He was determinedly conservative and proud of it. [Dick] Cheney was occasionally mischaracterized as a centrist Republican, perhaps because he had worked for Ford against Ronald Reagan in 1976 and perhaps because of his subdued, nonconfrontational style, a marked contrast with the fervor of [Newt] Gingrich and some other Republicans. Nevertheless, Cheney's [Congressional] voting record and his views of issues of both domestic and foreign policy put him solidly on the political right. In his first year Cheney voted against implementation of the Panama Canal treaties negotiated by the Carter administration, thus effectively aligning himself with the antitreaty position Reagan had embraced against Ford in the 1976 Republican primaries. [The non-nearly-forgotten Canal treaties were a highly emotional, symbolic issue for the Republican right.] Over the years, he regularly supported hefty increases in defense spending and the development of new weaons systems, such as the MX missile.
Indeed Cheney became annoyed when his political views were misinterpreted. Once, when an article in the Washington Post referred to him as a "moderate" (a designation many politicians of both left and right avidly seek), Cheney summoned his aide [Dave] Gribben to push for a correction. "Will you please call the Post and tell them I'm a conservative?" Cheney grumbled. "Dont they ever check my voting record? I've got a voting record, and they ought to look at it." That was vintage Cheney, choosing substance over style, policy over flash, and always proving more conservative than he appeared. [my emphasis]
- James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans (2004)
Dick Cheney is emerging once again from his fabled "undisclosed location" to hold forth to the nation in his debate with Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards. And though few mistake him for a moderate these days, Cheney still benefits from the fact that people don't always check his record that closely.
One of the stranger misconceptions about Cheney is left over from the 2000 campaign. Cheney was widely regarded as the experienced hand, a steady and stable force who would provide the foreign policy background, Washington experience and administrative savvy that the head of the ticket seemed to lack. Today, his hawkish views and secretiveness are much better known.
Josh Marshall set out to puncture that mythical picture of competence in an important article, Vice Grip by Jonah Joshua Marshall Washington Monthly Jan/Feb 2003. Even at that time, the worst failures of the Bush administration were associated with the active role of Dark Lord Cheney. "Indeed," he wrote, "on almost any issue, it's usually a sure bet that if Cheney has lined up on one side, the opposite course will turn out to be the wiser."
Marshall doesn't use the term "military-industrial complex," but he reminds us that Cheney's experience at Halliburton was experience of a particular kind:
But Halliburton is a peculiar kind of enterprise. It doesn't market shoes or design software. Rather, its business--providing various products and services to the oil industry and the military--is based on securing lucrative contracts and concessions from a handful of big customers, primarily energy companies and the U.S. and foreign governments. Success in that business comes not by understanding and meeting the demands of millions of finicky customers, but by cementing relationships with and winning the support of a handful of powerful decision-makers.
Indeed, that's why Halliburton came to Cheney in the first place. His ties with the Bush family, his post-Gulf War friendships with Arab emirs, and the Rolodex he'd compiled from a quarter century in Washington made him a perfect rainmaker. And though he did rather poorly on the management side--he shepherded Halliburton's disastrous merger with Dresser Industries, which saddled the new company with massive asbestos liabilities--he handled the schmoozing part of the enterprise well.
Cheney's fondness for secret government became known well before the 9/11 attacks thanks to his famously secretive energy task force in early 2001. Cheney's machinations on energy policy particularly endeared the Bush administration to Californians who suffered significant power shortages and blackouts that year. In Big Lies (2003) Joe Conason relates the following concerning Ken Lay of Enron fame and the Dark Lord himself:
On the very same day that Enron announced its happy 2001 first-quarter results [including a bonanza from exploiting the California shortages], Lay met with Cheney to discuss his company's recommendations for the Energy Task Force. The Enron boss gave the Vice President a detailed memo that highlighted his most urgent request: do nothing to hold down power prices. Specifically, the memo urged that "the administration should reject any attempt to re-regulate wholesale power markets by adopting price caps or returning to archaic methods of determining the cost-base of wholesale power." Those "archaic" practices were established to suppress and earlier gang of predators know as the utility trust, with support from Bush's supposed idol Theodore Roosevelt. But that was another era and a very different kind of Republican.
