I just finished reading (in like two days) the new book by Ron Suskind, “The One Percent Doctrine,” which is an inside view of the war on terror and the bizarre policy that drives its conduct: the idea, formulated by Dick Cheney, that a one percent possibility that something might happen should be dealt with and responded to as if it were a certainty.

So if a piece of information gleaned from research and surveillance MIGHT have a one percent bit of credibility to it, the Administration’s policy (known in the inner circles but never voiced in public) is that they will hit it with all resources available.

A tip from an informant in Cairo suggests that a “sleeper cell” might exist in New York, or was it Philadelphia, and they might have a member who might have met bin Laden once and maybe they were in the vicinity of al-Qaeda’s training camps when it happened? Round up the guy and all his relatives.

Add in the bureaucratic infighting, the struggle between the career analysts and the policy makers, and the sheer volume of information being collected, and you have the roots of our current state of perpetual fear out for all to see.

It’s a good read, if not a particularly well written one — Suskind uses a sort of breathless narrative that I think was probably a sincere attempt to not bog readers down in a technically obtuse quagmire of details — and I would recommend it to anyone looking for some clarity on the mess.

I bought the book after listening to Suskind on NPR. During the call in section of the show, a woman called in to say (sarcastically) that she thought the policy was great. She went on to wonder how our responses to things like Katrina and global warming would have been different if the same thinking had prevailed there. Interesting and sobering thought, no?