[Peace-discuss] The long march of Dick Cheney

[Lisa Chason]

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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

11/25/05 "
<http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2005/11/24/cheney/print.html>
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. 

-- By Sidney Blumenthal 
 
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