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Ultimately, both Trump and Cheney represent different forms of danger to American democracy and global stability. They both deserve nothing less than our eternal scorn.
In an unsurprising yet telling development, Republican former Vice President Dick Cheney has thrown his support behind the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, over his party’s candidate, framing former President Donald Trump as an unprecedented threat to the United States. On its face, this endorsement might appear as a principled defence of democracy from a longstanding Republican stalwart. But beneath the surface lies a troubling irony.
Cheney, the architect of some of the most disastrous foreign and domestic policies of the early 21st century, now seeks to claim the moral high ground. The legacy of his policies – particularly the havoc unleashed during the Iraq War and the broader “war on terror” – continues to reverberate globally, causing suffering and instability that far surpass anything Trump has wrought to date.
During Tuesday’s presidential debate, Harris proudly touted Dick Cheney’s endorsement as a badge of honour – a moment as baffling as it was revealing.
Embracing a man whose policies left a trail of death and destabilization in their wake as a champion of American values lacks any semblance of moral clarity. Cheney, whose hands are stained with the blood of countless innocents from Iraq to Guantanamo, who undermined American democracy and terrorized countless innocent Americans under the “war on terror,” should not be celebrated, especially by someone seeking the mantle of progressive leadership.
While Trump has undeniably stoked internal divisions and undermined democratic norms, Cheney’s actions as vice president set the stage for some of the most catastrophic conflicts of the 21st century.
Cheney’s tenure as vice president under George W Bush is synonymous with neoconservative ambition, a vision of American dominance built on military intervention and disregard for international law. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 is perhaps the most glaring example of this approach. Alongside President Bush, Cheney pushed for a war based on false premises, most notably the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq, and a supposed link between Saddam Hussein’s regime and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Both claims were categorically debunked in the years that followed, yet the human and financial costs of the war are staggering.
Estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths range from hundreds of thousands to well over a million, depending on the source. This war destabilized an entire region, paving the way for the rise of extremist groups like ISIL (ISIS) and contributing to ongoing cycles of violence and displacement. The political vacuum created by the toppling of Hussein remains unfilled, as Iraq continues to grapple with internal conflicts and external influences.632184874
Domestically, the costs were equally profound. The war drained trillions from the United States economy, money that could have been directed toward infrastructure, education or healthcare. Thousands of US troops lost their lives, and many more returned with life-altering physical and psychological wounds. Veterans of the Iraq conflict have some of the highest rates of PTSD and suicide among recent generations of American soldiers, underscoring the toll of this misadventure.
And yet, those celebrating Cheney’s endorsement of Harris over Trump are now portraying him as a defender of democracy, as if the destabilizing effects of his policies were somehow a lesser evil. The truth is that while Trump’s brand of populist nationalism has damaged the social fabric of the United States, the neoconservative project Cheney helped lead caused immense human suffering on a global scale – far beyond anything Trump has so far accomplished.
Cheney’s endorsement of Harris, framed as a repudiation of Trump’s divisiveness, conveniently ignores his own role in eroding civil liberties in the US and across the world.
One of Cheney’s signature policies, the “war on terror”, brought with it the expansion of executive power and a profound shift in the relationship between the American government and its citizens – especially Muslim Americans.
The Patriot Act, passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, granted the US government sweeping surveillance powers, many of which were abused in the name of national security. Cheney was one of the most ardent advocates of these measures, arguing that extraordinary threats required extraordinary responses. In practice, these measures disproportionately targeted minorities, particularly Muslim Americans.
Programs like the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) singled out men from predominantly Muslim countries, leading to widespread racial profiling and unconstitutional detentions. Muslim communities in the US were left to bear the brunt of Cheney’s overreach, living under a cloud of suspicion that persists to this day.
Internationally, the “war on terror” led to even graver abuses. Cheney oversaw the use of torture in US military operations. “Enhanced interrogation techniques,” such as waterboarding, were deployed at facilities like Guantanamo Bay and CIA black sites across the globe. These practices violated basic human rights and international law, leaving a stain on America’s global reputation. Many of the individuals detained and tortured were never formally charged with any crime. To this day, Guantanamo Bay remains a symbol of injustice, where detainees languish without trial or meaningful recourse.
