Written by Carl Peterson   

Undead American Global Totalitarianism

"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." Dick Cheney, speaking in November 2001, as reported in Ron Suskind's 2006 book, The One Percent Doctrine.

Cheney's Doctrine, also known as the One Percent Doctrine, means that some possible future events are so horrific that even if our estimate of the probability of the horrific event's future occurrence is only 1%--that is, that it is possible but very unlikely--we should respond to this possibility as if, without our response, it will certainly come to pass.

On its face it doesn't seem unreasonable that the more horrific the possible future event, the less certain of its occurrence we need to be to take drastic, costly, preventive action.  For example, would it not be prudent, according to the Cheney Doctrine, for the world to rid itself of nuclear weapons ASAP given the possibility that our continued possession of them will end in world-annihilation?  Would it not be prudent, following the Cheney Doctrine, to take immediate and decisive action to counter global-warming--even if there is only a 1% chance that the consensus among climate scientists is correct?  It is likely that Cheney never envisioned his doctrine being applied in this way.  It seems that somehow Cheney only saw that the 1% doctrine could be used to justify whatever actions he thought might be necessary as he pursued his geopolitical goals in a declared war on "global terror."  If Cheney had understood how readily his doctrine could be adapted to justify policies he despised, he might have kept the doctrine under his cowboy hat.

Given the context of the Cheney Doctrine--what he saw as a global war on terror requiring rapid, if not instantaneous, responses from the United States, the 1% standard was not to be taken literally, did not mean that any kind of formal risk analysis was to be undertaken, and that if the analyzed risk fell below 1% then no immediate action was required--but in reality only meant that if [claimed] evidence suggested that a specific catastrophic terrorist attack might occur, then the US was justified in taking preventive action, even extreme, violent, risky, and costly action to ensure that it would not occur.

But if, as indicated in Cheney's statement of his doctrine, there is no time or need for a formal, institutional analysis of the probability of the specific terrorist attack, then who is to determine when the level of probability crosses the threshold requiring an immediate, decisive response?  During the George W. Bush administration's prosecution of its "War on Terror," the highest-level decisions were formally the president's, but the preponderance of publicly available evidence suggests that the vice-president Dick Cheney through bureaucratic machinations and manipulations of the president had decisive influence on America's prosecution of the "War."  But let us say that in specific cases implementation of the Cheney Doctrine required three people, the president, the vice-president, and the secretary of defense to agree that the low probability of a certain terrorist attack with perceived catastrophic consequences--and without regard to any other considerations--had reached a probability threshold that required an immediate response from the United States sufficient to eliminate the threat.  The subjective risk perceptions of three people would then be sufficient to justify any action deemed by them to be necessary to prevent the attack, and, according to the Cheney Doctrine, nothing else needed to be considered.  Not the cost in lives lost, not the other humanitarian costs, not the dollar costs, not violations of international law, not the injustice of a mistaken preventive attack, not the massive opportunity costs for America's national security strategy, not the long-term damage to international society done by the example of the self-proclaimed leader of the free world reaching immediately for violence as a preventive response to a low-probability threat.

Dick Cheney could have formulated his doctrine as he was drifting off to sleep one night, or upon waking one morning, so small is its intellectual content--and large its irrationality--irrationality that must have been, and probably remains, hidden from Dick Cheney in his id.  The implications of the doctrine have to be sorted out to understand what Dick Cheney himself never understood: the totalitarian bent of his own mind.

The doctrine did not set forth any requirement for triage, that is, for constantly evaluating the range of known threats and dealing with the most serious threats first.  There was no formal analysis or triage provided for or implied in Cheney's statement of his doctrine because he foresaw that low-probability but possibly imminent and catastrophic threats would suddenly appear, and he believed that these threats would require quick, decisive responses, a requirement that would instantly move them to the head of any pre-established triage line.  So powerful in Dick Cheney's mind was this requirement for preemptive decisive response that the built-in relatively high probability that such a response would prove to be a mistake--possibly a grotesque and catastrophic mistake, as was America's war on Iraq--was pre-calculated in the logic of the Cheney Doctrine to be an acceptable cost for the additional American security supposed to be provided by preventively responding even to low-probability but potentially catastrophic threats.

