The Authoritarian Reflex

Those who still remember their high school biology lessons will recall how a simple reflex works: touch a hot stove and "instinctively" your hand jerks away; it is automatic—no thought involved. Although most animal behavior is instinctive, almost all of human behavior is learned and requires thought even when life is threatened; firefighters enter burning buildings to save the lives of others. Because "certainty" is rarely, if ever, present in human affairs, Vice President Dick Cheney believes that our response to a perceived threat must be like a simple reflex: without "analysis." In The One Percent Doctrine, Ron Suskind quotes him as saying, "If there's a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. . . . It's not about our analysis or finding a preponderance of evidence. . . it's about our response." But, what about that response?