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Originally Posted by Elphaba
As Blumenthal points out, Cheney had fully circumvented CIA intelligence and produced and promoted his view through the same "group think" methodology that he used in selling the Iraq war. Please think about this. In Cheney's world, his foreign policy goals produce the intelligence necessary to support them. Intelligence needs to inform policy, not the other way around.
My personal belief is that Cheney is a dangerous ideologue.
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And we might as well lay out the key ideologies, which in my opinion are:
1. a blind faith in trickle-down Reaganomics, tax reductions for the upper income brackets, corporate tax rate reductions, government subsidies, deregulation; what Bush's dad referred to as "voodoo economics" and which no respected economist has ever advocated, including conservative economists;
2. a blind faith in the power of the U.S. military to force the will of the U.S. on other nations, through threat of war or outright invasion, war, and nation-building if necessary. And "will" is usually defined in terms of (1) above, namely in terms of U.S. corporate interests, whose well-being is equated to the well-being of the U.S. as a whole (and Bush probably needed to be re-educated in this area, reluctant as he has been in the past to endorse the value of nation-building);
3. this foreign policy ideology is accompanied by the unquestioned view that 2005 = 1939, i.e. the threats of islamofascism, China, and Iran are equated with the threats of Hitler and Japan pre WWII, and anybody who disagrees and advocates diplomacy is an "appeaser" (again Bush himself in the past has had trouble getting the message -- during the China spy plane incident he was respectful and apologetic, which probably infuriated Cheney);
4. complete intellectual inflexibility, to the point that all of these beliefs have become matters of unfalsifiable faith, leading to an "ends justify the means" ethic that has resulted in an attitude of civil war between the Administration and the CIA, when the CIA has often refused to provide Cheney with the propaganda necessary to rationalize an aggressive foreign policy stance.
I think that about covers it. And it's worth pointing out that Nixon was not anywhere near as extreme as Cheney when it came to foreign policy; Nixon in fact tended to prefer diplomacy and containment; if Nixon were president in 2000 he probably would have continued to contain Saddam.