But, how do you even get to the point where it is possible to believe that you can successfully implement the Cheney Doctrine?  No one went after Cheney with a large butterfly net and strait-jacket after he proposed his doctrine,--although that might not have been an inappropriate response--because it was not immediately obvious to most Americans that even the United States did not have the military prowess to fulfill the basic requirement of the Cheney Doctrine: responding immediately and decisively to every low-probability threat as defined by the doctrine.  A good part of America believed its own stories about the efficacy of its military might, and it was not apparent to them that it would not be possible to quickly impose preventive Draconian punishment on every international actor perceived to pose a low-probability but potentially catastrophic threat to the United States.  A citizen of ordinary understanding can get to that point where it is possible to believe that the Cheney Doctrine is feasible (after setting aside all considerations regarding the doctrine's wisdom, morality and legality) only when it seems plausible that the United States actually has the power to carry out the doctrine.  If the doctrine had been proposed by a prominent politician in any other democratic country, the idea would immediately have been identified as absurd, and the proposer's seriousness and sanity dismissively questioned, because in any other country it would have been obvious that it did not have the military power to support consideration of the doctrine as an option.  But the United States' reputed military power was enough to protect the Cheney Doctrine from being immediately rejected as absurd on the grounds of infeasibility, and it was enough to protect the Cheney Doctrine from being analyzed in America's main stream media to reveal its deeper absurdities...which analysis, if competently conducted, would have revealed the totalitarian bent of Dick Cheney's mind.

One parable for Cheney's Doctrine is the man sitting alone at night in a dark woods full of wild animals. He is fearful of every sound emanating from the darkness around him.  He wants to survive to the morning, but he believes that every rustling, every movement of a leaf, every sound that he does not understand, and even every sound that his mind manufactures on its own, could mean the beginning of an attack from human or beast or who knows what--an attack that would end his life.  Overcome by his terror, he forgets the various resources within himself:  including intelligence, scrutiny, skepticism, patience...courage.  He leaves behind the many gifts that nature has given to humanity and that have allowed it to survive from a beginning of nakedness in the world, and exults instead in his rifle and the bags of ammunition he has had the forethought to bring with him into the woods.  He determines that he has enough ammunition to fire at every sound until morning and by following that plan he will certainly survive the night.

By the light of the next morning he finds that he has killed a rabbit and injured many trees--but the other animals (counting humans), including all of the most dangerous ones, had fled the area as soon as the all-night firing began.  The man is satisfied, however, that his response--the only one he was sure would guarantee his survival--has been his savior.  He does not know that just beyond the range of his rifle a group of humans has gathered, determined that this madman with the rifle shall not survive long enough to continue to endanger everyone and everything in the woods.

The Drive for American Totalitarian Dominance of the International Order

The yen for total dominance latent in the totalitarian mind becomes livelier with an increase in power and springs fully to life as the belief is born that one has at last acquired sufficient coercive power to dispense with politics, and move straight to the heart of the matter: complete dominance.

Project for a New American Century

In 1997, pundit William Kristol and pundit-historian Robert Kagan built a think tank, Project for a New American Century (PNAC), in Washington DC.  The name proclaimed a core "neoconservative" belief: that the global 21st century should belong to America.  The think tank produced its Founding Statement of Principles on June 3, 1997, which reads, in part:

As the 20th century draws to a close, the United States stands as the world's preeminent power. Having led the West to victory in the Cold War, America faces an opportunity and a challenge: Does the United States have the vision to build upon the achievements of past decades? Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests?

The document was signed by 25 people, including some of the most public and ardent architects and proponents of the unprovoked invasion of Iraq six years later: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul   Wolfowitz...

About six months later, on January 26, 1998, the PNAC sent a letter to President Clinton asking him to "remov[e] Saddam Hussein and his regime from power."  Getting rid of Hussein and the Iraqi regime was necessary, according to the PNAC, because Hussein was "almost certain... to [eventually] acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction."  In a true expression of the totalitarian view of security, the PNAC informed President Clinton, "The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility [italics added for emphasis] that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction."

In this way the totalitarian mind refuses to accept a necessary condition of human existence: uncertainty, and in its attempted evasion of reality finds its belief that power--military power--brings certainty.

The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002

This belief that the United States had acquired the condition of dominant coercive power is suggested in the opening sentence of the George W Bush administration document, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002, signed by George W. Bush on September 17, 2002, a little more than a year after 9/11, and about six months before the unprovoked American invasion of Iraq.

"The United States possesses unprecedented— and unequaled—strength and influence in the world."

