The Iraq war wasn’t conceived out of a desire to spread democracy around the world. Those justifications came later. It was born out of what Mazaar calls the “demonstration effect:” an effort to display one’s martial and military prowess. Every other argument was subordinated to that original effort to demonstrate American supremacy. That’s how conservatives who had scoffed at nation-building only months earlier were suddenly roped into the greatest foreign policy disaster in American history. After Al Qaeda struck, the administration’s priority was simply—in Bush’s words—to “kick their ass.”
Cheney was at the forefront. “From day one George Bush made clear he wanted me to help govern,” Cheney wrote in his memoirs. He began enunciating the “one percent doctrine,” which tossed aside notions of caution, prudence, and pragmatism. “If there’s a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda” get nuclear weapons, “we have to treat it as a certainty.” “9/11 changed everything,” he wrote, again and again. One might say that 9/11 scrambled his mind. The one percent doctrine became his most important legacy. In the past, Cheney thought that technology favored America using precise attacks. But now, technological advances seemed to make America more vulnerable, requiring much more aggressive projection of power around the world to preempt threats. The old arguments for restraint seemed anachronistic.
During the years when Cheney was the number one villain of progressives, his doctrine was reshaping the national security bureaucracies. He lost on torture, at least where US agencies were directly involved. But he won on information collection. Thereafter, more surveillance was always needed. In 2008, the Republicans had lost control of Congress and the anti-war left was at its high-water mark. The administration proposed a FISA amendment that expanded surveillance powers and protected telecommunications companies that had cooperated with the Bush Administration from lawsuits. A junior senator switched his vote to ensure it passed; his name was Barack Obama.
Like many conservatives, Cheney saw Obama as an embodiment of the anti-imperialist New Left, the bane of his youth, going on apology tours and withdrawing American forces around the world. But Cheney was fighting phantoms. Obama was doing no such thing. He ended no alliance or security guarantee. He increased troop deployments abroad in Europe, and doubled down on Bush’s counter-terrorism strategy. Cheney railed against Obama’s contempt for a strong military, but as secretary of defense, he had presided over a much larger defence drawdown than Obama ever did.