The idea that the War on Terror was the work of a hardline cabal is too simplistic
The death of former U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney has revived an old canard from political discussion, decades old. It is the widespread notion that President George W. Bush, in office 2001-2009, played second-fiddle, or was a near-subordinate, or poodle, to his deputy. Cheney, as this version of history goes, was the power behind the throne, the prime mover who controlled foreign policy in Bush’s momentous first term, “effectively a copresident, dominating the unprepared and incurious Bush” and driving the U.S. to war in Iraq.
Implicit in this portrayal is the corollary, an image of President George W. Bush, manipulated and directed by the éminence grise, apathetic about real control and easily led. It’s an attractive portrait to some. It makes some Democrats feel better that the political force which truly beat them (and at least, in 2004, by a decisive margin) was Cheney the formidable power-wielding force of darkness, rather than Bush who they perceived as a stupid, ignorant, and over-privileged faux cowboy. To have two party grandees defeated by Bush — Al Gore and John Kerry — who both supposed themselves Bush’s intellectual superior, was hard to swallow. So much easier to imagine Bush as a puppet and a cipher. Cheney was a demon, to this cast of mind, but a worthy combatant.
Cheney may have been the most influential vice president in memory. But Bush retained the ultimate whip hand
Likewise, the image of Cheney in charge, along with a cabal of GOP Vulcans, also makes certain liberal internationalists feel better. It gets liberalism off the hook to assign causal responsibility for the Iraq war to Cheney the narrow, hardline nationalist and his ilk. This helps them forget that Bush’s coalition for war including many vocal liberals – in congress, the media and intelligentsia – from The New Republic to The New York Times, from George Packer to Leon Wieseltier, from the detailed case for war by Clinton-era official Kenneth Pollack to the vast manifesto for interventionism of Philip Bobbitt, an national security patrician very much of the Democrat stable. Neither do Democrats in congress get to exculpate themselves on the grounds that Cheney lied them into war. In October 2002, congress authorised force against Iraq almost casually, after only six Senators and a handful of Representatives visited a secure vault on Capitol Hill to read the CIA’s classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction.
The tired old line, however, is untrue. Cheney may have been the most influential vice president in memory. But Bush retained the ultimate whip hand. As biographers and historians concur, though Cheney helped set the agenda, he did not determine Bush’s decisions. Historical accounts and memoirs of those who served closely with the 43rd president agree on Bush’s independent will and central part in the drive to conflict, and indeed to government in general.
Bush in truth overruled Cheney’s advice on multiple occasions. Against Cheney’s urging, Bush appointed Colin Powell as his Secretary of State. Contrary to his Vice President’s views, he signed a treaty codifying nuclear arms cuts with Russia. Contrary to Cheney’s preference, he voiced in-principle support for a Palestinian state. He refused to appoint Cheney to chair a special executive committee to frame policy options. He refused to pardon “Scooter” Libby. The surge in Iraq and the bank bailouts were very much Bush’s desired policies, not Cheney’s.
And in the summer of 2002, Bush turned down Cheney, senior civilians from his Vice Presidential Office, Pentagon officials and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, when they urged the president to strike the training camp and chemical weapons production site of an Islamist terrorist group, Ansar al Islam, in Khurmal in northeastern Iraq, with tomahawk missiles followed by an inspection. Bush prioritised his international coalition-building campaign over the opportunity.
Bush, moreover, overrode Cheney’s recommendations against trying for a congressional authorisation and U.N. Security Council resolution, and to appoint Ahmed Chalabi president of Iraq. He even considered dumping Cheney from the presidential ticket ahead of the 2004 election. However disastrous a president, Bush was also his own man. He was a wilful, not deferential president. Cheney’s capacity for monopolising power stopped at the Oval Office.
The image of Cheney as the de facto president was one of many dumbed-down theories from the era. “It was all about [x]” claims proliferated at the time, not only about how the Bush White House functioned, but about what single thing (and who) “really”, secretly drove U.S. foreign and defence policy. (By the way, it was French, Russian and Chinese firms who got the lion’s share of the oil contracts in post-Saddam Iraq, a strange turn for Washington’s supposedly petro-imperialist conspiracy). Those of you who are old enough will recall that type of person of the early noughts, who “knew” it was really about Halliburton or oil or Karl Rove, who avidly consumed the crankish fare of Michael Moore or Jesse Ventura, and were oblivious as the room around them emptied. Yet, it turns out, the man who headed Washington’s executive branch counted, after all.
The correction above isn’t just offered for the sake of historical curiosity. It has implications for how we judge policy and politics now
For one thing, it means that liberal internationalists shouldn’t cheer themselves up that Bush’s proclaimed cause of Iraqi and Arab democracy was just a hollow pretext. Bush really did believe in these aspirations from an early date, and since his thoughts and judgements counted, it was partly a liberal war, the kind of high-minded vision that inspired a subsequent president to try in Libya in 2011. Cheney-ism appeals not least because it reduces the Iraq war, a venture that still puzzles many Americans including some participants, to a smaller group of like minds. In truth Iraq was a war in search of reasons, born more of a set of belligerent, fearful and ambitious impulses than a single actor or a particular defined aim. Pretending America’s statecraft was Cheney’s preserve is no answer.
The correction above isn’t just offered for the sake of historical curiosity. It has implications for how we judge policy and politics now. Recognising that even Cheney’s power was limited in the White House is also a caution against a kind of wised-up, know-it-all opinion about the sources of U.S. foreign policy, one that was widespread at the time and remains beguiling now. It is a warning against the temptation to dismiss or underestimate political opponents as dim-witted and passive. Bush, like Trump, lacked curiosity but also had a low, rat cunning. And a life of the mind, of sorts, formed over time. He was increasingly drawn to history and historians in his mental effort to comprehend the crisis unleashed by 9/11. That isn’t to rehabilitate him as some kind of virtuous philosopher-ruler. It is just to recognise him as a self-conscious agent. Oppose your opponents, don’t dismiss them.
