The
long march of Dick Cheney
For his entire career, he sought untrammeled power. The Bush presidency
and 9/11 finally gave it to him -- and he's not about to give it
up.
by Sidney
Blumenthal on 24 November 2005 in www.Salon.com
The hallmark
of the Dick Cheney administration is its illegitimacy. Its essential
method is bypassing established lines of authority; its goal is
the concentration of unaccountable presidential power. When it matters,
the regular operations of the CIA, Defense Department and State
Department have been sidelined.
Richard Nixon is the model, but with modifications. In the Nixon
administration, the president was the prime mover, present at the
creation of his own options, attentive to detail, and conscious
of their consequences. In the Cheney administration, the president
is volatile but passive, firm but malleable, presiding but absent.
Once his complicity has been arranged, a closely held "cabal"
-- as Lawrence Wilkerson, once chief of staff to former Secretary
of State Colin Powell, calls it -- wields control.
Within the White House, the office of the vice president is the
strategic center. The National Security Council has been demoted
to enabler and implementer. Systems of off-line operations have
been laid to evade professional analysis and a responsible chain
of command. Those who attempt to fulfill their duties in the old
ways have been humiliated when necessary, fired, retired early or
shunted aside. In their place, acolytes and careerists indistinguishable
from true believers in their eagerness have been elevated.
The collapse of sections of the façade shielding Cheney from
public view has not inhibited him. His former chief of staff, I.
Lewis Libby, indicted on five counts of perjury and obstruction
of justice, appears to be withholding information about the vice
president's actions in the Plame affair from the special prosecutor.
While Bush has declaimed, "We do not torture," Cheney
lobbied the Senate to stop it from prohibiting torture.
At the same time, Cheney has taken the lead in defending the administration
from charges that it twisted intelligence to justify the Iraq war
and misled the Congress even as new stories underscore the legitimacy
of the charges.
Former Sen. Bob Graham has revealed, in a Nov. 20 article in the
Washington Post, that the condensed version of the National Intelligence
Estimate titled "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs"
that was submitted to the Senate days before it voted on the Iraq
war resolution "represented an unqualified case that Hussein
possessed [WMD], avoided a discussion of whether he had the will
to use them and omitted the dissenting opinions contained in the
classified version." The condensed version also contained the
falsehood that Saddam Hussein was seeking "weapons-grade fissile
material from abroad."
The administration relied for key information in the NIE on an Iraqi
defector code-named Curveball. According to a Nov. 20 report in
the Los Angeles Times, it had learned from German intelligence beforehand
that Curveball was completely untrustworthy and his claims fabricated.
Yet Bush, Cheney and, most notably, Powell in his prewar performance
before the United Nations, which he now calls the biggest "blot"
on his record and about which he insists he was "deceived,"
touted Curveball's disinformation.
In two speeches over the past week Cheney has called congressional
critics "dishonest," "shameless" and "reprehensible."
He ridiculed their claim that they did not have the same intelligence
as the administration. "These are elected officials who had
access to the intelligence materials. They are known to have a high
opinion of their own analytical capabilities." Lambasting them
for historical "revisionism," he repeatedly invoked Sept.
11. "We were not in Iraq on September 11th, 2001 -- and the
terrorists hit us anyway," he said.
The day after Cheney's most recent speech, the National Journal
reported that the president's daily briefing prepared by the CIA
10 days after Sept. 11, 2001, indicated that there was no connection
between Saddam and the terrorist attacks. Of course, the 9/11 Commission
had made the same point in its report.
Even though experts and pundits contradict his talking points, Cheney
presents them with characteristic assurance. His rhetoric is like
a paving truck that will flatten obstacles. Cheney remains undeterred;
he has no recourse. He will not run for president in 2008. He is
defending more than the Bush record; he is defending the culmination
of his career. Cheney's alliances, ideas, antagonisms and tactics
have accumulated for decades.
Cheney is a master bureaucrat, proficient in the White House, the
agencies and departments, and Congress. The many offices Cheney
has held add up to an extraordinary résumé. His competence
and measured manner are often mistaken for moderation. Among those
who have misjudged Cheney are military men -- Colin Powell, Brent
Scowcroft and Wilkerson, who lacked a sense of him as a political
man in full. As a result, they expressed surprise at their discovery
of the ideological hard man. Scowcroft told the New Yorker recently
that Cheney was not the Cheney he once knew. But Scowcroft and the
other military men rose by working through regular channels; they
were trained to respect established authority. They are at a disadvantage
in internal political battles with those operating by different
rules of warfare. Their realism does not account for radicalism
within the U.S. government.