The erosion of civil liberties Cheney helped to engineer not only devastated communities but also created a culture of fear that Trump later capitalized on during his rise to power. Anti-Muslim rhetoric, which played a key role in Trump’s 2016 campaign, has its roots in the fear-mongering that Cheney and his neoconservative allies perpetuated during the Bush administration. In this sense, the groundwork for Trump’s policies on immigration and national security was laid by Cheney himself.
When examining Cheney’s legacy, no issue looms larger than the invasion of Iraq. The war, waged on false pretenses, remains one of the costliest misadventures in modern American history. Under Cheney’s influence, the Bush administration sidelined diplomacy, dismissing warnings from the international community and bypassing the United Nations Security Council. The war not only violated international law but also undermined the very principles of sovereignty and self-determination that the US purported to champion.
The ripple effects of the Iraq War are still being felt today. The instability it created in the Middle East has made it fertile ground for extremist groups, leading to a proliferation of violence that has engulfed nations far beyond Iraq’s borders. The rise of ISIL, the ongoing Syrian civil war, and the refugee crisis that has strained Europe can all be traced back, at least in part, to the power vacuum created by the toppling of Hussein.
Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence of the war’s catastrophic consequences, Cheney has never fully reckoned with his role in bringing about this disaster. By endorsing Harris, he is attempting to paint himself as a responsible elder statesman, but his track record tells a different story – one of hubris, miscalculation and indifference to human suffering.
One of the reasons Cheney’s endorsement may resonate with some Democrats and centrists is the perception that Trump represents an existential threat to American democracy. Trump’s brand of populism, his encouragement of far-right extremism, and his open disregard for democratic norms have indeed damaged the political fabric of the US. However, Cheney’s legacy of violence and imperialism abroad, coupled with his domestic assault on civil liberties, presents a far more troubling picture of the threats to democracy.
The Democratic Party and some of its liberal and progressive backers’ apparent decision to absolve Cheney of any responsibility for the havoc he unleashed on the world simply because he now opposes Trump is devoid of morality.
Trump’s most egregious actions have played out on American soil, targeting immigrants, people of colour, and marginalised groups. His rhetoric has fueled political violence and stoked deep divisions within American society. But the scope of Cheney’s policies, especially those that played out on the world stage, exceeds Trump’s in terms of sheer human suffering. The wars Cheney championed, particularly the Iraq War, claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and displaced millions. The torture and surveillance programs he helped oversee have left a lasting legacy of fear and suspicion, both at home and abroad.
What makes Cheney’s endorsement, and the Democratic Party’s embrace of it, particularly galling is the way in which they gloss over these past sins in order to paint him as a guardian of American values. While Trump’s rhetoric and policies may have caused harm within the US, Cheney’s decisions inflicted untold suffering on far more people all across the globe. The selective moral outrage they direct at Trump while embracing Cheney as a savior of democracy, is a testament to the hypocrisy of the liberal political establishment in the country.
Both men have caused irreparable harm, and neither should be celebrated for their actions.
As we navigate American politics, we must be careful not to view figures like Cheney solely through a partisan lens. His critique of Trump, while valid in some respects, cannot erase the devastating impact of his own policies. Cheney’s endorsement of Harris should not be interpreted as an act of moral courage, but rather as a cynical attempt to rehabilitate his public image in the face of a deeply divided country.
Ultimately, both Trump and Cheney represent different forms of danger to American democracy and global stability. While Trump has undeniably stoked internal divisions and undermined democratic norms, Cheney’s actions as vice president set the stage for some of the most catastrophic conflicts of the 21st century. His policies eroded civil liberties, violated human rights, and destabilized entire regions, leaving a legacy of fear and instability that continues to haunt the world today.
The Democratic Party and some of its liberal and progressive backers’ apparent decision to absolve Cheney of any responsibility for the havoc he unleashed on the world simply because he now opposes Trump is devoid of morality. Both men have caused irreparable harm, and neither should be celebrated for their actions. Instead, we should take this moment to reflect on the broader failures of the political system that allowed both Cheney and Trump to rise to power in the first place. Only then can we begin to chart a course towards a more just and equitable future.
Instead of acting as an alternative to ground wars involving U.S. forces, U.S. proxy wars have spawned ever-escalating crises that are now making U.S. wars with Iran and Russia increasingly likely.
The Associated Press reports that many of the recruits drafted under Ukraine’s new conscription law lack the motivation and military indoctrination required to actually aim their weapons and fire at Russian soldiers.
