He served as Secretary of Defense under President George H.W. Bush during Operation Desert Storm. He served as vice president in the young Bush administration during the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Dick Cheney, who died Tuesday at the age of 84, was arguably one of the most powerful and influential U.S. vice presidents in history.
It was said many times on the day of his death that Cheney was President George W. Bush’s chief operating officer.
And as chief operating officer, he was one of the strongest and outspoken proponents of regime change in Iraq, perhaps his most enduring and darkest legacy.
“Simply put, there is no question that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no question that he is stockpiling weapons of mass destruction to use against our friends, allies, and us.”
Simply put, the Iraqi president did not have weapons of mass destruction. He wasn’t collecting them to use against anyone. But these mythical “weapons of mass destruction” provided the pretext for a costly, clumsy, and high-handed occupation that opened a Pandora’s box of war and subsequent bloodshed, displacement, terrorism, and oppression. The box is still open.
The U.S.-led military operations that Cheney helped plan were spectacular from an American perspective. Swift and decisive, it took American and coalition forces just 20 days to invade Iraq and reach Baghdad.
Cheney must bear some responsibility, but the occupation was a disaster.
Trouble began in cities such as Fallujah and Ramadi within weeks of Hussein’s ouster in April 2003, and months later, the US-led coalition was struggling to maintain order and failing in many areas.
The profession’s failures were numerous in relation to security, governance, economics and the provision of basic municipal services.
Simply put, Americans willingly encountered a situation in which they were largely ignorant (or, critics argue, deliberately indifferent) about the complexities of ancient societies.
“Saddam knew his enemies and killed them,” Abu Kazim, a shopkeeper in Baghdad, told me a year after the US-led invasion. “But Americans don’t know who’s who, even if they don’t mean it. They’re putting us all at risk.”
It was also around this time that the torture scandal at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison emerged. Images of Iraqi detainees being stripped naked and abused were published in the media and shocked the world.
“They were taunting us: ‘Shut up! You son of a bitch! Shut up!'” Heydar Sabah Ali told me.
Heydar was prisoner No. 13077 at Abu Ghraib and was one of the people photographed by U.S. prisoners in various positions of agony.
“When we spoke, they hit us hard in sensitive areas like our kidneys, chest, and throat. Our bodies were covered in bruises,” Heydar told me in April 2004.
Heydar, a traffic police officer during Hussein’s regime, was never charged and released in early 2004.
While then-Vice President Cheney condemned those behind the torture scandal, he also defended waterboarding as an effective means of extracting important information (many intelligence experts say waterboarding is torture and that victims will say anything to avoid further abuse).
Today, Iraq is stable. Baghdad is no longer a war zone. The country is still crippled by corruption, and it was only a few years ago that after years of war it was able to defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) (with US and allied support), itself a direct result of the US invasion and occupation. Iran, Baghdad’s biggest enemy during the Hussein regime, now enjoys significant influence in Iraq, a direct result of the US invasion.
Aside from the moral quagmire and human cost of America’s foreign military failures, there is the lasting economic damage from the war that Cheney so fervently defended. Since September 11, 2001, conflicts have cost the United States $8 trillion, according to Brown University’s Cost of War Project.
The post-9/11 fiasco that Cheney was involved in can be linked to the rise of ISIS, persistent instability in the Middle East, the immigration crisis, and the crushing debt burden ($38 trillion and growing) looming over the U.S. economy.
It would be unfair to blame Cheney alone for the plight of Iraq, and the broader Middle East. After all, he is just one in a long line of American leaders who have acted erratically in the region, with dire consequences and leaving the United States in further instability.
