Absence of regret, but a misplaced sense of pride
THERE is heavy irony in the fact that the publication of Dick Cheney’s memoirs occurred so close to the commemorations to mark the 10th anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon by Islamist extremists.
Regarded by many as the insider’s insider at the heart of the American government, Cheney was an even more skilful manipulator of the Washington bureaucracy than Henry Kissinger, though they share the honours when it comes to a Machiavellian disregard for the norms of morality.
We associate him, of course, primarily with the presidency of George W Bush, but his introduction to Washington DC actually began in mid-July 1968 when he accepted a congressional fellowship. And it was during this period that he first encountered a name with whom his own would later be very closely linked, Don Rumsfeld.
The following year he first met George HW Bush of Texas, who in Cheney’s own words “would play a big role in my life”. If that was true of Bush senior (President from 1989 to 1993) it would prove even more true of his son, George W (President from 2001 to 2009).
After 9/11, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, in promoting the “war on terror”, repeatedly cast themselves as defenders of democracy, yet their actions and their justifications for such actions displayed a contempt for democracy and for one of its key pillars, the rule of law.
Cheney has always stubbornly insisted that “waterboarding” was not torture. His justification for the “enhanced interrogation” programme was that it was “critically important ... to our national security”.
And even after the US Supreme Court handed down its decision in June 2006 in the Hamdan v Rumsfeld case — in which it ruled that the CIA’s enhanced interrogation programme contravened the Geneva Convention — Cheney, angry at the decision, insisted that what the CIA programme now needed so that it could continue was “new legal underpinning”.
He was also highly critical of Barack Obama when the new President issued an executive order ending the programme, and went on to publish the dodgy legal memos that, under prompting from the Bush-Cheney White House, the US Justice Department had drawn up.
Of Obama he said: “He released the memos over the objection of his current CIA director and the four previous CIA directors. He also did so despite apparently having been told directly by members of the CIA’s clandestine service that the release of this information could endanger our CIA operatives”.
This flagrant disregard for constitutional and moral norms was nothing new on Cheney’s part. Back at the time of the Iran-Contra controversy in 1986 during the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, he took the side of the maverick Army Colonel Oliver North, who had shredded documents and acted without proper authority.
The Iran-Contra scandal involved the illegal sale of arms to Iran, the proceeds of which were then used illegally to fund the Contras, the right-wing guerrillas aided and abetted by the CIA, who were attempting to destroy the democratically elected left-wing government in Nicaragua. All of this was “justified” — like so much else in Central and South America — on the basis that any pro-Marxist government there, even when democratically sanctioned (as in Chile in 1970) posed a threat to US “national interests”. Under that rubric, terrible things were done, including the murder of Catholic priests and nuns working for social justice.
Despite the fact that a congressional hearing found that the Iran-Contra affair was a sensational story of rogue operators within the Regan administration willing to skirt the law and subvert the Constitution in their determination to carry out their own foreign policy, Cheney thought it was all of “vital importance in keeping the Nicaraguan democratic resistance alive”. The same twisted logic had led to the quagmire of Vietnam.
After 9/11, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were obsessed with “projecting American power” and to that end they were prepared to ignore the norms of international law and to introduce measures in the USA itself — the Patriot Act which Bush signed into law in October 2001, and the opening of the prison at Guantanamo — which contravened constitutional rights.
Of Guantanamo, Cheney says in his book that it has been “the target of a tremendous amount of unjustified criticism”. He even has the temerity, in spite of all that we now know about conditions there, to describe it as “a model facility”. By classifying the people detained there as “enemy combatants” he, and his master in the White House, insisted they were not ordinary prisoners of war, and therefore fell outside the protection of the Geneva Convention.
All of this stems in large measure from what Cheney calls the “need to work the dark side”. In effect, this means you throw away the rule book — all rule books. “We need to make certain we have not tied our hands.” And he adamantly denies throughout that there was ever anything “sinister” about this. “It remains true today that defending this nation and preventing another attack require efforts that have to be kept secret”. And if that meant telling lies to the American people — about, for instance, Saddam Husssein’s “weapons of mass destruction” — so be it.
An American politician much admired by Cheney, Newt Gingrich, once said: “A free society can never do in secret what it cannot defend in public”. It is abundantly clear, though, that this maxim was never adopted by his admirer.
Cheney turned the office that Lyndon Baines Johnson once dismissively said wasn’t worth a “bucket of spit” into a kind of parallel Presidency. According to himself, this was what President Bush wanted. Mind you, on the morning after JFK’s assassination in Dallas on November 22, 1963, I suspect LBJ would have been very happy to revise his opinion of the office of Vice President. Whatever about that, friends and foes are agreed that Cheney was without doubt the most powerful Vice President in the history of the USA. Yet he has left a shocking legacy.
Just the other day, Imran Khan, the legendary Pakistani cricketer turned politician, described the “war on terror” as the “most insane and immoral war of all time”. In an interview to mark the publication of his new book Pakistan: A Personal History, he said: “The Americans are doing what they did in Vietnam, bombing villages. How can a civilised nation do this?”
His anger was palpable: “Ours is perhaps the only country in history that keeps getting bombed, through drone attacks, by our ally”. In a letter to President Obama, Khan argued that the war was unwinnable. “I said you do not have to own Bush’s war — you can’t win it anyway”.
The Economist magazine recently summarised the aftermath of 9/11 as 6,000 dead American soldiers (and another 1,000 or so from allied forces), a conservative assessment of 137,000 civilian deaths in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, nearly eight million refugees, and a cost to the US treasury of $8 trillion, “equivalent to the country’s cumulative budget deficits . . . from 2005 to 2010”.
But while Bush bears primary responsibility for the “war on terror” and its terrible consequences, Cheney was also one of its prime architects and advocates. What is sickening about his memoirs is not just the absence of any regrets, but a sense of pride in and even gloating over what America has done in the post-9/11 period.
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