Richard Bruce Cheney, the 46th vice president of the United States, is dead at 84. He broke with the Republican Party at the end of his life and voted for Kamala Harris, perhaps aware of the way in which his own politics had turned the country to the far right. Long before Trump, Cheney purveyed fairy tales to a gullible public to underpin major policy initiatives, charging the secular socialist Arab nationalist Baath Party of Iraq with having been a collaborator with the far-right fundamentalist terrorist organization, al-Qaeda, in the 9/11 attacks. He made that same Baathist Iraq into a bogeyman only two years from blowing up an atomic bomb (Iraq did not have an actively nuclear weapons program). He sent hundreds of thousands of Americans invade and occupy a major Middle Eastern country. Some 4,492 were killed, and 100,000 wounded, some 10,000 with life-altering injuries. Domestically, police were militarized as the Bush administration donated weapons, kevlar, troop transport vehicles to departments.
Why he did all this is still not entirely clear, but he came back into government from being the CEO of Halliburton, an oil services company, and my guess is that Cheney wanted to lift the US and UN boycott on Iraq to put its oil back on the market. If this motivation was behind his warmongering, it worked. Iraq is pumping 4.5 million barrels a day, and gasoline would be much more expensive without that. The United States could have treated al-Qaeda, a small terrorist organization, as a police matter. Instead, Cheney mired the country in major wars that coarsened its moral fiber, created resentments and fueled a vicious Islamophobia. To some extent, MAGA came out of this maelstrom, imitating the corporate-populist-jingoist discourse and war-by-fairy-tale that Cheney perfected.
One of Cheney’s pretexts for the Iraq War was that the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein had purchased uranium for enrichment purposes from the African country of Niger. This story was another fairy tale, pushed by foreign intelligence agencies, for which Cheney fell or which he was glad to use for his purposes. My late friend Joseph Wilson IV, former acting ambassador in Baghdad, wrote an op ed about his own visit to Niger, where he investigated and found the allegation of Iraqi uranium purchases completely implausible and the alleged documents presented by those favoring this story to have been forged. Wilson began an avalanche of skepticism toward the basis for the Iraq War.
In a bid to discredit Wilson, Cheney and his team tried to tip the Washington press corps that his wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA operative. I suppose they were hinting around that the CIA was full of half-hearted moles who opposed the Iraq War and that they used Plame to set Wilson up to do false propaganda against it. Unfortunately for the Cheney team, their role became public, and Cheney aide Scooter Libby was ultimately convicted for the plot. The below essay at Salon, of which I present excerpts, was published when it was unclear whether anyone would be indicted for blowing Plame’s cover.
All the vice president’s men
The ideologues in Cheney’s inner circle drummed up a war. Now their zealotry is blowing up in their faces.
Published
( Salon ) – As Washington waits on pins and needles to see if special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald hands down indictments, the focus falls on Dick Cheney’s inner circle. This group, along with that surrounding Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made up what Colin Powell’s top aide, Lawrence Wilkerson, called “a cabal” that “on critical issues … made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.” Cheney is the first vice president to have had, in effect, his own personal National Security Council. This formidable and unprecedented rump foreign policy team, composed of radical hawks, played a key role in every aspect of the war on Iraq: planning for it, gathering “evidence” to justify it and punishing those who spoke out against it. It is not surprising that members of that team, and Cheney himself, have now also emerged as targets in Fitzgerald’s investigation of the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson to the press, along with Bush advisor Karl Rove.
Although the investigation has focused on Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a number of other Cheney staffers have been interviewed. Who are these shadowy policymakers who played such a major role in shaping the Bush administration’s foreign policy?
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Most of the members of Cheney’s inner circle were neoconservative ideologues, who combined hawkish American triumphalism with an obsession with Israel. This does not mean that the war was fought for Israel, although it is undeniable that Israeli concerns played an important role. The actual motivation behind the war was complex, and Cheney’s team was not the only one in the game. The Bush administration is a coalition of disparate forces — country club Republicans, realists, representatives of oil and other corporate interests, evangelicals, hardball political strategists, right-wing Catholics, and neoconservative Jews allied with Israel’s right-wing Likud party. Each group had its own rationale for going to war with Iraq.
Bush himself appears to have had an obsession with restoring family honor by avenging the slight to his father produced by Saddam’s remaining in office after the Gulf War. Cheney was interested in the benefits of a war to the oil industry, and to the military-industrial complex in general. It seems likely that the Iraq war, which produced billions in no-bid contracts for the company he headed in the late 1990s, saved Halliburton from bankruptcy. The evangelicals wanted to missionize Iraqis. Karl Rove wanted to turn Bush into a war president to ensure his reelection. The neoconservatives viewed Saddam’s Iraq as a short-term danger to Israel, and in the long term, they hoped that overthrowing the Iraqi Baath would transform the entire Middle East, rather as Kamal Ataturk, who abolished the offices of Ottoman emperor and Sunni caliph in the 1920s, had brought into being a relatively democratic Turkey that was allied with Israel. (This fantastic analogy was suggested by Princeton emeritus professor and leading neoconservative ideologue Bernard Lewis.) This transformationwould be beneficial to the long-term security of both the United States and Israel.
