The former White House chief of staff, congressman, secretary of defence and US vice-president Dick Cheney has died, his family has said. He was 84.
A Yale dropout who avoided service in Vietnam, Cheney nonetheless became a giant of Republican politics.
He was a White House aide under Richard Nixon; the youngest ever White House chief of staff, to Gerald Ford; a congressman under Ronald Reagan; secretary of defence to George HW Bush; and vice-president to George W Bush.
His stamp remains: his daughter Liz Cheney, who followed him as a representative from Wyoming, is a senior member of Republican leadership in the US House.
When the younger Bush plucked him from the corporate giant Halliburton to be his running mate in the 2000 presidential election, Cheney had already survived three heart attacks. Nor was he immune to mishap: once, while vice-president, he shot a hunting partner in the face.
Nonetheless, he became one of the most powerful vice-presidents, widely reported to wield great influence over the less experienced Bush.
In office on September 11th, 2001, Cheney took charge after the attacks on New York and Washington while Bush was hurried to safety. Hugely experienced and with no department to run, working with the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, an ally from the days of Nixon and Ford, he assumed policy control.
Cheney sought international co-operation but also thought, he later wrote, the Bush administration “had an obligation to do whatever it took to defend America”.
Troops were soon in Afghanistan, fighting the Taliban and hunting al-Qaeda. But Cheney’s place in history will be dominated by the decision to invade Iraq.
He was defence secretary during the first Gulf War, in 1990 and 1991, a swift campaign to eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. A decade later, Bush and Cheney’s public rationale for war was that the Iraqi dictator was linked to al-Qaeda and thus 9/11, and possessed weapons of mass destruction. By March 2003, when US and coalition forces invaded, no proof had been found for either charge. They were soon proved false.
By February 2021, the official US death toll in Iraq was 4,431, with nearly 32,000 wounded. The toll in Afghanistan, where US troops still fought, was 2,352 with more than 20,000 wounded.
The violence spread. According to the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, since 2001 “at least 800,000 people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan”.
The treatment of prisoners taken by the US in its so-called war on terror proved hugely controversial. Out of office, Cheney continued to defend the use of torture against detainees after 9/11.
Speaking to the Guardian in 2018, on the release of Vice, a darkly comic biopic starring Christian Bale, the Cheney biographer Jake Bernstein said: “There has been some rehabilitation with George W Bush. In comparison with Donald Trump, everyone starts to look better. But Dick Cheney liked the fact everyone called him Darth Vader. I don’t think there’ll be an effort on his part to soften his image.” – Guardian
