Question: Was the George W. Bush administration's foreign policy in the Arab world an example of totalitarianism? 

Context articles: Totalitarianism
Jordan Page
Stephen Zunes
John Feffer
Alex Moens
Ira Chernus
State of Denial
Terror and Liberalism
Neoconservatism
The Vulcans

Totalitarianism is a political system in which the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible.
 A distinctive feature of totalitarian governments is an "elaborate ideology, a set of ideas that gives meaning and direction to the whole society".
Jordan Page is an American singer-songwriter and musician.
 He began writing music with a political bent during the Bush administration, in December 2006.
 Some of his early music is critical of United States foreign policy, especially the interventionism of the Bush administration.
 Page's music instead advocates a policy of peace and non-interventionism.
 His song "War Machine" specifically alludes to the military–industrial complex.
 Page's music also supports civil liberties, which are viewed in some of his songs as threatened and eroding.
 Page and his music have been embraced by libertarians, and Page has performed at many libertarian and liberty-oriented events, including some in support of Ron Paul's 2008 presidential campaign and 2012 presidential campaign.
Stephen Zunes (born 1956) is an American international relations scholar specializing in the Middle Eastern politics, U.S. foreign policy, and strategic nonviolent action.
 He is known internationally as a leading critic of United States policy in the Middle East, particularly under the George W. Bush Administration, and an analyst of nonviolent civil insurrections against autocratic regimes.
John Feffer is an author and currently co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies.
 He is a fellow at the Open Society Foundations.
 His books include "Crusade 2.0", (City Lights, 2012), a description of contemporary attacks on Islam, "North Korea/South Korea: US Policy and the Korean Peninsula", a description of current U.S. policy towards Korea and its limitations, "Power Trip", a narrative of American unilateralism during the George W. Bush administration, and "Living in Hope", a description of creative responses by local communities to the challenges of globalization.
Alexander Moens (born 1959) is a professor of Political Science at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and a Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute in the Centre for Canadian-American Relations.
 He teaches American Foreign Policy and the Political and Security Relations between Europe and North America.
 He is the author of "The Foreign Policy of George W. Bush: Values, Strategy, Loyalty" (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing, November 2004) as well as "Foreign Policy Under Carter" (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990).
Ira Chernus (born October 29, 1946) is a journalist, author, and Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
 He received his Ph.D. in Religion from Temple University, specializing in the history of rabbinic Judaism.
 His academic writing now focuses on the foreign policy of US presidents.
 He has published books on Dwight Eisenhower and George W. Bush and is currently writing a book on Franklin D. Roosevelt.
 As a journalist, he has written extensively on peace, war, foreign policy, and nationalism in the United States, as well as the Israel-Palestine conflict and U.S. Middle East policy.
 He has written often for the Huffington Post, CommonDreams, TomDispatch, AlterNet, Truthout, Foreign Policy In Focus, and Religion Dispatches.
 In 2012 he started a new blog, MythicAmerica.us, and published online MythicAmerica: Essays.
 His recent writings on Israel, Palestine, and the U.S. are also collected on a separate blog.
 Many of his earlier writings can be found on his University of Colorado website.
 He has lectured in Lebanon, Finland, Australia, and Canada, as well as extensively throughout the United States.
State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III (ISBN  ) is a book by Bob Woodward, originally due to be published October 2, 2006 (but unexpectedly released two days early by the publisher due to demand), that examines how the George W. Bush administration managed the Iraq War after the 2003 invasion.
 It follows Woodward's previous books on the Bush administration, "Bush at War" and "Plan of Attack".
 Based on interviews with a number of people in the Bush administration (although not with George W. Bush himself), the book makes a number of allegations about the administration.
Terror and Liberalism is a non-fiction book by American political philosopher and writer Paul Berman.
 He published the work through W. W. Norton & Company in April 2003.
 Berman asserts that modern Islamist groups such as al Qaeda share fundamental ideological elements with fascism and other 20th-century Western totalitarian movements, and he defends an assertive approach to root out this extremist thinking across the world.
 He details the appeal of violent terror, going back to Albert Camus' work "The Rebel", first published in 1951.
 Berman hypothesizes that the spread of democracy in the Arab world, while highly difficult and involving a long struggle, is a fundamentally just cause, and he writes in support of the George W. Bush administration's foreign policies while also faulting President Bush for credibility problems and incompetence.
Neoconservatism (commonly shortened to neocon) is a political movement born in the United States during the 1960s among conservative-leaning Democrats who became disenchanted with the party's foreign policy.
 Many of its adherents became politically famous during the Republican presidential administrations of the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.
 Neoconservatives peaked in influence during the administration of George W. Bush, when they played a major role in promoting and planning the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
 Prominent neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration included Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle and Paul Bremer.
 Senior officials Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, while not identifying as neoconservatives, listened closely to neoconservative advisers regarding foreign policy, especially the defense of Israel and the promotion of American influence in the Middle East.
The Vulcans is a nickname used to refer to Republican Presidential candidate George W. Bush's foreign policy advisory team assembled to brief him prior to the 2000 US presidential election.
 The Vulcans were led by Condoleezza Rice and included Richard Armitage, Robert Blackwill, Stephen Hadley, Richard Perle, Dov S. Zakheim, Robert Zoellick and Paul Wolfowitz, and Wolfowitz protégé, Scooter Libby.
 Other key campaign figures including Dick Cheney, George P. Shultz and Colin Powell were also closely associated with the group, but were never actually members.
 During the campaign, Bush sought to deflect questions about his own lack of foreign policy experience by pointing to this group of experienced advisers.
 After the election, all the members of the team received key positions within the new Bush administration.