By Wes Pedersen
Toward the end of his presidency, it dawned on George W. Bush that Dick Cheney had been a God-awful choice as his vice president.
Track the course of events laid out by Cheney himself (and his daughter, Liz) in his new book, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir. You won’t find him admitting any such thing, but the lines between this book of revelations of dubious worth shout it out: In 2007, Bush finally balked flat out when Cheney came up with a scheme to involve the U.S. in a third war in the Middle East.
Cheney pushed Bush closer to the edge of new disaster by urging him to bomb a nuclear reactor in Syria. Cheney expected easy agreement when he proposed it at a Cabinet meeting. Bush didn’t bite: Instead he asked how many of the Bush brass on hand thought the proposal worth acting on. Not one member of the Cabinet held up a hand.
Cheney squeezed the CIA to provide information justifying the assault on Iraq. Typically, he now blames the agency for the Cabinet’s reluctance to act on Syria. No one at the meeting, he theorizes, wanted to be stung again by flawed CIA information.
Israel didn’t hesitate. It took out Syrian reactor on its own. The U.S. was off the hook.
That may have been Bush’s intent all along – let another country take the rap this time, and show the media, the Capital skeptics, and the others that he wasn’t Cheney’s lapdog.
With his book as testament, it is clear, though, that Cheney thought of himself not merely as the power behind the throne, but as a rainmaker for the military and the defense industry. His former company, Halliburton, has profited mightily from his excursions into the wars. His secret meeting with his oil baron friends at the start of the wars has never been probed in faith by Cheney’s corporate friends in Congress, nor by the media.
It’s time for such a probe.
Cheney’s book, out this week, is a distorted view of the history of the Bush regime. No one who somehow managed to throw Cheney off his game or his timetable escapes his wrath.
Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice are excoriated as weak cave-ins, preferring diplomacy to his advocacy of force. The CIA, complicit with Cheney on Iraq, is guilty of foisting false information on him about Saddam Hussein’s ability to wipe out millions via his secret stash of weapons and/or chemicals.
The “I’m the good guy, my critics were all wimps,” approach is typical Cheney. We have met him before.
At the outset, his attempts to pose himself as a normal boy growing up in the gun-loving West show us someone who dreams of becoming a hero and seems to relish the smell of gunpowder. He grew up instead to be a Viet Nam draft dodger (remember his famous excuse, “I had other priorities”?) and, it must be said, a war monger.
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Wes Pedersen is a retired Foreign Service Officer and principal at Wes Pedersen Communications and Public Relations Washington, D.C.
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