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Vice President of the Apocalypse
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Vice President of the Apocalypse
09/08/2004
For those who feared that the speakers at last week's Republican National Convention had failed to adequately impress upon the American electorate the view that death and grief and sorrow would be the predictable byproducts of John Kerry's election to the presidency, Vice President Dick Cheney has spelled out the threat in excruciating detail.
"It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States," Cheney grumbled to a gathering of the ceaselessly-nodding Republican party faithful in Des Moines.
Cheney's claim that the replacement of the administration he runs -- with an assist from George W. Bush -- by a Kerry administration would call down the wrath of global terrorism on the homeland is easily the most irresponsible statement of a campaign that has not exactly been characterized by moderation.
The Democratic response was to condemn Cheney in the bizarrely tepid fashion that has come to characterize the opposition party's dysfunction attempt to retake the White House. "Protecting America from vicious terrorists is not a Democratic or Republican issues, it's an American issue and Dick Cheney and George Bush should know that," whined Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards.
Let it be recorded that, despite the firm slap on the wrist that was administered by Mr. Edwards, Mr. Cheney did not choose to retract his remarks. And he won't.
Edwards and other Democrats make a mistake when they assume, as Edwards did, that the vice president is merely playing politics. When Edwards suggested that Cheney was employing "scare tactics," and that the Republicans "will do anything and say anything to save their jobs," he gave Cheney far too much credit.
It is true, of course, that the vice president would say anything and do anything in order to maintain his grip on power. But it does not necessarily follow that Cheney is simply carrying out a political hit. Indeed, if the past is prologue, there is every reason to assume that the vice president believes what he is saying about the damage that will befall the land if he and his minions are not working the levers of authority.
Few figures in American politics maintain a world view that is so consistently apocalyptic as does Cheney. Fewer still have allowed petty fears and profound ignorance to so dramatically warp their actions and public pronouncements.
Cheney's Cold War obsessions have frequently placed him on the wrong side of history, causing him to misread the geopolitical realities of regions around the world -- and of the key players within them. This is the man who was so certain that the African National Congress was a dangerous group that he regularly voted, as a member of Congress in the 1980s, against House resolutions calling for the release of Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners in South Africa. While leading conservative Republicans such as Jack Kemp were hailing Mandela as an iconic fighter for freedom and racial justice, Cheney continued to decry the ANC as "a terrorist organization" and to dismiss its leaders as threatening radicals.
During the same period that Cheney was championing the imprisonment of Mandela, the Republican representative from Wyoming was one of the most prominent Congressional advocates for the Reagan administration's illegal war making in Central America. When the administration's crimes were exposed as the Iran-Contra scandal, former White House counsel John Dean notes, "Cheney became President Reagan's principle defender in Congress." Cheney argued that those who sought to hold the Reagan administration accountable for illegal acts in Latin America were "prepared to undermine the presidency" and the ability of future presidents to defend the United States.
When he left the House to become George Herbert Walker Bush's Secretary of Defense, Cheney struggled to maintain the Pentagon's Cold War footing even as the Berlin Wall was crumbling. Obsessed with the notion that the United States should retain the capacity to launch preemptive wars against nation's that were perceived even as possible threats, Cheney was a hyperactive advocate for the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Unfortunately for Secretary of Defense, whose passion for deposing Saddam Hussein reached surreal levels, the "Operation Scorpion" scheme he and his aides developed for imposing "regime change" upon Iraq was so ineptly plotted that it was scrapped after a cursory review by General Norman Schwarzkopf. "I wondered whether Cheney had succumbed to the phenomenon I'd observed among some secretaries of the army," observed Schwarzkopf, the commander on the ground in the region. "Put a civilian in charge of professional military men and before long he's no longer satisfied with setting policy but wants to outgeneral the generals."
When Cheney and a self-selected Praetorian Guard set up the new Republican administration that took charge of the White House after the 2000 election, the vice president could not be bothered to address real threats to the country because he remained obsessed with what turned out to be a ridiculously hyped Iraqi threat. As former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill noted, Cheney and his aides were in the first days of 2001 "already planning the next war in Iraq and the shape of a post-Saddam country."