Neoconservatives ["Neoconservative" is a misnomer, since there is nothing new or conservative about their beliefs, motivations and objectives.  American foreign policy neoconservatives are more accurately labeled American Aspiring Global Totalitarians (AAGT.)] built from this premise of dominant American power a strategy for global threat-elimination, primarily through an overwhelming means of violence--means that would serve as both direct counter-terrorism, and indirectly as terrorism serving as counter-terrorism.

"To defeat this threat [global terrorism] we must make use of every tool in our arsenal—military power, better homeland defenses, law enforcement, intelligence, and vigorous efforts to cut off terrorist financing... and, as a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed [italics and underlining added for emphasis].  We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best.  [Had AAGTs so simplified their geopolitical views that they really saw these as the only alternatives?  Preventive strikes versus "Hoping for the best?"]  So we must be prepared to defeat our enemies’ plans, using the best intelligence and proceeding with deliberation  [Actually, the requirement for rapid if not immediate responses precluded deliberation from being a real part of the doctrine outlined in the 2002 National Security document or Dick Cheney's One Percent Doctrine.]  History will judge harshly those who saw this coming danger but failed to act.  In the new world we have entered, the only [italics added for emphasis] path to peace and security is the path of action."

Note the lack of modifying adjective on the term, "action."  How about at least one?  How about "wise?"  No--if you believed as neoconservatives, AAGTs, did--that the will to action was all that was missing from America's proper exercise of its military muscle, you did not want to publicly qualify the concept of American international action in any way because that would indicate not prudence, or circumspection, or intelligence, but lack of will and resolve, which for AAGTs had been enervating American foreign policy since the end of the war in Vietnam.  For the AAGTs, everything was negative that impeded the exercise of America's relatively recently acquired military super-dominance.

Nascent AAGT ideas of American international hyper-dominance predicated on military might preceded the fall of the Soviet Union, but the existence of the opposing nuclear-armed superpower effectively smothered such ideas.  And the ideas re-erupted and re-smothered many times before the constraining reality of the Soviet Union was finally removed.  Some saw a new opportunity for humanity in the end of the Cold War.  Some saw a New World Order.  Some saw a Hegelian end of history.  Few saw the totalitarian impulse stirring to life again in the minds of the AAGTs, and the recurring rebirth of the idea that overwhelming American military dominance of international relations was the most effective means to provide for American national security and the other AAGT-perceived inherent benefits of total American control of "the New World Order."

To summarize the AAGT conception of the eventual rewards of American hyper-dominance of international relations:  The unpleasant uncertainty of complicated international politics is eliminated--you will always get your way. And what exactly would be the great simplifier of American national security and international relations?  Violence and the threat of violence. For the totalitarian mind seeking absolute control of its environment--and terrified of the multitude of variables that may contain danger--simplification promises security.  As the choice of whether to use one's capability of decisive violence seems to have the binary power of allowing continued existence or discontinuing that existence--the control of existence--the totalitarian mind sees violence as the great simplifier: yes/no; existence/non-existence--illustrated by the thought,  A certain person is a problem--when you no longer have that person you no longer have that problem.

The American National Security Strategy document promulgated by the George W. Bush administration in September 2002 speaks of coalitions: The US would "Strengthen alliances"; "Work with others"; "Develop agendas for cooperative action."  But permeating the document is the subtext of all of these themes: the American announcement of its own global hegemony and its intention to use it to an extreme it had never before had the will to do.  A more accurate title of the document would be, America's Global Hegemony and a National Security Strategy Appropriate to that Fact.

In Chapter 2 of the document, titled Champion Aspirations for Human Dignity, the United States announces to the world what all the people in all the nations of the world really want, which is a government very much like the American government.  "No nation owns these aspirations, [to liberty and justice] and no nation is exempt [from the requirement to serve these aspirations within its borders.]"

 

America must stand firmly for the nonnegotiable demands [italics added for emphasis] of human dignity: the rule of law; limits on the absolute power of the state; free speech; freedom of worship; equal justice; respect for women; religious and ethnic tolerance; and respect for private property.

 

Russia, China and any other state with a government insufficiently like America's (unless they are American allies in which case the "nonnegotiable demands" do not apply) are put on notice that they must change their forms of government to comply with American standards.  Appearing in the same document with the American announcement of its hegemonic power and its eagerness to use such power, these demands must have been perceived in Moscow and Beijing as an aggressive and insufferable affront.  Ominously, the announcement continues,

 

Embodying lessons from our past and using the opportunity [provided by our recently acquired global hegemony] we have today, the national security strategy of the United States must start from these core beliefs and look outward for possibilities to expand liberty (italics added for emphasis.)

