Dick Cheney has died at the age of 84, and I feel nostalgic.
If you are a millennial, you probably remember a time when Mr Cheney was considered to be the most powerful man in the world. President George W. Bush was a bumbling simpleton. No one thought that he was really directing politics in the USA. Cheney, with his Bond villain appearance and his gravelly voice, was the perfect candidate for being considered the power behind the throne.
Cheney remained the physical embodiment of the cruelty and cynicism of the Bush administration
Of course, this was simplistic. No one person is ever absolutely powerful in a system as strong and complex as that of the USA. But Cheney remained the physical embodiment of the cruelty and cynicism of the Bush administration.
For most of us, riddling our friend with shotgun shells would be a low point in our lives. For Mr Cheney, the accidental shooting of his hunting buddy was among the more understandable and even quaint disasters in his life.
This sounds harsh but it is very much justified. It was Cheney, more than anyone, who promoted the false idea that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” he said in 2002. “There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us.”
Reader — there was doubt.
According to Hans Blix, head of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, Cheney attempted to intimidate him, threatening that he would “discredit inspections” if they did not produce results. For Cheney and his accomplices, it appears, Blix and the inspectors were not there to see if there was cause for an invasion — they were there to provide an excuse.
What made Cheney especially responsible for the carnage that followed, which claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of Coalition soldiers, is that he knew damn well what was liable to happen if the US invaded. After the first Gulf War, when asked why the US had not pursued a policy of regime change, Cheney said that the US was right not to take Baghdad because it would have created a “quagmire”. So it did — twelve years later.
Mr Cheney also played a major role in the implementation of “enhanced interrogation techniques”, otherwise known as torture, which inflicted waterboarding and other forms of cruelty on terror suspects. Cheney was unapologetic — even saying that he had “no problem” with the fact that there were suspects who were tortured who were later found to have been innocent.
In more recent years, Cheney has become a notable opponent of Donald Trump. Trump, Cheney has argued, has been a liar and a demagogue. Of course, there has been justice in Cheney’s accusations. But it has been wildly, staggeringly ironic that a man who built a brutal war on a foundation of lies has been making those accusations. It is like being called a mobster by Al Capone.
Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban” in 2015, Cheney blustered, “went against everything we stand for and believe in”. How could not letting Muslims into the country offend his sense of the American spirit more than killing them?
I don’t want this to seem like a celebration of Mr Cheney’s death. He was an old man without power or influence, and his death must be very sad for the people who loved him. (To someone, even the worst leader in the world might be “grandad”.)
Yet obituaries are the stuff of legacy building, so it is important to be honest about Mr Cheney’s most significant contributions to the world. The Bush administration took the promise of the post-Soviet era, and the outpouring of sympathy that was produced by 9/11, and destroyed them with their stupid and dishonest wars and their hypocritical combination of the rhetoric of human rights and the furtive use of torture and extrajudicial detention. Trump’s rhetoric of “Making America Great Again” struck a chord because men like Cheney had contributed so much to its decline.
