The One Percent Doctrine: deep inside America’s pursuit of its enemies since 9/11 Ron Suskind Simon & Schuster, 367pp, £18.99 ISBN 0743295684

There is something irritating about The One Percent Doctrine, Ron Suskind's exposé of the duplicity and stupidity of the US officials running the war on terror. At first I thought it was the style. Suskind is a journalistic Dan Brown, whose factual account of the shadowy meetings between the CIA, the FBI and Pentagon and State Department bigwigs over the past four years is written in the breathless prose of a dime-store novel. In Suskind's hands, US officials turn into Robert Langdons or Sophie Neveus. The CIA boss George Tenet (who resigned in 2004) has a "kind of clumsy, shirt-untucked openness". We learn that, after 9/11, he slumped in his office chair and turned towards the window - "[T]he lights of Washington . . . were barely visible in the distance." One of his assistants, "a slender bru nette in her fifties", stuck her head around the doorway. "They'd been through a lot together. Nothing, though, like what was to come." This slender brunette, we are told, "loves George". You half expect them to conduct an affair, perhaps while pursuing Osama Bin Laden in a car chase through the hot and sweaty half-roads of Tora Bora.

Not even the major players are spared the Dan Brown treatment. George W Bush is a "cut-the-crap type" who continually says things such as "That's a nightmare". When a character actually referred to as "Langdon" - Jim Langdon, a foreign affairs adviser - enters the fray, you have to keep reminding yourself that this isn't fiction.

And it's not only the style: the content grates, too. The book fancies itself as a searing critique of the war on terror; it's actually a limited one. It doesn't challenge the premise that small sects of Koran-bashing wackos pose an unprecedented threat to western civilisation - rather, it takes issue with the tactics of the war. Suskind argues that certain decisions made by the Bushies have heightened the terror threat and left us with "ardent and empowered enemies", a "global village of Islamic terrorists". In the end, he plays the fear card as much as his subjects in Washington.

What he does capture well is the panic and confusion that gripped Washington post-9/11. Take the "One Percent Doctrine" itself. The vice-president, Dick Cheney, upon hearing that Bin Laden had possibly hooked up with a couple of nuclear scientists, reportedly declared: "If there's a 1 per cent 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." This shows that the Bushies were "embracing suspicion as a threshold for the use of American power": even the infinitesimal possibility of a threat (does anyone seriously believe Bin Laden could not only make a nuke, but also deliver and detonate it?) could become the basis for action. Fear and precaution have become the motors of US foreign policy, and that has proved disastrous for Iraqis and Afghans.

Yet Suskind uses scare tactics, too. He writes about intelligence officials' discovery of a computer belonging to a Saudi jihadist which contained plans for building something called a "mubtakkar" - apparently a device that can deliver lethal gases. Officials actually built the device, using the plans they found, and showed it to Tenet and others. Tenet said: "Oh shit . . . The man's got to see this." The next day, "the man" - Bush - is shown the device. "Thing's a nightmare," he says. Is it just me, or is there something hilarious about the commander-in-chief of the most powerful army on earth and the head of the largest intelligence agency in the world shaking with fear while looking at something called a mubtakkar, which, Suskind informs us, is "about the size of a paint can"? It is worth remembering that, for all the fearmongering about terrorists getting their hands on chemical or biological weapons, fewer than 15 people have been killed by known terrorist use of such weapons, and they were all victims of the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, which carried out the sarin attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995. The group had more than 20 members with graduate degrees in science, actual scientific laboratories and a billion dollars at its disposal. Such has been the failure of terror groups to make and use chemical and biological weapons that one expert, David C Rapoport, editor of the US Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence, says they should be relabelled "weapons of minimum destruction".

Yet, instead of challenging the obsession with chemical destruction, Suskind ratchets up the reader's fear. As he says of the discovery of the mubtakkar: "In the world of terrorist weaponry, this was the equivalent of splitting the atom."

Suskind sometimes relies on possibly dodgy sources. He writes that the US had a mole close to al-Qaeda - "call him Ali" - who told his handlers that al-Qaeda planned a chemical attack on the New York subway in 2002. Should we take the word of one man, known only as "Ali", who presumably gave his info to an official who then passed it on to someone else who passed it on to Suskind? Why hasn't al-Qaeda used chemical weapons since? Suskind says that the London bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan was barred from flying to America two years before 7/7; but the FBI says that Suskind has confused Khan with another man, Mohammed Ajmal Khan.

Suskind is trying to challenge fear with fear. Where Bush officials argue that inaction will allow terrorists to flourish, Suskind says that the wrong kind of action will create more terrorists. He overlooks one of the ironies of our so-called "age of terror": that there is less terrorism today than at any time over the past 30 years. In the 1980s, there were roughly 360 international terror incidents a year; by 2000 there were roughly 100. The biggest fall was in America itself, where the number of terror attacks has gone from 40 a year in the mid-1970s to fewer than five every year over the past ten years (although admittedly, if 9/11 is included, the annual death toll has gone up). Where Bush officials claim that they are winning the war against lunatics who pose a threat to life as we know it, Suskind says the war isn't going very well and the lunatics may have acquired chemicals, gases and "suitcase nukes".

A good critique of the war on terror should start by challenging the politics of fear that underpins it, not by advancing an alternative version. By the time you get to the end of this book, you're likely to be even more scared of terrorism - or perhaps just curious as to whether Tenet and his slender assistant ever got it on.

Brendan O'Neill is deputy editor of spiked (www.spiked-online.com)

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