Nixon's resignation in the Watergate scandal thwarted his designs
for an unchecked imperial presidency. It was in that White House
that Cheney gained his formative experience as the assistant to
Nixon's counselor, Donald Rumsfeld. When Gerald Ford acceded to
the presidency, he summoned Rumsfeld from his posting as NATO ambassador
to become his chief of staff. Rumsfeld, in turn, brought back his
former deputy, Cheney.
From Nixon, they learned the application of ruthlessness and the
harsh lesson of failure. Under Ford, Rumsfeld designated Cheney
as his surrogate on intelligence matters. During the immediate aftermath
of Watergate, Congress investigated past CIA abuses, and the press
was filled with revelations. In May 1975, Seymour Hersh reported
in the New York Times on how the CIA had sought to recover a sunken
Soviet submarine with a deep-sea mining vessel called the Glomar
Explorer, built by Howard Hughes. When Hersh's article appeared,
Cheney wrote memos laying out options ranging from indicting Hersh
or getting a search warrant for Hersh's apartment to suing the Times
and pressuring its owners "to discourage the NYT and other
publications from similar action." "In the end,"
writes James Mann, in his indispensable book, "Rise of the
Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet," "Cheney and
the White House decided to back off after the intelligence community
decided its work had not been significantly damaged."
Rumsfeld and Cheney quickly gained control of the White House staff,
edging out Ford's old aides. From this base, they waged bureaucratic
war on Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger, a
colossus of foreign policy, who occupied the posts of both secretary
of state and national security advisor. Rumsfeld and Cheney were
the right wing of the Ford administration, opposed to the policy
of détente with the Soviet Union, and they operated by stealthy
internal maneuver. The Secret Service gave Cheney the code name
"Backseat."
In 1975, Rumsfeld and Cheney stage-managed a Cabinet
purge called the "Halloween massacre" that made Rumsfeld
secretary of defense and Cheney White House chief of staff. Kissinger,
forced to surrender control of the National Security Council, angrily
drafted a letter of resignation (which he never submitted). Rumsfeld
and Cheney helped convince Ford, who faced a challenge for the Republican
nomination from Ronald Reagan, that he needed to shore up his support
on the right and that Rockefeller was a political liability. Rockefeller
felt compelled to announce he would not be Ford's running mate.
Upset at the end of his ambition, Rockefeller charged that Rumsfeld
intended to become vice president himself. In fact, Rumsfeld had
contemplated running for president in the future and undoubtedly
would have accepted a vice presidential nod.
In the meantime, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld undermined the negotiations
for a new Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty being conducted by Kissinger.
Fighting off Reagan's attacks during the Republican primaries, Ford
was pressured by Cheney to adopt his foreign policy views, which
amounted to a self-repudiation. At the Republican Party Convention,
acting as Ford's representative, Cheney engineered the adoption
of Reagan's foreign policy plank in the platform. By doing so he
preempted an open debate and split. Privately, Ford, Kissinger and
Rockefeller were infuriated.
As part of the Halloween massacre Rumsfeld and Cheney pushed out
CIA director William Colby and replaced him with George H.W. Bush,
then the U.S. plenipotentiary to China. The CIA had been uncooperative
with the Rumsfeld/Cheney anti-détente campaign. Instead of
producing intelligence reports simply showing an urgent Soviet military
buildup, the CIA issued complex analyses that were filled with qualifications.
Its National Intelligence Estimate on the Soviet threat contained
numerous caveats, dissents and contradictory opinions. From the
conservative point of view, the CIA was guilty of groupthink, unwilling
to challenge its own premises and hostile to conservative ideas.
The new CIA director was prompted to authorize an alternative unit
outside the CIA to challenge the agency's intelligence on Soviet
intentions. Bush was more compliant in the political winds than
his predecessor. Consisting of a host of conservatives, the unit
was called Team B. A young aide from the Arms Control and Disarmament
Agency, Paul Wolfowitz, was selected to represent Rumsfeld's interest
and served as coauthor of Team B's report. The report was single-minded
in its conclusion about the Soviet buildup and cleansed of contrary
intelligence. It was fundamentally a political tool in the struggle
for control of the Republican Party, intended to destroy détente
and aimed particularly at Kissinger. Both Ford and Kissinger took
pains to dismiss Team B and its effort. (Later, Team B's report
was revealed to be wildly off the mark about the scope and capability
of the Soviet military.)
With Ford's defeat, Team B became the kernel of the Committee on
the Present Danger, a conservative group that attacked President
Carter for weakness on the Soviet threat. The growing strength of
the right thwarted ratification of SALT II, setting the stage for
Reagan's nomination and election.
Elected to the House of Representatives in 1978, Cheney became the
Republican leader on the House Intelligence Committee, where he
consistently fought congressional oversight and limits on presidential
authority. When Congress investigated the Iran-Contra scandal (the
creation of an illegal, privately funded, offshore U.S. foreign
policy initiative), Cheney was the crucial administration defender.
