Dick Cheney, Dark Lord of the shadows

James Galbraith has been Dissecting Cheney for Salon.com 10/05/04.  He looks at how Cheney's worldview, and by extension that of the Bush Doctrine which has been so heavily influenced by Cheney and the "neoconservatives" he has sponsored, was heavily influenced by a particular kind of aggressive nuclear strategic thinking from the Cold War days:

The key to understanding Cheney is that he is a throwback -- to a brand of strategic thinking that bedeviled the Cold War. He is part of the legacy that runs back to Generals Curtis LeMay and Thomas Power of the Strategic Air Command in the late 1950s. The two tenets of this legacy are absolutely consistent: 1) Overestimate the enemy and govern through fear, and 2) hit the enemy before it can hit you. In four words: "missile gap" and "first strike."

That school never quite seized control of American strategic policy while the Soviet Union existed, though it came close on several occasions, including the Cuban missile crisis. It often won budget and political battles through trickery, such as the CIA Team B exercise of the early 1980s, which led to the "Star Wars" missile defense program. But the first strike never happened. In the end cooler and wiser heads, from Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson through Nixon and Reagan, always saw the advantages of working with Soviet leaders to prevent war.

This is one of the best brief descriptions of Cheney's outlook on foreign and defense policy that I've seen.  Cheney the public figure of today is a spawn of the Cold War and the military-industrial complex.  But he is also an adherent of a particular hawkish version of that heritage.

Galbraith's identification of Cheney's current views with the most hardline version of nuclear strategy during the Cold War is a key to understanding the Bush Doctrine unilateralism.  He also talks about how two other assumptions from those days: an economic competition with the Other Side for strategic resources like oil, and a trade-off by which the dollar was supported through the US nuclear umbrella and massive lending from allied nations.

Ten years after the Soviet Union collapsed, the shadowy hard men of the Cold War finally came into uncontested power in the United States. And to our tragic cost, they brought unchanged thinking to a radically different world. The puzzle was how to force the new reality into the old frame. Their solution? To re-create in the minds ofthe public a world that would resemble, as much as possible, the dangerous but politically familiar one in which they had been formed. [my emphasis]

A key part of this approach, as noted above, is fear: "Rule through fear remains an essential part of Cheney's message; he reiterates it every day on the stump."

Looking at Cheney's explanation in 2002 of the new strategic doctrine of preventive war, Galbraith says:

He had always rejected the doctrines of deterrence and containment -- even as they applied to the Soviet Union. His position in 2002 was not a new one, crafted by strategists thinking afresh about the world after the Cold War. It was, instead, a direct return to the fantasy of world domination, powered by the atomic monopoly, that took hold in American military minds in the immediate aftermath of World War II, and that threatened the security and survival of the world for 20 years after that.

Preventive self-defense is nothing else than the most dangerous subterranean tendency of Cold War bombardiers LeMay and Power, who favored an unprovoked first strike against the Soviet Union. It is the doctrine rightly ridiculed in "Dr. Strangelove," resurrected and brought to you live in the nightmare we call Iraq.

It would be hard to overemphasize the importance of this perspective for understanding the Bush Doctrine.  The viewpoint sponsored by Dick Cheney is truly a dark one.  It assumes not just a permanent war economy but a permanent state of fear and more-or-less continuous wars. 

It's a view in which only an endless struggle for global dominance is the acceptable path for the United States, one in which there will never be a shortage of enemies and potential enemies, one where power and fear are the only bases for American's international security.  The vision of a Dark Lord, indeed.