 

Cloaking its plans for violence in idealistic sanctimony, the George W. Bush administration all but announces its determination to invade Iraq for the dual purpose of acting against an emerging threat before it is fully-formed, and expanding liberty.  Six months after George W. Bush signed the 2002 National Security Strategy document the United States invaded Iraq, where it found [To AAGT surprise?] that an "emerging threat" was not even partly-formed, and where, despite AAGT expectations, the United States was not greeted as a liberator, and as of 2018 the word liberty probably tastes for most Iraqis like a mouth full of dust.

 

In Chapter 3 of the document, titled: Strengthen Alliances to Defeat Global Terrorism and Work to Prevent Attacks Against Us and Our Friends, the AAGTs who wrote the 2002 National Security Strategy document reveal their singular and idiosyncratic understanding of the meaning of the term sovereignty of nations: In general, the accepted meaning of state sovereignty is that all states have sole authority for governance within their borders and of their international relations.  However, the AAGTs wrote, "We will disrupt and destroy terrorist organizations by...denying further sponsorship, support, and sanctuary to terrorists by convincing or compelling [italics added for emphasis] states to accept their sovereign responsibilities."  In other words, AAGTs recognize the sovereign responsibilities of other states as determined by AAGTs, but do not recognize the other half of the meaning of state sovereignty which is that states choose their own actions without external compulsion.

 

In Chapter 5, titled, Prevent Our Enemies from Threatening Us, Our Allies, and Our Friends  with Weapons of Mass Destruction, the Cheney Doctrine is restated:

 

The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction—and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack.

 

Chapter 8, titled, Develop Agendas for Cooperative Action with the Other Main Centers of Global Power, begins with a quote from a George W. Bush speech delivered at West Point on June 1, 2002: “We have our best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the 17th century to build a world where the great powers compete in peace instead of prepare for war.”  However, Chapter 9, titled Transform America’s National Security Institutions to Meet the Challenges and Opportunities of the Twenty-First Century, makes clear that the global peace envisioned by AAGTs is not of a noisy congress of international political equals, but an eerily quiet Pax Americana predicated on American military superiority so overwhelming that rival states are no longer even tempted to think of resisting American global rule:

 

It is time to reaffirm the essential role of American military strength. We must build and maintain our defenses beyond challenge. Our military’s highest priority is to defend the United States. To do so effectively, our military must:

 

• assure our allies and friends;

• dissuade future military competition;

• deter threats against U.S. interests, allies, and

friends; and

• decisively defeat any adversary if deterrence

fails.

 

Some First AAGT Responses to the 9/11 Attacks

According to George Packer, writing in his 2005 book, The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq, "Within minutes of fleeing his office at the devastated Pentagon, [on September 11, 2001, prominent AAGT Paul] Wolfowitz told aides that he suspected Iraqi involvement in the attacks."  On that date no evidence existed that Iraq was involved in the attacks, and since that date no evidence has been uncovered that Iraq was involved in the attacks.  Why did Wolfowitz claim to suspect Iraqi involvement?  His suspicion could not have been based on valid evidence.

According to Packer's book, the day after 9/11 President George W. Bush asked his counterterrorism team to investigate Iraqi links. "See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way... I want to know any shred."  This despite the fact that the president had received a Presidential Daily Brief from the CIA on August 6, 2001 titled Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US, that had mentioned an uncorroborated report that "Bin Laden wanted to hijack a US aircraft...to gain the release of...US held extremists."  Also noteworthy is that Al-Qaeda under Bin Laden's direction had already carried out at least six terrorist attacks against US targets including the World Trade Center; the American guided missile destroyer, USS Cole; and US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Tanzania.  Iraq had never attempted a terrorist attack on the United States.

Richard Perle, prominent AAGT, and chairman of the Defense Policy Board in the George W. Bush administration from 2001 to 2003, told CIA director George Tenet shortly after 9/11, “Iraq has to pay a price for [these attacks]. They bear responsibility.”  Tenet, who at that moment already had the evidence that Al-Qaeda acting under Bin Laden's direction had carried out the attacks, has indicated that he was bewildered by Perle's claim.

Representative Samples of AAGT Responses to the Calamitous and Ghastly Failure of AAGT Adventurism in Iraq

Dick Cheney told Politico in 2014, "I look back on it now, [the invasion of Iraq] was absolutely the right thing to do."

