The Cheney Candidate

by Rachel Morris

This Tuesday in New Hampshire, Rudy Giuliani gave a speech on terrorism that has already attracted attention for its retro (c. 2002) theme: that America is headed straight for another 9/11 if a Democrat wins the White House. “America will be safer with a Republican president,” Giuliani announced. Democrats, by contrast, would simply “wave the white flag.”

Those Democrats were quick to hit back. Barack Obama charged Giuliani with taking “the politics of fear to a new low.” Hillary Clinton’s office issued a less pithy statement: “There are people right now in the world, not just wishing us harm but actively planning and plotting to cause us harm. If the last six years of the Bush administration have taught us anything, it's that political rhetoric won't do anything to quell those threats.”

But the most disturbing thing about the speech wasn’t its style—although milking one’s 9/11 reputation for crass political gain is, obviously, despicable. It was the rationale that lies behind it. Giuliani’s speech was about as pure an expression of the Dick Cheney worldview as you're likely to find outside the inner recesses of the vice president's psychological bunker.

For instance: “If any Republican is elected president … we will remain on offense and will anticipate what [the terrorists] will do and try to stop them before they do it,” Giuliani said. Later, he added: “Never, ever again will this country ever be on defense waiting for [terrorists] to attack us if I have anything to say about it.”

This is precisely the logic that Cheney has deployed ever since 9/11, with catastrophic results for the country. In his book, The One-Percent Doctrine, Ron Suskind describes a meeting in which Cheney succinctly set out his new doctrine: “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. It’s about our response.” In a 2002 speech, Cheney pronounced that, “the risks of inaction are far greater than the risk of action.”

Since then, we’ve had the misfortune to become much better acquainted with the risks of action prompted by Cheney’s reckless theorizing. Iraq is the most obvious example of the perils of acting on threats without evidence or reason. But the same logic underpins the administration’s use of torture: although experts unanimously agree that the most effective interrogation method is the development of a relationship with the subject, the administration was convinced it didn’t have the time for that sort of thing, and instead pushed for information by any means necessary. Similarly, the preference for action over inaction has caused many men to be swept up in Afghanistan or Pakistan and detained in Guantanamo on flimsy or nonexistent grounds. This kind of thinking has also been used to justify the administration’s troubling use of executive power. The NSA wiretapping program, for instance, was founded on the notion that the erosion of civil liberties and the sidestepping of the law were small prices to pay for security.

It's astounding that any presidential candidate is prepared to embrace a way of thinking that has done so much damage. But Giuliani needs a way to compensate for his liberal views on abortion and homosexuality, and so he’s apparently hoping that the Cheney Doctrine will be a powerful weapon when wielded by “America's Mayor.” If his opponents are smart, however, Giuliani’s use of Cheney's logic should be about as effective as John McCain’s support for Bush’s war.

Rachel Morris is an editor of The Washington Monthly.