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Opinion
From Executive Overreach to Undeclared Wars, We Are Living in the World Cheney Made
Dick Cheney midwifed the emergence of a new warfare marked by extrajudicial killing, torture, secrecy, and endless war that transformed American society and politics, perhaps forever.
Nov 04, 2025
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.
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Venezuela’s Oil, US-led Regime Change, and America’s Gangster Politics
The flimsy moral pretext today is the fight against narcotics, yet the real objective is to overthrow a sovereign government, and the collateral damage is the suffering of the Venezuelan people. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is.
Nov 04, 2025
The United States is dusting off its old regime-change playbook in Venezuela. Although the slogan has shifted from “restoring democracy” to “fighting narco-terrorists,” the objective remains the same, which is control of Venezuela’s oil. The methods followed by the US are familiar: sanctions that strangle the economy, threats of force, and a $50 million bounty on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as if this were the Wild West.
The US is addicted to war. With the renaming of the Department of War, a proposed Pentagon budget of $1.01 trillion, and more than 750 military bases across some 80 countries, this is not a nation pursuing peace. For the past two decades, Venezuela has been a persistent target of US regime change. The motive, which is clearly laid out by President Donald Trump, is the roughly 300 billion barrels of oil reserves beneath the Orinoco belt, the largest petroleum reserves on the planet.
In 2023, Trump openly stated: “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil… but now we're buying oil from Venezuela, so we're making a dictator very rich.” His words reveal the underlying logic of US foreign policy that has an utter disregard for sovereignty and instead favors the grabbing of other country’s resources. .
What’s underway today is a typical US-led regime-change operation dressed up in the language of anti-drug interdiction. The US has amassed thousands of troops, warships, and aircraft in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. The president has boastfully authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations inside Venezuela.
The calls by the US government for escalation reflect a reckless disregard for Venezuela’s sovereignty, international law, and human life.
On October 26, 2025, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) went on national television to defend recent US military strikes on Venezuelan vessels and to say land strikes inside Venezuela and Colombia are a “real possibility.” Florida Sen. Rick Scott, in the same news cycle, mused that if he were Nicolás Maduro he’d “head to Russia or China right now.” These senators aim to normalize the idea that Washington decides who governs Venezuela and what happens to its oil. Remember that Graham similarly champions the US fighting Russia in Ukraine to secure the $10 trillion of mineral wealth that Graham fatuously claims are available for the US to grab.
Nor are Trump’s moves a new story vis-à-vis Venezuela. For more than 20 years, successive US administrations have tried to submit Venezuela’s internal politics to Washington’s will. In April 2002, a short-lived military coup briefly ousted then-President Hugo Chávez. The CIA knew the details of the coup in advance, and the US immediately recognized the new government. In the end, Chávez retook power. Yet the US did not end its support for regime change.
In March 2015, Barack Obama codified a remarkable legal fiction. Obama signed Executive Order 13692, declaring Venezuela’s internal political situation an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to US national security to trigger US economic sanctions. That move set the stage for escalating coercion by the US. The White House has maintained that claim of a US “national emergency” ever since. Trump added increasingly draconian economic sanctions during his first term. Astoundingly, in January 2019, Trump declared Juan Guaidó, then an opposition figure, to be Venezuela’s “interim president,” as if Trump could simply name a new Venezuelan president. This tragicomedy of the US eventually fell to pieces in 2023, when the US dropped this failed and ludicrous gambit.
The US is now starting a new chapter of resource grabbing. Trump has long been vocal about “keeping the oil.” In 2019, when discussing Syria, President Trump said “We are keeping the oil, we have the oil, the oil is secure, we left troops behind only for the oil.” To those in doubt, US troops are still in the northeast of Syria today, occupying the oil fields. Earlier in 2016, on Iraq’s oil, Trump said, “I was saying this constantly and consistently to whoever would listen, I said keep the oil, keep the oil, keep the oil, don’t let somebody else get it.”
Now, with fresh military strikes on Venezuela vessels and open talk of land attacks, the administration is invoking narcotics to justify regime change. Yet Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter expressly prohibits “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” No US theory of “cartel wars” remotely justifies coercive regime change.
Even before the military strikes, US coercive sanctions have functioned as a siege engine. Obama built the sanctions framework in 2015, and Trump further weaponized it to topple Maduro. The claim was that “maximum pressure” would empower Venezuelans. In practice, the sanctions have caused widespread suffering. As economist and renowned sanctions expert Francisco Rodríguez found in his study of the “Human Consequences of Economic Sanctions,” the result of the coercive US measures has been a catastrophic decline in Venezuelan living standards, starkly worsening health and nutrition, and dire harm to vulnerable populations.