Paul Wolfowitz, who was the first to advise President Bush, just days after 9/11, to seek regime-change in Iraq, continues to claim to believe that the decision to invade Iraq was right, but was botched in its execution.  Wolfowitz transfers blame for the debacle onto others and absolves himself of responsibility for the results of the invasion he had so robustly advocated.  Exhibiting an extraordinary patience with his own political judgment that he has never been willing to extend to others, Wolfowitz has stated, “We still don’t know how all this is all going to end.  With the Korean War , it is amazing how different Korea looks after 60 years than it looked after 10 or even 30.”

Richard Perle, another prominent AAGT who for years prior to 9/11 and for a year afterward had been a leading advocate for regime-change in Iraq, was asked the following question in a March 20, 2013, NPR interview:

Q: Ten years later, nearly 5,000 Americans troops dead, thousands more with wounds, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead or wounded; when you think about this, was it worth it?

A: I've got to say I think that is not a reasonable question. What we did at the time was done in the belief that it was necessary to protect this nation. You can't a decade later go back and say, well, we shouldn't have done that.

What Richard Perle means to say here, but he is too modest to enunciate it clearly, is that although the AAGTs gamed the evidence used to justify the invasion of Iraq, propagandized and cheer-led America into its worst foreign policy disaster, their heart was in the right place, so no one will ever have the right to ask them if it was worth it.  If you question whether AAGT hearts were actually in the right place, and whether instead the invasion of Iraq was really meant to be the first act toward the establishment of American global totalitarian rule, you are way off base and should be ashamed of yourself.

How is the "Neoconservative" Ideology of American Global Totalitarianism Undead?

American Global Totalitarianism is undead because it was never intellectually alive in the first place.  Although it once rose up and led America zombie-like into an unprovoked attack on Iraq, it can never be killed because its intellectual content, like a zombie's heart--is not functional, but merely a placeholder, and even if its heart--its flimsy argument--is destroyed in a confrontation with reality, as it was in the Iraq War, this undead ideology, attended by the AAGTs, will creep back into its crypt for awhile, or go to sleep in a think tank somewhere, but it will be back whenever it is called to serve the totalitarian drive for global power and dominance.

AAGT ideology begins with strong, highly dubious assumptions the most important of which is that violence is the first and best means to achieve global democracy, liberty, justice and peace.  Formulated by tiny men educated in some of the most prestigious east coast American universities, AAGT ideology was never alive, never referred seriously to the evidence, never attempted to make a serious, scientific argument, but was undead at its inception, animated not by the life of intelligence, but by arrogant, bold assumptions leading to the conclusion that robust American employment of global violence would be the greatest force for good in the world.

Evidence indicates that AAGTs at least on some level have always understood that their ideology had little intellectual content, but nevertheless in their deeply immature fantasies believed that the salutary results of American violence employed for the purposes of reshaping the world according to American designs would redeem the empty ideology.  As the George W. Bush administration/AAGT document, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002, states, "The only path to peace and security is the path of action."  By "action," they meant violence.

We can now see that the AAGTs probably never took their own intellectual argument (such as it is) seriously because, since the calamitous results of the invasion have become obvious to nearly everyone, no AAGT has attempted to make an intellectual defense of the ideology, or admitted that its premises were in any way wrong, but, apart from Dick Cheney who simply shuts down discussion of what went wrong by claiming that he believes invading Iraq was the right thing to do, AAGTs have lied, distracted, lied, obfuscated, shifted blame to others, lied, attempted to force large portions of the history of the Iraq War down the memory hole, and lied.  None of these unserious, immature political operatives and propagandists have shown that they feel--or even have the capacity to feel-- any personal responsibility for the calamitous and ghastly results of the Iraq War, even though the historical facts make clear that without the assiduous, concerted, coordinated efforts of the AAGTs there would have been no second invasion of Iraq.

Ironically, by not attempting to publicly defend AAGT ideology and expose it to public controversy following the obviously disastrous results of the Iraq War, the AAGTs have protected it--by making it even easier for Americans--who have difficulty vividly remembering even recent historical events--to gently drop the whole thing down the memory hole--and turn away with a sigh.   Neoconservatism has slunk off to walk the Earth another day.

Now, 15 years after the unprovoked invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush is viewed favorably by 61% of the American public; AAGTs are ensconced comfortably once again in their various think tanks [A misnomer when applied to institutions where, it is said, neoconservatives think.], and on television as talking heads; William Kristol and David Frum are regulars on MSNBC, the ostensibly "liberal," political news channel.  No perpetrator of the 2003 invasion of Iraq has paid a public price, and because none of them has a conscience, none has paid a private price.