From Executive Overreach to Undeclared Wars, We Are Living in the World Cheney Made

Dick Cheney has died, according to reports Tuesday morning, at the age of 84.

A formidable White House and defense department aide (under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford) who left to head an equally formidable Texas-based oil company (with vast federal contracts) and then back in Washington as vice president to George W. Bush, Cheney is probably the most symbolic figure of the failure of the post-9/11 wars. In particular, the Iraq War. It was his amassed power and special cadre of operators known as neoconservatives inside the Old Executive Office building and E Ring at the Pentagon, who with strategic treachery dominated the politics and intelligence necessary to march Washington into the invasion of 2003 and to proliferate a Global War on Terror that lasted well beyond his tenure in office.

By all accounts it was his midwifed lies over WMDs that got us there, followed by the blunders (not anticipating the Iraqi insurgency); the loss of life (millions); the cost to our treasury; and the emergence of a new warfare marked by extrajudicial killing, torture, secrecy, and endless war that transformed American society and politics, perhaps forever.

For it was the exploitation of American grief, fear, and patriotism after 9/11 to pursue neoconservative wars in the Middle East that zapped the people's faith in government institutions. It pretty much destroyed the Republican Party and gave rise to populist movements on both sides of the aisle. It created a generation of veterans harboring more mistrust in elites and Washington than even the Vietnam War era. On the other end of the spectrum, it unleashed mercenary warfare, killer drones, civil wars, and police powers in the United States that have only served make the people less free and more fearful of their government. Thanks in part to Dick Cheney, the Executive, i.e. the president, has more power than ever—to bomb, detain, and "decapitate" any government leader he does not like.

There will be many obituaries written for Dick Cheney, all will be scarred with his role in the Iraq War. For a time he was a very, very powerful man and then he went away to retire and help raise his grandchildren. How many hundreds of thousands of American families were unable to do the same, plagued by death, disease, mental injuries, sterility, divorce, addiction, suicide—because of a war that he so relentlessly pushed but should never have been.

Cheney's Quest for More Executive Power and 'Machtpolitik'

Cheney first came to national prominence when he served as White House chief of staff (1975-77) to President Gerald Ford. In that position, he worked closely with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to counter and eventually derail Henry Kissinger's strategy of "detente" with the Soviet Union.

In that initiative, Cheney and Rumsfeld also worked closely with the Washington-based leaders of the emergent neoconservative movement, a number of them, including Richard Perle and Elliott Abrams, working in the office of Washington State Democratic Senator and Senate Armed Services Chairman Henry "Scoop" Jackson, to promote, among other things, Jewish emigration to Israel and in persuading Ford to convene an ultra-hawkish "Team B" outside the intelligence community to hype the alleged military threat posed by Moscow.

Their mutual interest in pursuing a massive US arms buildup and an aggressive foreign policy more generally would form the basis of an alliance between the aggressive nationalism and Machtpolitik of Cheney and Rumsfeld on the one hand, and the Israel-centered neoconservatives on the other that created the infamous Project for the New American Century in 1998 and ultimately became dominant in the post-9/11 "global war on terror" (GWOT) and the Iraq invasion for which he always remained unrepentant.

In the 1980s, Cheney, who chafed at the post-Watergate restrictions on presidential power, particularly regarding foreign policy, served as Wyoming’s single congressman in the House of Representatives where he became a staunch and powerful defender both of Ronald Reagan’s anti-Soviet policies and of the “Reagan Doctrine” of rolling back leftist regimes and movements in the Global South, notably in Central America and southern Africa. A staunch defender of the protagonists of what became the Iran-Contra scandal, a secret operation to sell weapons to Iran and use the proceeds to fund the Nicaraguan contras (for whom Congress had prohibited any US assistance), he later prevailed on President George H.W. Bush, for whom he served as defense secretary, to issue pardons to those, like Abrams, convicted as a result of the affair.

In the wake of the first Gulf War, Cheney commissioned his undersecretary of defense for policy, Paul Wolfowitz, to draft a long-term US strategy, called the Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), whose global ambitions, when leaked to the Washington Post, provoked a flurry of controversy about the future US role in the world.

Among other things, the draft called for Washington to maintain permanent military dominance of virtually all of Eurasia to be achieved by “deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role” and by preempting, using whatever means necessary, states believed to be developing weapons of mass destruction. It foretold a world in which US military intervention would become a “constant fixture” of the geopolitical landscape, and Washington would act as the ultimate guarantor of international peace and security.

One of the document’s principal drafters was I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who would later become Vice President Cheney’s highly effective chief of staff and national security adviser during George W. Bush’s first term until he was indicted for perjury.

The draft DPG would essentially become the template for what became in 1997 the Project for New American Century, a letterhead organization launched by neoconservatives Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan that in some ways formalized the coalition of Machtpolitikers like Cheney, Rumsfeld, and John Bolton; pro-Israel neoconservatives like Perle, Abrams, Libby, Eliot Cohen, and Frank Gaffney; and Christian Zionists, such as Gary Bauer and William Bennett.

PNAC subsequently published a series of hawkish statements and open letters demanding substantial increases in the US defense budget and stronger US action against perceived adversaries, notably Iraq, Iran, and China. Led by Cheney as vice president and Rumsfeld as defense secretary, many PNAC associates, particularly neoconservatives, took key posts in the George W. Bush administration in 2001, while PNAC became the leading group outside the administration banging the drum for invading Iraq and prosecuting the “global war on terror.” A legacy that leads directly to the current moment where Cheney's hard won Executive powers rule over a landscape of unauthorized US military interventions and undeclared wars all over the globe.