The flimsy moral pretext today is the fight against narcotics, yet the real objective is to overthrow a sovereign government, and the collateral damage is the suffering of the Venezuelan people. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. The US has repeatedly undertaken regime-change operations in pursuit of oil, uranium, banana plantations, pipeline routes, and other resources: Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Congo (1960), Chile (1973), Iraq (2003), Haiti (2004), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and Ukraine (2014), just to name a few such cases. Now Venezuela is on the block.
In her brilliant book Covert Regime Change (2017), Professor Lindsay O’Rourke details the machinations, blowbacks, and disasters of no fewer than 64 US covert regime-change operations during the years 1947-1989! She focused on this earlier period because many key documents for that era have by now been declassified. Tragically, the pattern of a US foreign policy based on covert (and not-so-covert) regime-change operations continues to this day.
The calls by the US government for escalation reflect a reckless disregard for Venezuela’s sovereignty, international law, and human life. A war against Venezuela would be a war that Americans do not want, against a country that has not threatened or attacked the US, and on legal grounds that would fail a first-year law student. Bombing vessels, ports, refineries, or soldiers is not a show of strength. It is the epitome of gangsterism.
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Stormtroopers in Suburbia
Chicago is hundreds of miles from Canada and 1,500 miles from Mexico, but US Customs and Border Patrol turned my peaceful suburb upside down on Halloween.
Nov 04, 2025
It can’t happen here.
I live in a quiet, affluent suburb just north of Chicago. Our house is on a brick street, surrounded by well-maintained homes with manicured lawns.
On Halloween day, leaves from 100-year-old oak and maple trees were turning yellow, amber, red, and orange. Landscapers with lawnmowers, leaf blowers, and rakes had begun annual fall cleanups. The setting resembled a Normal Rockwell painting.
As an attorney, I’m trained to make distinctions. A legal precedent that otherwise seems problematic can become irrelevant if the advocate can persuade the court to distinguish it. “The facts of that case are distinguishable from this one, your Honor” is every litigator’s rhetorical tool.
But that skill is fraught with dangerous traps. Distinctions in the service of selective perception and confirmation bias can facilitate complacency.
It Can’t Happen Here
I’ve followed President Donald Trump’s deployment of the military on America’s streets. I watched the Los Angeles mobilization. The chaos and violence was and is disturbing, to say the least. But California is distinguishable from Chicago. For starters, it’s 2,000 miles away.
That can’t happen here.
When Trump sent troops into Washington, DC, that was distinguishable too. DC is a special situation where the federal government has unique powers.
Portland? Again, it’s thousands of miles away.
That can’t happen here. Besides, I had faith that the courts would keep Trump’s troops from running amok.
It Can Happen Here
Before Trump moved his fight to Chicago, he posted ominously: “I love the smell of deportations in the morning… Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”
He wasn’t kidding. Three weeks later, a Black Hawk helicopter circled overhead as hundreds of armed officers raided an apartment building below. The assault occurred about 25 miles from my home. But the South Shore area is a world away from my north suburban life.
That can’t happen here.
It Did Happen Here
Chicago is hundreds of miles from Canada and 1,500 miles from Mexico, but US Customs and Border Protection (CBP, or Border Patrol) turned my peaceful suburb upside down on Halloween.
Clear, sunny skies and a temperature in the mid-50s were perfect for the season. Soon the youngest trick-or-treaters, dressed in costumes that they had carefully selected or made, would emerge from elementary schools and descend on the neighborhood. Parents escorting their kids past spooky lawn displays would remain on the sidewalk as their children summoned the courage to ring the bell or knock on the door and say, “Trick or treat!”
But this Halloween, Nextdoor—a community engagement and communication site that usually includes information on gas leaks, water main breaks, traffic jams, and lost pets—had two disturbing videos of events a few blocks from my home.
The first victim was Hispanic—a 30-something delivery driver for Target. A resident with a smartphone started filming as she came upon the scene. Parked at the curb was the driver’s old maroon minivan. In the middle of the street alongside the van was a grey Chevrolet Tahoe with California license plates. The delivery driver’s doors and rear of the van were open, revealing his yet-to-be delivered packages.
