WASHINGTON - Has US Vice President Dick
Cheney become so much of an albatross around his
boss' neck that he will have to go?
While
that question may appear a bit premature at the
moment - speculation about the tenure of President
George W Bush's chief political adviser, Karl
Rove, remains on the front burner - it has loomed
over the White House since Cheney's chief of
staff, I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was indicted 10
days ago.
Libby has been charged with
perjury and obstruction of justice in connection
with the "outing" of a covert Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) operative, whose husband accused the
administration of taking the US to war under false
pretences.
But Cheney's fate rests less
with whether Libby tells prosecutors that his
former boss encouraged him to leak the operative's
identity to prominent Washington journalists than
with the White
House's calculation that the
most powerful vice president in US history has
become a serious political liability, both for
Bush and for increasingly panicked Republican
lawmakers desperate to retain control of Congress
in next year's elections.
Cheney's public
approval ratings have dropped to an all-time low,
according to the most recent Gallup soundings,
with a majority of respondents believing that the
vice president at least knew about Libby's
actions. In his latest National Journal column,
public opinion analyst William Schneider asserted
that the president now has a "Cheney problem".
A big part of that problem is Iraq, and
particularly Cheney's pre-war role as the most
aggressive administration official to promote the
invasion. With two-thirds of the public now
believing that invading Iraq was a mistake, and
more than half saying that the administration
"deliberately misled the American people" about
the reasons for the invasion, Cheney is
particularly vulnerable.
According to
Newsweek, Cheney's power has already shriveled to
virtually nil. It quoted "a senior official
sympathetic to Cheney's policies" last week as
saying, "You can say that the influence of the
vice president is going to decrease, but it's hard
to decrease from zero."
But that is almost
surely a gross, perhaps even deliberate,
exaggeration. Even if he has lost influence on
foreign policy to Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice, for example, he clearly continues to
exercise strong, if not decisive, influence on
issues that he considers priorities, such as Iran
and North Korea, and ensuring that the executive
branch has virtually absolute powers to wage the
"war on terror" in any way it sees fit.
Cheney reportedly played a key role in
vetoing a proposed trip by Assistant Secretary of
State for Asian Affairs Christopher Hill to
Pyongyang in advance of this month's round of
six-party talks in Beijing on North Korea's
nuclear program. Similarly, a State Department
proposal last month to resume direct talks with
Tehran two-and-a-half years after Cheney helped
break them off was dropped after the vice
president indicated his adamant opposition.
And a sharp loss of influence would have
made it impossible for Cheney to forcefully argue
in a meeting with Republican senators last week
that US national security would be at unacceptable
risk if the Central Intelligence Agency - and not
just the US military - were bound by pending
legislation that would ban torture and inhumane
treatment of detainees captured in the "war on
terror".
Cheney's aggressive opposition to
the so-called "McCain Amendment", which earned him
the title of "Vice President for Torture" from the
Washington Post's editorial board, offers some
measure of his confidence that he retains Bush's
ear. It also reveals his contempt for his
Republican audience in Congress, the vast majority
of whom had voted for the torture ban in the first
of a series of revolts against the White House
that began last month.
The McCain
Amendment would prohibit the use of "cruel,
inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment" as
defined by the US constitution and any
interrogation technique that is not authorized by
the US Army Field Manual, which was drafted to
comply with the Geneva Conventions.
Bush
has backed Cheney on this question, even while he
insisted that "we do not torture". Responding to
media questions in Panama on Monday, the president
asserted that, "Anything we do [to protect the
American people] ... any activity we conduct, is
within the law."
However, the question
remains whether Bush's backing will continue to be
as unconditional as it has been to date,
particularly given the unprecedented array of
forces that appear to be lining up against the
vice president.
Consider, for example, an
account in the Washington Post Monday about the
internal administration battle over the McCain
Amendment. According to the account, Cheney's
position is increasingly opposed by other
administration officials, "including cabinet
members, political appointees and Republican
lawmakers who once stood firmly behind the
administration on all matters concerning terrorism
..."
Nor is it only the State Department,
which fought Cheney on the treatment of detainees
during the first term as well, which opposes him
now. The Post named deputy national security
adviser for democracy, neo-conservative Elliot
Abrams, and his boss, National Security Adviser
Stephen Hadley, as arguing against the vice
president.
Even more remarkable was the
reported opposition of Pentagon chief Donald
Rumsfeld's new deputy, Gordon England. An unnamed
State Department official described Cheney's camp
as a "shrinking island".
England's
position on the detainee issue, which reflects
that of the uniformed military, is particularly
damaging to Cheney's position because it suggests
that Rumsfeld, an acutely sensitive political
animal in his own right, has himself deserted the
vice president on a key issue at a delicate
moment.
Last month, Lawrence Wilkerson, a
retired colonel who was former secretary of state
Colin Powell's chief of staff, accused Cheney and
Rumsfeld of jointly leading a "cabal" that
hijacked US foreign policy after the September 11
terrorist attacks against New York and the
Pentagon. He charged that the two men, who worked
closely together as White House chief of staff and
defense secretary, respectively, in the Gerald
Ford administration 30 years ago, of circumventing
the formal decision-making process in order to get
their way.
Wilkerson elaborated on that
theme during an interview last week in which he
suggested that authorization for harsh treatment
of detainees originated with Cheney.
"There was a visible audit trail from the
vice president's office through the secretary of
defense down to the commanders in the field"
authorizing practices that led to the abuse of
detainees, he told National Public Radio, adding
that Cheney's new chief of staff, David Addington,
played a particularly important role.
While the detainee issue in itself is
unlikely to bring down the vice president, growing
and aggressive Democratic pressure to investigate
the administration's use of pre-war intelligence
on Iraq - and particularly the role played by
Cheney and his "cabal" in presenting and allegedly
manipulating it - offers yet another battleground
in which the vice president will find himself
playing defense.
