[Mb-civic] Deconstructing Cheney - James Carroll - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Deconstructing Cheney

By James Carroll  |  November 7, 2005

THE INDICTMENT of the vice president's chief of staff for perjury and 
obstruction of justice is an occasion to consider just how damaging the 
long public career of Richard Cheney has been to the United States. He 
began as a political scientist devoted to caring for the elbow of Donald 
Rumsfeld. As a congressman, Rumsfeld had reliably voted against programs 
to help the nation's poor, so (as I recalled in reading James Mann's 
''Rise of the Vulcans") it was with more than usual cynicism that 
Richard Nixon appointed him head of the Office of Economic Opportunity, 
the antipoverty agency. Rumsfeld named Cheney as his deputy, and the two 
set out to gut the program-- the beginning of the Republican rollback of 
the Great Society, what we saw in New Orleans this fall.

When Rumsfeld became Gerald Ford's White House chief of staff, he again 
tapped Cheney as his deputy. Now they set out to destroy detente, the 
fragile new relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. 
Dismissing detente as moral relativism, Cheney so believed in Cold War 
bipolarity that when it began to melt in the late 1980s, he tried to 
refreeze it. As George H.W. Bush's secretary of defense, Cheney was key 
to America's refusal to accommodate the hopeful new spirit of the age. 
Violence was in retreat, with peace breaking out across the globe, from 
the Philippines to South Africa, Ireland, the Middle East, and Central 
America. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Cheney forged America's 
response -- which was, little over a month later, to wage an illegal war 
against Panama.

As Mikhail Gorbachev presided over the nonviolent dismantling of the 
Soviet Union, Cheney warned Bush not to trust it. When the justification 
for the huge military machine over which Cheney presided disappeared, he 
leapt on the next casus belli -- Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. 
Hussein, a former ally, was now Hitler.

Against Cheney's own uniformed advisers (notably including Joint Chiefs 
Chairman Colin Powell), he forged Washington's choice of violence over 
diplomacy. The first Gulf War, remembered by Americans as justified, was 
in fact an unnecessary affirmation of military might as the ground of 
international order, just as an historic alternative was opening up. US 
responses in that period, mainly shaped by Cheney, stand in stark 
contrast to Gorbachev's, who, refusing to call on military might even to 
save the Soviet Union, was ordering his soldiers back to their barracks. 
The unsentimental Cheney, eschewing human rights rhetoric, was explicit 
in defining America's Gulf War interest as all about oil. (The oil 
industry having made Cheney rich.) Cheney's initiatives, more than any 
other's, defined the insult to the Arab world that spawned Al Qaeda.

With all of this as prelude, it seems as tragic as it was inevitable 
that Cheney was behind the wheel again when the next fork in the road 
appeared before the nation. When the World Trade Center towers were hit 
in New York, it was Cheney who told a shaken President Bush to flee. The 
true nature of their relationship (Cheney, not Bush, having shaped the 
national security team; Cheney, not Bush, having appointed himself as 
vice president) showed itself for a moment.

The 9/11 Commission found that, from the White House situation room, 
Cheney warned the president that a ''specific threat" had targeted Air 
Force One, prompting Bush to spend the day hiding in the bunker at Offut 
Air Force Base in Nebraska. There was no specific threat. In Bush's 
absence, Cheney, implying an authorizing telephone call from the 
president, took command of the nation's response to the crisis. There 
was no authorizing telephone call. The 9/11 Commission declined to make 
an issue of Cheney's usurpation of powers, but the record shows it.

At world-shaping moments across a generation, Cheney reacted with an 
instinctive, This is war! He helped turn the War on Poverty into a war 
on the poor. He helped keep the Cold War going longer than it had to, 
and when it ended (because of initiatives taken by the other side), 
Cheney refused to believe it. To keep the US war machine up and running, 
he found a new justification just in time. With Gulf War I, Cheney 
ignited Osama bin Laden's burning purpose. Responding to 9/11, Cheney 
fulfilled bin Laden's purpose by joining him in the 
war-of-civilizations. Iraq, therefore (including the prewar deceit for 
which Scooter Libby takes the fall), is simply the last link in the 
chain of disaster which is the public career of Richard Cheney.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/11/07/deconstructing_cheney/
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