“Some people don’t want to shoot. They see the enemy in the firing position in trenches but don’t open fire... That is why our men are dying,” said a frustrated battalion commander in Ukraine’s 47th Brigade. “When they don’t use the weapon, they are ineffective.”
This is familiar territory to anyone who has studied the work of U.S. Brigadier General Samuel “Slam” Marshall, a First World War veteran and the chief combat historian of the U.S. Army in the Second World War. Marshall conducted hundreds of post-combat small group sessions with U.S. troops in the Pacific and Europe, and documented his findings in his book, Men Against Fire: the Problem of Battle Command.
One of Slam Marshall’s most startling and controversial findings was that only about 15% of U.S. troops in combat actually fired their weapons at the enemy. In no case did that ever rise above 25%, even when failing to fire placed the soldiers’ own lives in greater danger.
We must refuse to volunteer our bodies and those of our children and grandchildren as their cannon fodder, or allow them to shift that fate onto our neighbors, friends, and “allies” in other countries.
Marshall concluded that most human beings have a natural aversion to killing other human beings, often reinforced by our upbringing and religious beliefs, and that turning civilians into effective combat soldiers therefore requires training and indoctrination expressly designed to override our natural respect for fellow human life. This dichotomy between human nature and killing in war is now understood to lie at the root of much of the PTSD suffered by combat veterans.
Marshall’s conclusions were incorporated into U.S. military training, with the introduction of firing range targets that looked like enemy soldiers and deliberate indoctrination to dehumanize the enemy in soldiers’ minds. When he conducted similar research in the Korean War, Marshall found that changes in infantry training based on his work in World War II had already led to higher firing ratios.
That trend continued in Vietnam and more recent U.S. wars. Part of the shocking brutality of the U.S. hostile military occupation of Iraq stemmed directly from the dehumanizing indoctrination of the U.S. occupation forces, which included falsely linking Iraq to the September 11th terrorist crimes in the U.S. and labeling Iraqis who resisted the U.S. invasion and occupation of their country as “terrorists.”
A Zogby poll of U.S. forces in Iraq in February 2006 found that 85% of U.S. troops believed their mission was to “retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks,” and 77% believed that the primary reason for the war was to “stop Saddam from protecting Al Qaeda in Iraq.” This was all pure fiction, cut from whole cloth by propagandists in Washington, and yet, three years into the U.S. occupation, the Pentagon was still misleading U.S. troops to falsely link Iraq with 9/11.
The impact of this dehumanization was also borne out by court martial testimony in the rare cases when U.S. troops were prosecuted for killing Iraqi civilians. In a court martial at Camp Pendleton in California in July 2007, a corporal testifying for the defense told the court he did not see the cold-blooded killing of an innocent civilian as a summary execution. “I see it as killing the enemy,” he told the court, adding, “Marines consider all Iraqi men part of the insurgency.”
U.S. combat deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan (5,429 killed) were only a fraction of the U.S. combat death toll in Vietnam (47,434) or Korea (33,739), and an even smaller fraction of the nearly 300,000 Americans killed in the Second World War. In every case, other countries suffered much heavier death tolls.
And yet, U.S. casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan provoked waves of political blowback in the U.S., leading to military recruitment problems that persist today. The U.S. government responded by shifting away from wars involving large deployments of U.S. ground troops to a greater reliance on proxy wars and aerial bombardment.
After the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military-industrial complex and political class thought they had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome,” and that, freed from the danger of provoking World War III with the Soviet Union, they could now use military force without restraint to consolidate and expand U.S. global power. These ambitions crossed party lines, from Republican “neoconservatives” to Democratic hawks like Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden.
In a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in October 2000, a month before winning a seat in the U.S. Senate, Hillary Clinton echoed her mentor Albright’s infamous rejection of the “Powell Doctrine” of limited war.
“There is a refrain…,” Clinton declared, “that we should intervene with force only when we face splendid little wars that we surely can win, preferably by overwhelming force in a relatively short period of time. To those who believe we should become involved only if it is easy to do, I think we have to say that America has never and should not ever shy away from the hard task if it is the right one.”
