revelation that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003, those odds have changed. Still, though, the Bush administration has latched on to any language it can in the NIE to support its case for war with Iran. The president has said that the NIE actually supports his position, since it says there is a “moderate” agreement among all sixteen US intelligence agencies that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons ambitions. In the Bush mindset, that means there is still a chance that Iran may be developing nuclear weapons. For Bush, any probability of something happening must be treated as though it is certainty. He’s the eternal optimist.

Unless it comes to something the president disagrees with. Take global warming. For five years, President Bush refused to believe that global warming was happening and that it was caused by human beings, despite a consensus in the scientific community that it really was happening, and humans really were causing it. When it came to global warming, the man who ignored any contrary opinions about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was suddenly a multilateralist, willing to entertain all points of view. He didn’t want to make decisions too hastily, since there were still some dissenters on the global warming front. (Actually, there were hardly any at all.) The reason that Bush was loathe to believe in global warming was the solution to the problem: cut down greenhouse gas emissions. That meant cutting down fossil fuel use, spending money developing cleaner alternatives to fossil fuels, and possibly cutting greenhouse gas emissions by cutting industrial production. All of these activities are directly at odds with Bush’s personal and professional constituencies: namely, energy companies. The second solution -- spending money on alternatives -- has the double whammy of both costing energy companies revenue from fossil fuels and requiring them to spend money on technological innovation when they would rather just call up the government and have Congress pass laws exempting them from new requirements or forcing new markets to behave like old ones. They’re used to this, and they’re not going to like having to engage in actual change. Bush may have lost some cherry board of directors and/or consulting jobs.

When it came to global warming, a 1% chance that it wasn’t true was treated as a 100% chance that it wasn’t true. Let’s not be too hasty. After all, we’re only talking about the planet. It was probably the film An Inconvenient Truth that, more than anything else, catalyzed popular support for a serious look at the damage humans are doing to the environment. Hence Bush’s cold shoulder toward Al Gore when the latter won the Nobel Prize: it was Gore, whom Bush defeated in 2000, who forced the president’s hand in admitting something that he didn’t want to. Like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Saddam Hussein, Bush doesn’t want to be seen as capitulating on anything. Changing one’s mind is a sign of weakness, even if you were wrong the whole time. No matter how wrong your course may be, it is more important to continue on that course than it is to change to the correct course. Only sissy girls and John Kerry change their minds in the face of new information. Even if Bush rides his horse straight into quicksand, at least they’ll say that he never wavered. He’s dead now, but that’s not the important part.

The one percent doctrine leads to paranoia, which is a hallmark of dictators. Paranoia leads to civil liberties abuses, like warrantless wiretapping and torture. Everything else takes a back seat to the probability that there will be a terrorist attack, which is necessarily one hundred percent at all times. It’s a great doctrine for keeping a populace in a state of constant fear, and using that fear to get whatever you want. Warrantless wiretapping? You got it! US citizens being denied habeas corpus? As long as it will keep me from being blown up! And while we’re at it, let’s spend billions of dollars to create a government department second only in size to the Defense Department that manages to bungle security while at the same time vacuuming up taxpayers’ money. What’s even worse is that the Bush administration itself doesn’t adhere to its own one percent doctrine -- unless, of course, there’s an election to be won or money to be made.