Ok…not a little…..terrifying, actually, to read about some of the stuff going on in the Bush White House (via Ron Suskind, who obviously has the ear of some insiders, in his book )

The title of the book,  The One Percent Doctrine,  is referring to the “Cheney philosophy” of the “war on terror”.  If there’s as much as a “one percent chance” that a certain danger is true,  then respond to it as if it is a certainty.  In other words,  pre-emption whenver you feel like it.  What else can we deduce from this?  1% is small enough to allow ANYTHING you suspect,  or have reason to believe that somebody MIGHT believe,  to have the level of certainty and thus sufficient justifcation for ANYTHING.  With someone like Cheney,  this seems all the more to be the case.  I wonder if this will be a topic covered by James Carroll in his “House of War” book (I’ve delayed my jumping back into that,  since I picked up Suskind’s book after seeing the frontline segment “The Dark Side” last week.

This stuff makes Carroll’s subtitle for House of War (“The Pentagon and the Disastreous Rise of American Power” ) al the more accurately descriptive.   And as I’ve read about nuclear issues in house of war and in Stanley Hauerwas’ essays in Against the Nations,  the Cheney doctrine and the blustery confidence of a man reacting from his “gut” is a scary thing to ponder.  When one considers how very little Bush knows and reads,  reacting from the “gut” is all the more dangerous.