During the question-and-answer session, a banking executive in the audience challenged Clinton on that statement. “I wonder if you think that every foreign country—the majority of countries—would actually welcome this new assertiveness, including the 1 billion Muslims that are out there,” he asked, “and whether or not there isn’t some grave risk to the United States in this—what I would say, not new internationalism, but new imperialism?”
When the aggressive war policy promoted by the neocons and Democratic hawks crashed and burned in Iraq and Afghanistan, this should have prompted a serious rethink of their wrongheaded assumptions about the impact of aggressive and illegal uses of U.S. military force.
Instead, the response of the U.S. political class to the blowback from its catastrophic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was simply to avoid large deployments of U.S. ground forces or “boots on the ground.” They instead embraced the use of devastating bombing and artillery campaigns in Afghanistan, Mosul in Iraq, and Raqqa in Syria, and wars fought by proxies, with full, “ironclad” U.S. support, in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and now Ukraine and Palestine.
The absence of large numbers of U.S. casualties in these wars kept them off the front pages back home and avoided the kind of political blowback generated by the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The lack of media coverage and public debate meant that most Americans knew very little about these more recent wars, until the shocking atrocity of the genocide in Gaza finally started to crack the wall of silence and indifference.
The results of these U.S. proxy wars are, predictably, no less catastrophic than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. domestic political impacts have been mitigated, but the real-world impacts in the countries and regions involved are as deadly, destructive, and destabilizing as ever, undermining U.S. “soft power” and pretensions to global leadership in the eyes of much of the world.
In fact, these policies have widened the yawning gulf between the worldview of ill-informed Americans who cling to the view of their country as a country at peace and a force for good in the world, and people in other countries, especially in the Global South, who are ever more outraged by the violence, chaos, and poverty caused by the aggressive projection of U.S. military and economic power, whether by U.S. wars, proxy wars, bombing campaigns, coups, or economic sanctions.
Now the U.S.-backed wars in Palestine and Ukraine are provoking growing public dissent among America’s partners in these wars. Israel’s recovery of six more dead hostages in Rafah led Israeli labor unions to call widespread strikes, insisting that the Netanyahu government must prioritize the lives of the Israeli hostages over its desire to keep killing Palestinians and destroying Gaza.
In Ukraine, an expanded military draft has failed to overcome the reality that most young Ukrainians do not want to kill and die in an endless, unwinnable war. Hardened veterans see new recruits much as Siegfried Sassoon described the British conscripts he was training in November 1916 in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer: “The raw material to be trained was growing steadily worse. Most of those who came in now had joined the Army unwillingly, and there was no reason why they should find military service tolerable.”
Several months later, with the help of Bertrand Russell, Sassoon wrote Finished With War: a Soldier’s Declaration, an open letter accusing the political leaders who had the power to end the war of deliberately prolonging it, which was published in newspapers and read aloud in Parliament. The letter ended:
On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realize.
As Israeli and Ukrainian leaders see their political support crumbling, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy are taking increasingly desperate risks, all the while insisting that the U.S. must come to their rescue. By “leading from behind,” our leaders have surrendered the initiative to these foreign leaders, who will keep pushing the United States to make good on its promises of unconditional support, which will sooner or later include sending young American troops to kill and die alongside their own.
Proxy war has failed to resolve the problem it was intended to solve. Instead of acting as an alternative to ground wars involving U.S. forces, U.S. proxy wars have spawned ever-escalating crises that are now making U.S. wars with Iran and Russia increasingly likely.
Neither the changes to U.S. military training since the Second World War nor the current U.S. strategy of proxy war have resolved the age-old contradiction that Slam Marshall described in Men Against Fire, between killing in war and our natural respect for human life. We have come full circle, back to this same historic crossroads, where we must once again make the fateful, unambiguous choice between the path of war and the path of peace.
If we choose war, or allow our leaders and their foreign friends to choose it for us, we must be ready, as military experts tell us, to once more send tens of thousands of young Americans to their deaths, while also risking escalation to a nuclear war that would kill us all.
If we truly choose peace, we must actively resist our political leaders’ schemes to repeatedly manipulate us into war. We must refuse to volunteer our bodies and those of our children and grandchildren as their cannon fodder, or allow them to shift that fate onto our neighbors, friends, and “allies” in other countries.
We must insist that our mis-leaders instead recommit to diplomacy, negotiation, and other peaceful means of resolving disputes with other countries, as the United Nations Charter, the real “rules-based order,” in fact requires.
