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| December 7, 2005 | ||||
Cheney at the Alamo |
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| by Christopher Deliso | ||||
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Things would have been better for George W. Bush had his vice president just been more, well, vice presidential. In a modest, supportive role, as an influential facilitator of the president's policies rather than an aggressive shaper of them, Cheney could have remained both worthy of respect and suitably distant, as would appear to befit his job profile and his professional experience. As such he could have put his personal stamp on the office, in the manner of predecessors such as the earnest technocrat (Al Gore) or the hapless comic sidekick (Dan Quayle). Alas, Cheney adopted another persona entirely: that of the malevolent power behind the throne, becoming the man of a thousand undisclosed locations and constant apocalyptic admonitions to war without end. Becoming the president in everything but name, Cheney and the neocons with whom he sympathized crafted the disastrous war in Iraq that is now dragging down Bush's second term. That Cheney would seek such a role isn't hard to understand. After all, when candidate Bush once upon a time asked the elder statesman to suggest a possible running mate, Cheney nominated himself. In various other fields of human endeavor, such opportunism from a trusted elder would be seen as crass exploitation. To this day it remains unclear as to whether George W. Bush knew exactly what he was getting into by taking Cheney's advice – and whether the former even considered that someday he might need to be gotten out of it. Writing in the Financial Times on Dec. 2, Philip Stephens states succinctly how the uncompromising stance of the vice president in upholding the CIA's right to torture at will has ruined the credibility of America (that alleged shining example of democracy and human rights) abroad. For Stephens, the government's "denials" of running covert torture operations "are rendered virtually worthless by the stance of Dick Cheney, the vice president." Noting that Cheney would like to exempt the CIA from legislation against "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" of detainees, Stephens poses this rhetorical question: "Why would the CIA need an exemption, if it did not employ torture?" Of course, Cheney does have his supporters – though they don't include the majority of senators or congressmen or the majority of Americans in general. The main ones are the neocons, whose ruthlessness and pathologies are well known already. Aside from them, torture-supporters include those patriotic sorts who dare not withhold any weapon from the government's arsenal if it'll help win the war against the terr'ists faster (as if torturing people ever expedited the acquisition of a truthful answer, anyway). However, while the sponsor of the legislation, John McCain, will not move an inch from his position on the moral high ground, neither will Cheney, a scoundrel holed up in the last refuge of amorality. Is it this battle, then, that could finally result in the removal of the Bush administration's dark overlord? Is Dick Cheney, in his truly outrageous defense of an indefensible principle incompatible with all American values (not to mention in his role in both the Plamegate and Nigergate scandals) being forced to hunker down in an ideological and political Alamo of his own making? For George W. Bush, part of the good fortune of being perceived as a blank slate is that he can be erased and rewritten endlessly. The average person will always have some measure of sympathy for his mediocrity, because the mediocre is usually not too far from home. Sheer malevolence is another story. Despite all the disaster and death Bush's wars have brought over the past few years, my guess is that the average Joe would probably not mind having a beer with George W. But it's hard to imagine anyone wanting to sidle up to the bar next to Dick Cheney (except maybe Judith Miller). That Cheney has thus far survived despite it all owes first to the administration's conventional wisdom that internal discord is a sign of weakness, and that termination, implying terminal discord, thus means terminal weakness. This is why the president continually refused to allow gentle Secretary of Death Donald Rumsfeld to resign following the Abu Ghraib torture scandal and the disastrous course of a war that the latter had incompetently planned. However, despite the indictment of his chief of staff, Lewis Libby, the vice president has so far brushed aside all criticism. It looks as if Cheney is going to fight early termination all the way. If it really is a siege, it looks like Cheney's planning to take a lot of people with him – whether they want to go or not. Perhaps Stephens was overly optimistic in arguing that Condoleezza Rice, allegedly the most powerful secretary of state in the modern age, is going to neutralize the influence of the most powerful vice president of all time, a man who can bend whole constitutions single-handedly and effortlessly deflect political missiles. Because at this moment, Rice is being put through the wringer over the latest torture-related scandal to hit the administration – alleged secret American torture camps in Europe and elsewhere. On a fence-mending tour of the Continent this week, Rice has been forced to defend the indefensible – a position that Cheney still relishes. In fact, Rice's tactic has not been simply to deny the allegations (though there has been some of that), but to actually argue for the legitimacy of American actions. As she "robustly defended the CIA's extrajudicial seizure, transportation, and interrogation of thousands of suspects," reports the Times (UK) online, Rice "responded to European demands for explanations of secret CIA flights from EU territory by insisting that aggressive U.S. actions had 'prevented attacks in Europe' and 'saved innocent lives.'" And, while denying that American treatment of detainees does not technically amount to torture, she refused specific comment – using the same old code of secrecy: "We cannot discuss information that would compromise intelligence, law enforcement, and military operations." The Europeans aren't buying it, however. From Italian indignation to German inquiries into terror flights to British incredulity over Rice's refutations that "defy belief," it is clear that America's policy is being met with revulsion by its oldest allies. And, while the Bush administration's vision of spreading democracy globally is allegedly underpinned by universal values common to all humans, Rice doesn't seem to think so: "[T]he captured terrorists of the 21st century do not fit easily into traditional systems of criminal or military justice, which were designed for different needs. We have had to adapt." All of this nonsense Rice is now faithfully spouting is nothing other than Cheney logic and Cheney policy, Cheney secrecy and Cheney deceit. So it hardly seems that the secretary of state is making a sea change in the administration's course. Rather, it would seem that Cheney is not planning to give up quietly, and if he is forced to, will take the administration with him. Indeed, that Rice is now being portrayed as a match for the grim overlord is a testament merely to the times and the ways. She owes her job to the hard-fought victory of Cheney and the neocons over her predecessor, Colin Powell. But that was a tag-team effort, and in any case, Rice is no Colin Powell. If, as is often mentioned, the neophyte President Bush needed to hold someone's hand upon entering office, he certainly picked the wrong person's, especially considering his apparent predetermination to wage foreign wars. Powell, after all, was the experienced military man and a voice of relative moderation and responsibility. Cheney (ironically, the one who had had "other priorities" when asked to serve in Vietnam) was the voice not of reason but of the military-industrial complex. From over on the Dark Side of the Force, the old man delights in predicting that the death and destruction his policies have wrought will keep on killing for decades after he (no doubt peacefully) passes away. Back in 2003, when Powell was still serving, Sen. Joseph Biden characterized White House interpersonal dynamics thus: "[L]ike with a horse, Powell is always able to lead Bush to the water. But just as he is about to put his head down, Cheney up in the saddle says, 'Un-uh,' and yanks up the reins before Bush can drink the water. That's my image of how it goes." With Rice faithfully spouting Cheney's policy to the Europeans, and the vice president apparently prepared to fight any and all critics, it looks as if the horse has been ridden away from the oasis and straight into the Alamo. If Cheney has to go out in a blaze of glory, he's trying to ensure that he won't go out alone.
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Christopher Deliso is an American journalist, travel writer and author concentrating on the Balkans and Southeast Europe, where he has lived and traveled for almost a decade. His criticisms of interventionist foreign policy can be found in his writings for Antiwar.com, and in his recent work on the West's failures to eradicate foreign-funded Muslim extremists in the Balkans, The Coming Balkan Caliphate: The Threat of Radical Islam to Europe and the West (Praeger Security International, 2007). Mr Deliso directs the Balkan-interest news and analysis website, Balkanalysis.com and is also the author of a travelogue, Hidden Macedonia (Haus Publishing, London). He holds an MPhil with distinction in Byzantine Studies from Oxford University.
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