For what’s now happening on the streets of America, the 21st-century adaptation should be: “If you see something, pull out your smartphone and film it. Then post it—everywhere you can.”
Two soldiers in military fatigues with CBP patches on their sleeves stood next to him. A third soldier who had been behind the wheel of the Tahoe joined the scene as the resident stopped her car to continue filming. The men were equipped for battle: masks covering everything but their eyes, helmets, body armor, and holstered sidearms. The driver provided some sort of identification card and waited nervously while one of the soldiers analyzed it.
“Are you ICE?’ the resident asked.
“Border Patrol, ma’am,” one of the soldiers answered.
“How do you sleep at night?”
“Great,” he answered as one of his colleagues nodded vigorously. “Just doin’ our job, ma’am.”
“Why are you here?” she inquired.
“We’re everywhere, ma’am.”
A few minutes later, one of the soldiers returned the driver’s identification card to him and shook his hand, saying, “Here you go, man. You’re all set, man.”
As the second soldier shook the driver’s hand, the first soldier turned to the camera and said, “Did you get that ma’am?”
He thought that he somehow deserved praise for the manner in which he had forcibly interrupted a citizen’s delivery route for no reason other than the color of the man’s skin and the sorry state of his van.
The two soldiers returned to their cars. As they drove away, the delivery driver turned to the camera, smiled, and said, “Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it.”
He was one of the lucky ones. The government doesn’t track the number of US citizens it has held in detention facilities. So Pro Publica investigated and found that Immigration agents have held more than 170 American citizens, including nearly 20 children: “They’ve been kicked, dragged, and detained for days.”
The victim of the second Halloween episode in my suburb wasn’t as fortunate as the Target delivery driver. A resident’s video of that encounter showed a landscaper running down the street as three soldiers chased him. The video didn’t reveal what happened next.
Nextdoor videos and the Chicago Tribune documented other Halloween arrests in the nearby suburb of Evanston. In one videotaped incident, three soldiers detained two landscapers. A third landscaper was released after insisting that he was an American citizen—but only after they put him in handcuffs.
A witness who recorded a different incident in Evanston said, “They had yanked his shoes off, they were shoving him on the ground multiple times. It got to the level where they punched him. They kicked him. They slammed his head on the ground.” A video seemed to corroborate that account.
When It Becomes Personal, It Becomes Real
As word of the Border Patrol’s activities spread throughout the community, schools implemented a “soft” lockdown—closed campus, no outdoor recess, all Halloween festivities moved inside. The community had to protect innocent children from the trauma that its own government was inflicting on all of us.
Trump branded his Chicago deportation surge “Operation Midway Blitz.” It’s apt. “Blitz” is not only a football term, but also shorthand for Hitler’s early surprise attacks on neighboring countries at the start of World War II. Trump is “blitzing” his own country—and ours.
What can one person do? After 9/11, the ubiquitous catchphrase was: “If you see something, say something.”
For what’s now happening on the streets of America, the 21st-century adaptation should be: “If you see something, pull out your smartphone and film it. Then post it—everywhere you can.”
Observing an experiment changes it. The CBP soldiers who detained the Target delivery driver knew they were being filmed. So did the guys who handcuffed a landscaper before eventually letting him go. Perhaps those outcomes would have been the same without the scrutiny of a camera, but with more than 170 “mistaken” federal abductions, there’s no way to know for sure.
There are no longer any meaningful distinctions.
It can happen here. It is happening now. It’s happening to US citizens. And if it can happen in my peaceful suburb, it can happen where you live too.
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A Rural Health Fund Band-Aid Will Not Staunch the Bleeding
The Trump administration’s rural hospital fund, meant to soften the impact of the brutal Medicaid cuts in HR1, will require a murky submission process and will not come close to closing the gap for rural communities.
Nov 04, 2025
Amid furious efforts to cover their tracks, Republicans included $50 billion in new funding to offset the disastrous cuts that rural hospitals will face as a result of President Donald Trump’s House Resolution 1. Trump’s new Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Director, Dr. Mehmet Oz, gave an explanation which would be laughable if this weren’t so serious. He stated that the Rural Health Fund “is part of a broader effort to modernize rural healthcare… [and that] innovation is the reigning theme” citing growing opportunities for rural providers to become more engaged in the healthcare system.