"I watched them shoot my grandfather, first in the chest and then in the head. Then they killed my granny," said one survivor who was just 8 years old during the attack by U.S. Marines.
After years of working with Iraqis whose relatives were killed by U.S. Marines in the 2005 Haditha massacre, American journalists finally obtained and released photos showing the grisly aftermath of the bloody rampage—whose perpetrators never spent a day behind bars.
On Tuesday, The New Yorker published 10 of the massacre photos—part of a collaboration with the "In the Dark" podcast that joined the magazine last year.
The podcast's reporting team had filed its public records request four years ago, then sued the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Central Command over their failure to hand over the images. "In the Dark" host Madeleine Baran also traveled with a colleague to Iraq's remote Anbar Province to meet relatives of some of the 24 Iraqi civilians—who ranged in age from 1 to 76—slaughtered by U.S. troops.
"The impact of an alleged war crime is often directly related to the horror of the images that end up in the hands of the public."
Baran explained that she sought the relatives' help partly because "we anticipated that the government would claim that the release of the photos would harm the surviving family members of the dead," as "military prosecutors had already made this argument after the trial of the final accused Marine."
Khalid Salman Raseef, an attorney who lost 15 members of his family in the massacre, told Baran that "I believe this is our duty to tell the truth."
The graphic photos show dead Iraqi men, women, and children, many of them shot in the head at close range. One 5-year-old girl, Zainab Younis Salim, is shown with the number 11 written on her back in red marker by a U.S. Marine who wanted to differentiate the victims in photos.
On November 19, 2005, a convoy of Humvees carrying Marines of Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, First Marine Division was traveling through Haditha when a roadside bomb believed to have been placed by Iraqis resisting the U.S. invasion killed Miguel Terrazas, a popular lance corporal, and wounded two other Marines.
In retaliation, Marines forced a nearby taxicab to stop and ordered the driver and his four student passengers out of the vehicle. Sgt. Frank Wuterich then executed the five men in cold blood. Another Marine then desecrated their bodies, including by urinating on them.
Wuterich then ordered his men to "shoot first and ask questions later," and they went house to house killing everyone they saw. They killed seven people in the Walid family home, including a toddler and an elderly couple.
"I watched them shoot my grandfather, first in the chest and then in the head. Then they killed my granny," Iman Walid, a survivor who was 8 years old when her family was slain, told Time in 2006.
Next, the Marines killed eight people in the Salim family home, six of them children. Finally, the troops executed four brothers in a closet in the Ahmad family home.
The Marines subsequently conspired to cover up what a military probe would deem a case of "collateral damage." The military initially claimed that 15 Iraqi civilians were killed by the same explosion that took Terrazas' life. However, a local doctor who examined the victims' bodies said they "were shot in the chest and head from close range."
Eight Marines were eventually charged in connection with the massacre. Six defendants were found not guilty and one had their case dismissed. Initially charged with murder, Wuterich pleaded guilty and was convicted of dereliction of duty. He was punished with a reduction in rank and was later honorably discharged from service.
Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis—who earned his "Mad Dog" moniker during one of the atrocity-laden battles for the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004—intervened on behalf of the Haditha defendants and personally dismissed charges against one of them.
Later, while serving as former President Donald Trump's defense secretary, Mattis oversaw an escalation in what he called the U.S. war of "annihilation" against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The general warned that "civilian casualties are a fact of life in this sort of situation," and thousands of men, women, and children were subsequently slaughtered as cities including Mosul and Raqqa were leveled.
The Haditha massacre was part of countless U.S. war crimes and atrocities committed during the ongoing so-called War on Terror, which has claimed hundreds of thousands of civilian lives in at least half a dozen countries since 2001. One of the reasons why the Haditha massacre is relatively unknown compared with the torture and killings at the U.S. military prison in Abu Ghraib, Iraq is that photos of the former crime have been kept hidden for decades.
"The impact of an alleged war crime is often directly related to the horror of the images that end up in the hands of the public," Baran wrote in the New Yorker article. She noted that Gen. Michael Hagee, who commanded the Marines at the time of the Haditha massacre, later boasted how "proud" he was about keeping photos of the killings secret.
"This," journalist Murtaza Hussain
reminded the world on Tuesday, "is what the U.S. military was doing in Iraq."