None of these rationales would have been acceptable across the board, or persuasive with Congress or the American public, so the various factions focused on the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately for them, this rationale was discovered to be a mirage. And in the course of trying to punish those who were pointing out that the emperor had no clothes — or, in this case, that the dictator had no weapons of mass destruction — Cheney and Bush’s underlings went too far. Ironically, their attempt to silence critics succeeded only in turning a harsh light on their own actions and motivations.
“Cheney Assembles Formidable Team,” marveled a Page One article in the Feb. 3, 2001, edition of the New York Times. It turns out that Cheney had 15 military and political advisors on foreign affairs, at a time when the president’s own National Security Council was being downsized. The number of aides who counseled Cheney on domestic issues was much smaller. In contrast, Al Gore had been advised by a single staffer on security affairs.
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The leader of the team was Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff. Libby had studied at Yale with Paul Wolfowitz, who brought him to Washington. He co-authored a hawkish policy document with Wolfowitz in the Department of Defense for its head, Dick Cheney, after the Gulf War in 1992. When it was leaked, it embarrassed the first President Bush. Libby was a founding member of the Project for a New American Century in 1997 during the Clinton years, when many neoconservatives were out of office. The PNAC attempted to use the Republican-dominated Congress to pressure Clinton to take a more belligerent stance toward Iraq, and it advocated significantly expanding military spending and using U.S. troops as “gendarmes” in the aftermath of wars to “shape” the international security environment.
Cheney was also a PNAC member, and his association with this group from 1997 signaled a shift from his earlier hard-nosed realism, as he allied himself with the neoconservatives, who dreamed of transforming other societies. The James Baker branch of the Republican Party had long been critical of Israel for causing trouble for the United States in the Middle East with its expansionist policies and unwillingness to stop the settlement of the West Bank, and Baker was well aware that the vast majority of American Jews do not vote Republican.
Although a staunch defender of Israel, Cheney at one time was at least on speaking terms with this wing of the Republican Party. (The sense of betrayal felt by his old colleagues was summed up by Bush I’s national security advisor Brent Scowcroft, who told the New Yorker he considered Cheney a friend, “But Dick Cheney I don’t know anymore.” As time went on, however, he increasingly chose to ally with neoconservatives and the Jewish right in the U.S. and Israel, accepting them as powerful allies and constituents for his vision of a post-Cold War world dominated by an unchallenged American hegemony that would be backed by a vast military-industrial establishment fed by U.S. tax dollars. He continually promised skeptical Jewish audiences that a democratic Iraq would benefit Israel. His choice of advisors when he became vice president demonstrated a pronounced preference for the neoconservatives.
But Cheney’s alliance with the neocons was probably driven more by his Manichaean, Cold War-inspired worldview — in which the U.S. battled an evil enemy — and his corporate ties, than by an obsession with Israel or remaking the Middle East. Islamist terror provided a new version of the Soviet “evil empire.” And the neocons’ dynamic foreign policy vision, their “liberalism with guns,” offered more opportunities for the military-industrial complex than did traditional Republican realism in a post-Soviet world, where peer states did not exist and no credible military threat menaced the U.S. Only a series of wars of conquest in the Middle East, dressed up as a “defense” against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, could hope to keep the Pentagon and the companies to which it outsourced in the gravy.
Such wars could no longer be fought in East Asia, given Chinese and North Korean nuclear capabilities, and there were no U.S. constituencies for such wars in most other parts of the world. The Middle East was the perfect arena for a renewed American militarism, given that the U.S. public held deep prejudices against the Arab-Muslim world, and, after Sept. 11, deeply feared it . . .
US Vice President Richard Cheney addresses personnel deployed with the US Air Force (USAF) 355th Air Expeditionary Group (AEG), at an undisclosed location in support of Operation ENDURING FREEDOM. Scene Camera Operator: TSGT Marvin Preston, USAF. Public Domain.
The New York Times reported on Oct. 24, 2005, that it was Cheney who told Libby that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA. White House chief of staff Karl Rove also learned of Plame’s identity, although it is not known how. Both of them shared the information with the press, including Matt Cooper of Time magazine, Robert Novak of CNN and Judith Miller of the New York Times. Their aim was to discredit Wilson in official Washington as a tool of CIA disinformation, someone determined to make the White House the fall guys in the intelligence scandal, so as to spare the Company criticism. Some have a dark suspicion that they may also have wished to disrupt the CIA unit on anti-proliferation, which continued to doubt the case they were making about the rogue Middle East states. When confronted by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, Libby and Rove seem to have claimed that they did not reveal the name of Valerie Plame Wilson. In fact, they had called her “Joe Wilson’s wife.” This denial, however, is strikingly disingenuous and unconvincing.
Clearly Cheney’s men had powerful domestic political reasons to try to destroy Wilson. But considering the larger geopolitical ambitions of the neocons in Cheney’s inner circle, and their combination of ignorance and arrogance, it could be argued that Iraq and Iraqi weapons were all along a mere pied-à-terre. Syria, Iran and the rest of the Middle East were in the cross hairs, and Wilson and Plame were getting in the way of the next projects.
With the war in Iraq a disaster, possible indictments looming and polls showing that 80 percent of Americans believe that revealing Plame’s identity was either illegal or unethical, those dreams of world domination have crumbled to dust.
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