On the issue of Iraq, Cheney has allowed his tendency toward apocalyptic fantasies to go unchecked. When the vice president was peddling the "case" for invasion, he made far more remarkable claims than did Bush. Charging that Saddam had "resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," Cheney warned a 2002 Veterans of Foreign Wars convention that, "Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror, and seated atop 10 percent of the world's oil reserves, Saddam Hussein could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of the world's energy supplies, directly threaten American friends throughout the region, and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail."
Whew! Scary stuff!
Even scarier, however, is the fact that, as Cheney's claims were proven wrong, the vice president continued to repeat them -- long after Bush had backed off, and long after there was any political advantage to be gained.
This, of course, is where assessing Cheney gets difficult. It is no longer clear where Cheney is deliberately deceiving the American people and where he has deliberately deceived himself. It is easy to call Cheney a "liar," -- and there is no question that the vice president has been caught more than once twisting the truth. But Dick Cheney's biggest lies are almost certainly the ones he tells himself. As such, he will never back away from his charge that changing administrations would be a "wrong choice."
A man who so frequently anticipates the apocalypse is likely to fall into the habit of believing that he alone recognizes that true dangers facing his country.
But why would anyone else treat Cheney seriously? Why would the press repeat his over-the-top charges without noting that Dick Cheney has a track record of reading the world wrong, imagining threats where they do not exist and neglecting real dangers? Why would it go unmentioned that the man who is questioning John Kerry's judgement thought Nelson Mandela was a terrorist?
That's what John Edwards should be talking about.
Instead of complaining that the vice president is engaging in "scare tactics," the Democrat should be suggesting that Americans ought to be afraid, very afraid, of Dick Cheney.
(John Nichols' book on Cheney, Dick: The Man Who Is President, has just been released by The New Press.
http://www.thenation.com/thebeat/in...?bid=1&pid=1793
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Tricky Dick
by Doug Ireland
When Dubya picked Dick Cheney as his running mate, the little screen was awash in flatulent flatteries from the chattering classes: "a grown-up," "presidential," "all steak and no sizzle" were some of the most-repeated encomiums sprayed in Cheney's direction. But after Gore surrogates fanned out across the blabshows armed with talking points about Cheney's reactionary voting record in Congress--against Head Start, school lunches, the liberation from prison of Nelson Mandela, the toxic-waste-cleanup Superfund and the like--Jay Leno cracked to his late-night audience that Bush/Cheney was "the Wizard of Oz ticket: One has no brain, the other has no heart."
When that equal-opportunity war criminal Colin Powell (the man who helped cover up the My Lai massacre) delivered his prime-time benediction of Cheney to the Philadelphia Republicans, among those chuckling at the enormous hypocrisy of Powell's effusive blessing was Leon Sigal, a former member of the New York Times editorial board. Sigal's forthcoming book, Hang Separately: Cooperative Security Between the United States and Russia, 1985-1994, details how Cheney, as Defense Secretary, remained a hard-line cold warrior even after the fall of the Berlin wall and fought Powell's proposed cuts in military spending and US troops abroad. "Cheney was very skeptical of Gorbachev and kept up his cold war attitude long after Powell and [President] Bush had changed," Sigal told me. "Powell thought nukes were useless. In 1990, Powell wanted to pull all the nukes off surface ships and out of Europe and Korea, but Cheney opposed it. Bush was about to do it in August of '90 when Kuwait was invaded. A year later, Powell pushed the proposal again, and Cheney again opposed it." The pullback was finally announced in September 1991. Cheney's ostrichlike refusal to admit that the world had changed meant "keeping the defense budget higher than the substantial cuts Powell wanted," says Sigal, "and keeping conventional forces in Europe at a higher level.... Cheney was very conservative in the sense he didn't want to move--Powell says this in his memoirs. President Bush, in the book he wrote with Brent Scowcroft [A World Transformed], also says Cheney resisted deeper cuts."
To take just one example, on page 452 of his memoirs Powell describes his battle against the "foolish" attempt to produce an improved nuclear artillery shell. "I was becoming more and more convinced that tactical nuclear weapons had no place on a battlefield," