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Cheney's
mask is
slipping
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - In the 2000 elections, he was the
thoughtful, gray-haired Washington veteran who reassured
nervous voters that candidate George W Bush would indeed
have adult supervision if he became president of the
United States.
Calm, if intensely purposeful and
focused, always substantive, and with virtually
unmatched experience, Dick Cheney, who already at age 34
had served as White House chief of staff under president
Gerald Ford and later as defense secretary under Bush's
father during the Gulf War in 1991, embodied competence
and gravitas. In addition to his government service, he
had worked for several years as the chief executive
officer of one of the country's biggest and most
profitable corporations.
You could trust him to
round out Bush's own inexperience and curb his boyish
enthusiasms, especially, perhaps, for Texas wildcatters,
tax cuts, Christian fundamentalism, or baseball. His was
the steady hand that communicated good old mainstream
conservative Republicanism.
Now, three years
later, the image of Vice President Dick Cheney is
changing. Already tarnished by questions surrounding the
huge no-bid reconstruction contracts won by his former
company, Halliburton, in which he retains a financial
interest, as well as his refusal to disclose to Congress
what meetings he held during his formulation of Bush's
energy policy, Cheney is increasingly seen as a serious
rightwing extremist and ideologue, and by far the most
powerful number two in US history.
As much as
Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and his neo-conservative
advisors have become the lightning rod for criticism
over the Iraq war and the administration's hubris,
Cheney appears to have acted as their principal patron
and advocate with Bush himself, and more than any other
official except perhaps Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz, the driving force within the administration
for war with Iraq.
Although long in the making,
the secretive vice president's image as zealot appears
to have impressed itself in the media just in the past
two weeks.
In particular, his September 14
appearance on the Sunday television news program,
Meet the Press, when he not only defended the
administration's pre-war optimism about Iraq, but also
revived two stories long dismissed by the intelligence
community - that one of the September 11 hijackers had
met with an Iraqi spy at a Prague cafe just five months
before the attacks on New York and the Pentagon and that
Iraq sponsored the 1993 bombing of the World Trade
Center - has attracted unprecedented attention.
The Prague story, which apparently rests on a
report to Czech intelligence by a single "Arab student"
who claimed five months after the alleged meeting to
have witnessed and overheard it, had been pushed
primarily by Cheney and several neo-conservatives
outside the administration, notably Richard Perle and
James Woolsey, since it first surfaced in November,
2001.
After an exhaustive investigation, US
intelligence agencies concluded a year before the March
invasion of Iraq that the hijacker, Mohammed Atta, was
in the US at the time of the alleged meeting. Moreover,
the Iraqi spy, who has been in US custody in Iraq since
July, has apparently failed to back up the story
despite, no doubt, repeated suggestions that he do so.
According to a major account in the Washington
Post on Monday, Cheney and his top aide, I Lewis
"Scooter" Libby, continued to press the story on the
administration long after the intelligence community had
dismissed it, even insisting on the eve of Secretary of
State Colin Powell's presentation to the UN Security
Council last February on Iraq's defiance of the
council's resolutions that it be included in Powell's
indictment.
Powell kept it out, and 10 days ago,
in a major blow to Cheney's credibility, Bush himself
told reporters that the administration had "no evidence"
that Saddam Hussein played any role at all in the
September 11 attacks.
Cheney's suspicions - and
their lack of any grounding in reality - have now become
fair game in the media. "Cheney in Wonderland" was how
the Los Angeles Times titled one editorial, while
accounts in Newsweek and the Post have gone to unusual
lengths to debunk Cheney's theories.
There had
long been hints that Cheney was not quite the reasonable
and deliberate presence that he so effectively conveyed
throughout his long career.
At the beginning of
the administration, it was he who championed Rumsfeld,
his former boss in the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford
administrations, for the defense post and then insisted,
over fierce objections by Secretary of State Colin
Powell, on placing Wolfowitz in the number two position
at the Pentagon.
He also insisted, again over
Powell's misgivings, on making ultra-unilateralist John
Bolton, then vice president of the American Enterprise
Institute (where Cheney's spouse, Lynne Cheney, is a
fellow), Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and
International Security.
Bolton - praised by the
ultra-rightwing former Senate Foreign Relations
Committee chairman as "the kind of man with whom I would
want to stand at Armageddon", the final, apocalyptic
battlefield between good and evil prophesied in the
Bible - told the Wall Street Journal last year that the
"happiest moment in his government service" came when
the US pulled out of the treaty creating the
International Criminal Court.
Cheney also made
Libby his own chief of staff and national security
advisor. A hard core neo-conservative who had worked
with Wolfowitz in 1992 on a controversial draft strategy
that called for global US military dominance that was
strongly denounced by the Republican foreign policy
establishment at the time, Libby later served as general
counsel to the Cox Commission, a Congressional body
convened to investigate alleged Chinese spying and
acquisition of advanced-weapons technology. Its final
report was almost universally derided as flimsy,
exaggerated and inaccurate by both technical and China
experts.
Libby also represented Marc Rich, a
billionaire fugitive who reportedly enjoys very close
ties to Israeli intelligence and whose pardon by Bill
Clinton in the last days of his presidency became a
major scandal, but one quickly hushed by the incoming
Bush administration. The fact that Rich had renounced
his US citizenship after his conviction for tax evasion
made the pardon - and Libby's efforts to obtain one -
particularly galling for many conservatives and made
Libby himself a particularly curious choice for Cheney's
chief aide.
Cheney also reportedly played a key
role in the appointment of another controversial
neo-conservative, Elliott Abrams, to head the Middle
East office on the National Security Council. Abrams, a
strong rightwing critic of the Oslo peace process, has
identified closely with positions of the Likud Party in
Israel. Cheney himself told Israel's defense minister in
a meeting in early 2002 that he thought Palestinian
President Yasser Arafat "should be hanged".
At
the same time, in what was widely interpreted as an
effort to intimidate the Near East bureau of the State
Department, which has generally favored a more
even-handed position toward Israelis and Palestinians,
Cheney's daughter, Elizabeth, was appointed by the White
House to serve as deputy assistant secretary of state of
that office in early 2002.
And it was also Libby
and Cheney who reportedly visited the headquarters of
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) several times in
the run-up to the war in Iraq in what was taken as
pressure on CIA analysts to take a darker view of
Saddam's alleged ties to al-Qaeda and weapons of mass
destruction than what was reflected in the agency's
reports.
In spite of the change in Cheney's
media image and the questions raised about the propriety
of his ties with Halliburton and the soundness of his
judgment, there is little indication that Cheney's
influence with Bush has been reduced.
While
Powell appeared to have been given the authority to
negotiate a new Security Council resolution that would
dilute Washington's authority over reconstruction and
political affairs in Baghdad earlier this months, Cheney
led an internal effort to retain full control, even as
Powell was negotiating in New York, according to several
knowledgeable sources. "He has been far more inflexible
than Rumsfeld," said one.
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