Dick Cheney and the dark side of politics

MEMOIR: LARA MARLOWEreviews In My Time: A Personal and Political MemoirBy Dick Cheney, with Liz Cheney Threshold Editions, 565pp. $35

THEY WERE the horsemen of an apocalyptic decade, a truculent trio who saw themselves as the incarnation of good in a perpetual war on terror. Together they destroyed Iraq, the economy and the United States’ standing in the world. Now they’ve completed a trilogy of self-justifying memoirs.

George W Bush was first, with Decision Points, last November. Bush at least admits he was "sickened . . . when we didn't find weapons of mass destruction". In Known and Unknownthe former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld regretted his declaration that "we know where [Saddam's weapons of mass destruction] are".

Dick Cheney regrets nothing. There is something particularly chilling about Cheney, the most powerful vice-president in US history. “We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will,” Cheney said on television five days after 9/11. “It’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.”

Cheney conveniently omits his own whopping lie of August 2002: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us.”

At a minimum, 102,417 civilians have died violently in Iraq since the US invasion, according to the Iraq Body Count database. The US state department warned this month that “violence and threats against US citizens persist and no region should be considered safe from dangerous conditions” in Iraq. Yet Cheney washes his hands of the destruction of that country. “It’s important to remember that the ultimate blame for the violence and bloodshed in Iraq after liberation lies with those who created it – the terrorists and those who were supporting them, primarily al-Qaeda and Iran,” he writes.

On weapons of mass destruction, Cheney argues that he can’t be faulted when others, including Tony Blair, said the same thing. “The intelligence that Saddam had stockpiles of WMD was wrong,” Cheney writes perfunctorily. He dismisses the Bush administration’s false claims that Saddam was in league with al-Qaeda – a fiction believed by more than two-thirds of Americans – as another result of poor intelligence.

Yet Cheney was a chief perpetrator and perpetuator of these lies. As the investigative reporter Bob Woodward wrote, “Cheney took intelligence and converted uncertainty and ambiguity into fact.”

Bush’s secretary of state Colin Powell blamed Cheney’s chief of staff, “Scooter” Libby (“One of the most competent, intelligent, and honourable people I have ever met,” Cheney writes), for the bogus intelligence that Powell presented to the UN Security Council. Libby was later convicted of one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury and one count of making false statements in connection with the leaking of the identity of the CIA operative Valerie Plame. Plame’s husband, the retired ambassador Joe Wilson, had angered the Bush administration by denouncing its lie that Saddam Hussein was shopping for uranium in Africa.

Cheney's memoir ought to come with a health warning that readers should seek the full truth elsewhere. He devotes eight pages to the African uranium canard, again blaming British intelligence for false information that in this case found its way into Bush's 2003 state-of-the-union address. As pointed out by Walter Pincus, of the Washington Post, a September 2002 CIA report had cast doubt on the credibility of British sources.

Cheney writes that he was "appalled" by the Watergate wiretapping scandal in the 1970s. But, by his own admission nearly 300 pages later, he wanted to continue the Bush administration's use of secret wiretaps on the grounds that seeking approval through legally established channels was too slow. As documented in Barton Gellman's book Angler: The Cheney Vice-Presidency, Cheney kept Bush in the dark about his battle with high-ranking officials who threatened to resign if the wiretaps continued beyond the spring of 2004.

Cheney urged Bush to bomb a Syrian nuclear reactor in June 2007, telling the national security council that to do so would “demonstrate our seriousness with respect to non-proliferation. It would enhance our credibility in that part of the world.” Israel destroyed the reactor three months later.

What Cheney fails to mention, as reported by Woodward, is that the then CIA director, Michael Hayden, said he had “low confidence” that the reactor was part of a nuclear-weapons programme.

“I was the lone voice,” Cheney reflects ruefully. Bush asked the meeting of the national security council whether anyone agreed with Cheney. “Not a single hand went up around the room,” Cheney writes. “I had done all I could.” A participant in the meeting told Woodward that Bush rolled his eyes after Cheney made his “lone-voice” claim there.

With the exception of his old friend Rumsfeld – the two have been thick as thieves since the late 1960s – Cheney gives the impression that the rest of the Bush administration were wimps. Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice come across as pesky, naive diplomats, always wanting to make peace. Cheney’s ridicule of Powell’s wish to convene a Middle East peace conference in 2002, and his dismissal of Rice’s attempts to negotiate an end to the North Korean nuclear programme, are particularly harsh.

Cheney regrets the Obama administration’s cessation of waterboarding, which he once referred to as a mere “dunk in the water”. Calling it torture “is to libel the dedicated professionals who have saved American lives and to cast terrorists and murderers as innocent victims,” he writes. He gloats that “for President Obama the ‘imperative’ of closing Guantánamo has evolved into the necessity of keeping it open”.

At the end of his book Cheney frets about hints early in the Obama administration that Bush-era torturers and the lawyers who justified their actions might face prosecution. He needn’t have worried; this is one can of worms that Obama won’t touch.

Cheney is still full of bombast, but his misdeeds are not forgotten. He was scheduled to promote his book in Vancouver next Monday. Gail Davidson, the cofounder of the international group Lawyers Against the War, appealed to the Canadian government to bar Cheney from entering the country, or to arrest and prosecute him for torture and crimes against humanity.

Lara Marlowe is Washington Correspondent of The Irish Times