It's not surprising that Cheney, Dark Lord of secret government and crony capitalism alike, didn't want the public to know who he consulted for his energy task force.
Cheney was a key player in selecting the major personnel choices of George W. Bush's incoming administration, and Cheney's fondness for secrecy left its mark on that process, too. "Rarely in American history," writes James Mann, "has a new administration's foreign policy been so clearly determined by its initial round of appointments."
Neither Cheney nor Rumsfeld are usually counted among the "neoconservatives," because their foreign policy perspective has more a cynical, power-political emphasis. But Cheney was the most important patron of the neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz, and along with them became famous as aggressive Iraq hawks.
In fact, the first major debut of the unilateralism that became the Bush Doctrine was in the 1992 Defense Policy Guidance (DPG) document prepared by a number of hardliners in Dick Cheney's Defense Department, under the George H.W. Bush administration. It urged an aggressive policy to maintain unquestioned American military/economic/political dominance in the world, and showed a deep suspicion of international organizations.
Though the precise formulations of the DPG were rejected in formal policy statements, and Old Man Bush's foreign policy on the whole did not reflect them, there is disagreement over whether Bush intended to take policy morein that direction if he had won a second term. And in 2000, when the neoconservative Project for New American Century (PNAC) issued their "Rebuilding America's Defenses" manifesto, which became highly influential in the new Bush administration, they explicitly linked their ideas back to the 1992 DPG.
And if Cheney was involved in most policy disasters in the current Bush administration, what was his role in the Iraq War? Front and center, of course. James Mann again:
The invasion of Iraq was in many ways Dick Cheney's war, just as the George W. Bush administration had been in some respects Cheney's administration [due in major part to his role in selecting top personnel]. Within the top ranks the vice president had been the leading proponent of a war to oust Saddam Hussein from power. Inside the administration Cheney had also been the most forceful in arguing that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. In the year before the start of the war Cheney had made numerous visits to the CIA to talk with its analysts about the evidence of Iraq's involvement in weapons programs.
The latter, Mann rather delicately observes, "was a remarkable, hands-on role for a vice president of the United States." Indeed it was. He continues:
When it came to military and intelligence issues, Cheney, as a former defense secretary and member of the House Intelligence Committee, wielded extraordinary influence in the administration's back room decision making. He had his own staff and an extensive network of former aides throughout the foreign policy apparatus; they recognized that he took defense and forieng policy issues seriously. This network of aides and former aides had moined with Cheney in pushing for military intervention to overthrow Saddam Hussein. A picture taken in the midst of the Iraq War, the day before American troops captured Baghdad, shows Cheney pointing happily at Wolfowitz, with Scooter Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, sitting behind the vice president and Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense, alongside Wolfowitz: hawks at their peak of triumph.
It's also well know that Cheney was perfectly willing to lie in order to drum up the case for war. For one of the latest compilations of prewar deceptions on WMDs, with Cheney's role included see How the White House Embraced Disputed Arms Intelligence by David Barstow, William Broad and Jeff Gerth New York Times 10/03/04.
The Abu Ghuraib torture scandal? As the scandal broke into public earlier this year, Seymour Hersh recounts in Chain of Command (2004), Cheney was put in charge on handling the political fallout:
The perception persists that this was [Don] Rumsfeld's war, and that it was his assertiveness and his toughness that sometimes led to the bombing of the wrong target or to the arrest of innocents. But Cheney's involvement in trying to conceal the import of Abu Ghraib was not unusual; it was asign of the teamwork at the top. George Bush talked about "smoking them out of their holes" and wanting them "dead or alive," and Rumsfeld was the one who set up the mechanism [torture in the gulag] to get it done. The defense secretary would hold the difficult news conferences and take the heat in public, as he did about Abu Ghraib, but the President and Vice President had been in it, and with him, all the way. Rumsfeld handled the dirty work and kept the secrets, but he and the two White House leaders [Bush and Cheney] were a team.
