Deconstructing Cheney
By James Carroll
The Boston Globe

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.

Read the rest of James Carroll’s piece Here