At every turn, he blocked the Democrats and prevented them from
questioning Vice President Bush. Under his leadership, not a single
House Republican signed the special investigating committee's final
report charging "secrecy, deception and disdain for law."
Instead, the Republicans issued their own report claiming there
had been no major wrongdoing.
The origin of Cheney's alliance with the neoconservatives goes back
to his instrumental support for Team B. Upon being appointed secretary
of defense by the elder Bush, he kept on Wolfowitz as undersecretary.
And Wolfowitz kept on his deputy, his former student at the University
of Chicago, Scooter Libby. Earlier, Wolfowitz and Libby had written
a document expressing suspicion of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's
liberalizing perestroika and warning against making deals with him,
a document that President Reagan ignored as he made an arms control
agreement and proclaimed that the Cold War was ending.
During the Gulf War, Secretary of Defense Cheney clashed with Gen.
Colin Powell. At one point, he admonished Powell, who had been Reagan's
national security advisor, "Colin, you're chairman of the Joint
Chiefs ... so stick to military matters." During the run-up
to the war, Cheney set up a secret unit in the Pentagon to develop
an alternative war plan, his own version of Team B.
"Set up a team, and don't tell Powell or anybody else,"
Cheney ordered Wolfowitz. The plan was called Operation Scorpion.
"While Powell was out of town, visiting Saudi Arabia, Cheney
-- again, without telling Powell -- took the civilian-drafted plan,
Operation Scorpion, to the White House and presented it to the president
and the national security adviser," writes Mann in his book.
Bush, however, rejected it as too risky. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf
was enraged at Cheney's presumption. "Put a civilian in charge
of professional military men and before long he's no longer satisfied
with setting policy but wants to outgeneral the generals,"
he wrote in his memoir. After Operation Scorpion was rejected, Cheney
urged Bush to go to war without congressional approval, a notion
the elder Bush dismissed.
After the Gulf War victory, in 1992, Cheney approved a new "Defense
Planning Guidance" advocating U.S. unilateralism in the post-Cold
War, a document whose final draft was written by Libby. Cheney assumed
Republican rule for the indefinite future.
One week after Bill Clinton's inauguration, on Jan. 27, 1993, Cheney
appeared on "Larry King Live," where he declared his interest
in running for the presidency.
"Obviously," he said, "it's
something I'll take a look at ... Obviously, I've worked for three
presidents and watched two others up close, and so it is an idea
that has occurred to me." For two years, he quietly campaigned
in Republican circles, but discovered little enthusiasm. He was
less well known than he imagined and less magnetic in person than
his former titles suggested. On Aug. 10, 1995, he held a news conference
at the headquarters of the Halliburton Co. in Dallas, announcing
he would become its chief executive officer. "When I made the
decision earlier this year not to run for president, not to seek
the White House, that really was a decision to wrap up my political
career and move on to other things," he said.
But in 2000, Cheney surfaced in the role of party elder, above the
fray, willing to serve as the man who would help Gov. George W.
Bush determine who should be his running mate. Prospective candidates
turned over to him all sensitive material about themselves, financial,
political and personal. Once he had collected it, he decided that
he should be the vice presidential candidate himself. Bush said
he had previously thought of the idea and happily accepted. Asked
who vetted Cheney's records, Bush's then aide Karen Hughes explained,
"Just as with other candidates, Secretary Cheney is the one
who handled that."
Most observers assumed that Cheney would provide balancing experience
and maturity, serving in his way as a surrogate father and elder
statesman. Few grasped his deeply held view on presidential power.
With Rumsfeld returned as secretary of defense, the position he
had held during the Ford administration, the old team was back in
place. Rivals from the past had departed and the field was clear.
The methods used before were implemented again. To get around the
CIA, the Office of Special Plans was created within the Pentagon,
yet another version of Team B. Senior military dissenters were removed.
Powell was manipulated and outmaneuvered.
The making of the Iraq war, torture policy and an industry-friendly
energy plan has required secrecy, deception and subordination of
government as it previously existed. But these, too, are means to
an end. Even projecting a "war on terror" as total war,
trying to envelop the whole American society within its fog, is
a device to invest absolute power in the executive.
Dick Cheney sees in George W. Bush his last chance. Nixon self-destructed,
Ford was fatally compromised by his moderation, Reagan was not what
was hoped for, the elder Bush ended up a disappointment. In every
case, the Republican presidents had been checked or gone soft. Finally,
President Bush provided the instrument, Sept. 11 the opportunity.
This time the failures of the past provided the guideposts for getting
it right. The administration's heedlessness was simply the wisdom
of Cheney's experience. |
