Ex- VP Dick Cheney: A Retrospective on His Powerful Government Service

The deceased US second-in-command Dick Cheney, who died at age 84, was regarded as one of the most significant occupants of the vice-presidency in US history. While many VPs had to settle for peripheral or symbolic roles, Cheney wielded substantial power during the presidency of George W Bush, to such an extent that he was often called as the "actual president".

Bush disliked such a characterisation and said the dynamic was more complex. He pointed out that Cheney was deferential, consistently addressing him in public as President, while he addressed him as Dick. Bush disputed even characterisations of their association as a team because it implied that they were peers. In spite of these denials, Cheney considered the easygoing president pliable on a whole raft of policy decisions.

A Post-9/11 Era

In charge of a contingent of conservative hawks that included military head Donald Rumsfeld and assistant defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, he pushed hard for the armed incursion of Iraq in 2003 in response to the terrorist strikes on New York and Washington. During of the 9/11 attack, Bush had been attending a meeting at a elementary school in Florida. While Bush made his way to a underground facility in Nebraska, Cheney assumed control, directing the downing of any unresponsive aircraft heading toward the Capitol building.

Cheney claimed the attacks transformed him, making him become intent on retribution. Together with other neo-conservatives, such as Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, he lobbied for a occupation of Afghanistan in an effort to seize Osama bin Laden. Cheney then strongly advocated for the armed intervention of Iraq, even though there was little proof of Saddam Hussein playing a role.

Disputed Actions

He showed no remorse about the military campaign, in which an reckoned 100,000 Iraqis perished, and not about the enhanced interrogation of individuals rounded up after 9/11. He informed CNN in 2015 that the Iraq military action, which was founded on faulty reports echoed by Cheney, was the right decision. "It was the correct action to do then. I believed it then and I believe it now."

But even then, there were opposing views at a senior level about the botched execution of Iraq. One of the government's own representatives to the area, General Anthony Zinni (2001-03), was dismissed from the post. "I witnessed, at a minimum," he wrote later "clear negligence, negligence, and recklessness: potentially, deception, ineptitude, and dishonesty."

Additional Factors

Cheney was not completely to blame for the Iraq invasion. Even before 9/11, Wolfowitz had pushed for similar measures. He had composed a memo detailing circumstances in which American interests might be endangered (encompassing "obtaining vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil"). Wolfowitz had argued that "the US should be positioned to act independently when joint efforts cannot be orchestrated," specifically citing armed actions against Iraq.

Bush too had entered the presidency generally inclined on implementing what his predecessor had notably declined to do in 1991; overthrow Saddam. After he had been dismissed by the administration, the finance chief Paul O'Neill disclosed how, at the initial gathering of the National Security Council in January 2001, Bush had declared his plan of diminishing America's participation in the Middle East dispute and mooted armed intervention against Iraq.

Bush bore a private grievance against Saddam, convinced he had been responsible for a conspiracy to assassinate his father, President George HW Bush, on a trip to Kuwait in 1993. He furthermore objected to that one of the largest accommodations in Baghdad had a surface artwork with a image of his parent's face that each person had to tread upon.

Questioning Techniques

But it was Cheney who was part of the most vehement advocating striking Iraq, frequently citing agency briefings that were either thin or completely inaccurate. He supported what the Bush administration indirectly described as "enhanced interrogation", the employment of interrogation method and torture.

Responding to a Senate report in 2014 that found that no actionable intelligence had been obtained through the torture, Cheney disregarded the report as "loaded with crap". He informed Fox News: "We asked [the CIA] to take steps and create procedures to apprehend the perpetrators who murdered 3,000 of us on 9/11 and make sure it never happened again. That's exactly what they did and they deserve a lot of praise."

External Perception

Cheney enjoyed monikers given to him by detractors such as the dark character and The Prince of Darkness, and by the idea that he was a shadow power manipulating Bush. In Peter Baker's 2013 book about the two, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House, Cheney is quoted as saying: "Do I represent the evil genius in the background that operates invisibly emerge from his lair? This represents a effective way to work, in fact."

Corporate Connections

Dispute over his business interests followed him during his tenure as second-in-command. While he had little experience in corporate affairs but strong connections in military, especially in Saudi Arabia, he was asked to become part of Halliburton, one of the world's most substantial oil and gas companies, in 1995 as chairman and CEO.

In 2000 he assumed the role of Bush's running mate for the presidency. Controversially, during the military campaign, Halliburton was awarded US agreements totaling billions.

It made him rich. His yearly compensation during his time at the firm grew from his previous salary during his time as military head to over four million. When he departed in 2000 he had a package valued at more than $20m|twenty