In his debate with John Edwards Tuesday night, Cheney will be out of his preferred element. As John Dean described it in a BuzzFlash interview (04/19/04):
There’s no question that Dick Cheney is a behind-the-scenes-type operator. That’s been his whole modus operandi throughout his government career. He likes to work the back alleys and the back rooms and behind closed doors. That’s where he is most comfortable; that’s where he’s most effective. People I know who’ve worked with Cheney say that one-on-one, he is very persuasive. The hushed voice and the whisper, and the lean-in -- he’s just very good at that. That’s the way he works, and there’s only one person he has to report to: his student, his partner, George W. Bush.
From his experience in the Nixon administration, Dean is something of an expert in governmental secrecy and its potential pernicious consequences. So his characterization of the Bush/Cheney level of secrecy in that same interview is striking:
In the Nixon administration, the stonewalling really didn’t start in earnest until Watergate was fairly far along, and when it was starting to threaten the White House. With the Bush administration, it really started in the 2000 campaign. Bush and Cheney were able to successfully stonewall their way through the 2000 campaign. I offer several important examples. The press never pushed them, never pressed them for the information. And they got away with it. And then they took their stonewalling from their campaign, and it morphed into continued stonewalling right in the White House ....
Let me give you a “for example.” Cheney’s health came up very early, right after he was selected by Bush. He has stonewalled and refused to supply any kind of relevant medical data where any outside physician could examine that data and tell us how healthy or sick this man really is. Obviously I suspect there’s a reason for that, more than his privacy. If Dick Cheney were running a committee to select the Vice President, given his health, he’s the last guy he would select. It is just too tenuous. You’ve to also remember ... that Cheney had a quadruple bypass. They have about a 20-year life expectancy, until they really are questioned as to how much longer the bypass will be effective. Cheney’s 20 years runs out in the middle of the 2004 campaign.
In his 2004 book Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush (German title: Das Ende der Demokratie), Dean criticizes Cheney for his excessive secrecy on his own heart condition, an important health issue for the person in the vice president's office. Among other examples of Cheney's secrecy, Dean details some of his business practices as CEO of Halliburton. He cites an interview Cheney did with ABC's Sam Donaldson on This Week (one of the bogeymen of the Liberal Press the Foxist imagine exists) during the 2000 campaign in which he denied that Halliburton was doing business with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Dean explains:
It was a lie, but there was no follow-up from Donaldson. The New York Times, however, stayed on the story and a month later removed all doubt about the untruthfulness of Cheney's statement. The Times, quoting Halliburton's vice chairman, Donald Vaughn, reported that Halliburton's subsidiary did, in fact, have "business relations" with Iraq. Not until after the campaign had ended did the Washington Post obtain records from the United Nations showing that Halliburton's subsidiaries had sold more than $73 million in oil-roduction parts and equipment to Iraq. In fact, no one did more oil-related equipment business with Saddam. The Post also noted that Cheney had managed to compound his initial false statement to ABC's This Week by later adding, during another appearance, a bit of obfuscation in claiming that he was unaware of the business they had "inherited" but that they had "divested ourselves of those interests." That was real stretch, since the divestiture did not take place until Halliburton's subsidiary completed some $30 million in business with Saddam. By then, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof also discovered that the Cheney-led Halliburton had "sold more equipment to Iraq than any other company did."
A reprint of the Post article referenced is available at TruthOut.org and also at the Global Policy Forum.
Of course, Halliburton is still doing business in Iraq. Big time.
It should be an interesting debate Tuesday. John Edwards vs. the Dark Lord of Halliburton.
No comments:
Post a Comment