The “Rural Health Fund” was established by HR1 to soften the impact of the legislation, which cuts $911 billion in federal Medicaid spending over 10 years, due to start after 2030. The good news is that the distribution of the $50 billion will begin before the Medicaid cuts take effect (conveniently before the midterms). The bad news is that the temporary $50 billion in new funding will offset a little over one-third (37%) of the estimated $137 billion in permanent cuts to federal Medicaid spending in rural areas. People everywhere can do the math. Fifty is a whole lot less than 137.
On September 15, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released a Notice of Funding Opportunity for states to apply for the funds. Half of the funds, $25 billion, will be distributed by CMS equally across all states with approved applications, and the other half distributed based on four factors identified by CMS, including priorities that align with the Make America Healthy Again agenda. While some of the goals are welcome, such as expanding access to opioid-use and substance-use disorder treatment and mental healthcare and recruiting and retraining clinicians in rural areas, other priorities, such as supporting value-based care, alternative payment models, and other innovative delivery arrangements that shift risk to practitioners away from insurance companies and that have been demonstrated to increase costs in Medicare, are worrisome. Predictably, no funds can be used to pay for abortions for women living in rural areas.
Each state, regardless of the size of their rural population and needs, will receive the same amount from the first $25 billion tranche. States with few rural hospitals, such as Delaware, with three rural hospitals, will receive equal funding as California, with 66 rural hospitals, some of which have closed and many which are at risk of closing, and that assumes that both states are approved for funding.
We urge residents of rural communities to stand together and demand the right to excellent healthcare that our wealthy nation can and must provide.
Disbursement of the funds promises to be a cronyism gravy train requiring applications, murky decision criteria, no administrative or judicial review, and nonexistent information as to the amount a state will receive, how the funds will be distributed, or even if the funds will go only to rural hospitals. A merit review panel will review the state applications with final award decisions made by CMS. The program runs for five years, but because CMS will reevaluate state initiatives every year, CMS could withhold, reduce, or even recover funding from the state depending on a state’s progress or if continued funding is “in the government’s best interests.” The only thing that is clear is that hospitals and their administrators will spend countless hours and resources on evaluation, reports, and contractors hired to write these reports.
The stakes for rural hospitals couldn’t be higher. As a result of the Medicaid cuts, hundreds of rural hospitals are at risk of closing. But even before cuts, rural hospitals have been shuttering: From 2005 to 2024, 193 rural hospitals closed. In the wake of HR1Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and others asked the Sheps Center to identify rural hospitals at risk of closing because of the Medicaid cuts. The Sheps Center identified 338 hospitals which either experienced three consecutive years of negative total margins, serve the highest share of Medicaid patients, or both. These are the hospitals that, because of their heavy reliance on Medicaid funds, will likely shutter.
What will happen to the millions of people who live in these rural communities when these hospitals close? The median travel distance to the next hospital, emergency room, substance-use, or heart specialty care center will jump seven- to eightfold. This translates to higher mortality from many common conditions: heart disease, cancer, stroke, and unintentional injury.
In "The False Promises of VA Privatization", author Suzanne Gordon highlights the plight of healthcare access for veterans and Americans who live in rural communities, the majority of whom already live in so-called medical and mental health deserts. For example, 81% of rural communities do not have even one psychiatric nurse practitioner and 65% do not have a single psychiatrist. The shuttering of rural hospitals will also mean the loss of thousands of healthcare worker jobs and the ensuing negative economic impact on those communities.
The $50 billion rural health fund earmarked by the Trump administration will not transform these rural medical deserts, will not protect the livelihood of workers and their families, nor will it safeguard their communities. The piddly funds will not staunch the bleeding the brutal cuts to Medicaid will cause.
National Single Payer has launched a “Save Our Rural Hospitals with National Single Payer” campaign. We believe that a national, improved Medicare for All, free from profit in the financing and the delivery of care, would provide the reliable, equitable funding needed to help hospitals and physicians not only survive, but thrive in rural areas. The funding from global budgets would be based on community healthcare needs and not on industry interests.
We urge individuals who live in districts where the at-risk hospitals are located to contact their representatives and ask them to cosponsor HR3069, the Medicare for All Act. If your representative is already a cosponsor, tell them to do more to put national single payer on the nation’s agenda.
People can also pass a resolution in their local organization or city council going on record in favor of saving and sustaining their rural hospitals by calling on Congress to pass national, improved Medicare for All, free from profit.
We urge residents of rural communities to stand together and demand the right to excellent healthcare that our wealthy nation can and must provide. The 46 million people living in America’s rural communities don’t need a temporary Band-Aid—they deserve what everyone deserves, no matter where they live—healthcare as a human right, free from profit.
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