The deceased US vice-president Dick Cheney, who died at the age of 84, was regarded as one of the most powerful occupants of the vice-presidency in US history. While numerous VPs had to settle for peripheral or figurehead roles, Cheney held huge sway during the term of George W Bush, to the point that he was often called as the "true president".
Bush objected to this portrayal and stated the dynamic was more nuanced. He pointed out that Cheney was respectful, consistently addressing him in public as the President, while he referred to him as Dick. Bush challenged even portrayals of their partnership as a team because it indicated that they were peers. Regardless of these objections, Cheney considered the easygoing president pliable on a whole raft of administrative determinations.
A Post-9/11 Era
At the head of a faction of conservative hawks that featured military head Donald Rumsfeld and deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz, he pushed hard for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 in answer to the terrorist strikes on New York and Washington. During of the 9/11 strike, Bush had been attending a gathering at a elementary school in Florida. As Bush traveled to a secret bunker in Nebraska, Cheney took charge, commanding the destruction of any non-communicating airplanes nearing the government building.
Cheney claimed the attacks altered his perspective, leading him to become focused on retribution. Together with other neo-cons, including Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, he lobbied for a invasion of Afghanistan in an attempt to seize Osama bin Laden. Cheney then vigorously pushed for the military action of Iraq, even though there was no evidence of Saddam Hussein playing a role.
Controversial Actions
He expressed no regrets about the military campaign, in which an approximated 100,000 Iraqis died, or about the harsh treatment of individuals captured after 9/11. He told CNN in 2015 that the Iraq invasion effort, which was founded on misleading intelligence echoed by Cheney, was the right course of action. "It was the proper decision to do at that time. I believed it at the time and I maintain that stance presently."
However even then, there were dissenting voices at a high level about the mishandling of Iraq. One of the White House's own special envoys to the region, General Anthony Zinni (2001-03), was not reappointed from the position. "I saw, at a minimum," he wrote later "obvious failure, negligence, and recklessness: potentially, deception, ineptitude, and dishonesty."
Additional Factors
Cheney was not solely accountable for the Iraq military action. Before 9/11, Wolfowitz had advocated for comparable steps. He had drafted a memo outlining circumstances in which national priorities might be endangered (including "access to essential resources, mainly Persian Gulf oil"). Wolfowitz had contended that "the United States should be positioned to operate alone when collective action prove impossible," specifically citing defense operations against Iraq.
Bush too had entered the Oval Office somewhat determined on executing what his predecessor had notably declined to do in 1991; remove Saddam. Subsequent to he had been dismissed by the White House, the Treasury head Paul O'Neill recounted how, at the first meeting of the National Security Council in January 2001, Bush had declared his plan of reducing America's participation in the regional tensions and proposed military action against Iraq.
Bush held a private grievance against Saddam, convinced he had been involved in a conspiracy to assassinate his predecessor, President George HW Bush, on a visit to Kuwait in 1993. He also resented that one of the most prominent accommodations in Baghdad had a floor mural with a portrait of his parent's visage that everyone had to walk over.
Questioning Techniques
Yet it was Cheney who was one of the most outspoken supporting striking Iraq, frequently quoting information documents that were whether insubstantial or completely inaccurate. He supported what the Bush White House euphemistically referred to as "enhanced interrogation", the employment of waterboarding and torture.
Answering a Senate document in 2014 that found that no actionable intelligence had been obtained through the interrogation methods, Cheney rejected the findings as "loaded with crap". He stated to Fox News: "We instructed [the CIA] to establish protocols and create programmes to capture the perpetrators who took the lives of 3,000 of us on 9/11 and guarantee it never happened again. That is precisely what they did and they merit a lot of credit."
Public Persona
Cheney reveled in nicknames imposed on him by critics such as Darth Vader and The Prince of Darkness, and by the idea that he was a shadow power directing Bush. In Peter Baker's 2013 book about the pair, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House, Cheney is reported as stating: "Do I represent the evil genius in the background that operates invisibly leave his hole? It's a advantageous way to work, truthfully."
Commercial Ties
Debate over his commercial relationships pursued him during his tenure as vice-president. Even though he had minimal expertise in corporate affairs but established relationships in defence, notably in Saudi Arabia, he was offered a position at Halliburton, one of the world's biggest energy corporations, in 1995 as chairman and chief executive.
In 2000 he became Bush's election partner for the White House. Contentiously, during the military campaign, Halliburton was given US contracts totaling multiple billions.
It made him rich. His yearly earnings during his period at the company grew from his previous salary when he was defence secretary to $4.4m. When he departed in 2000 he had a severance arrangement totaling over $20m|twenty
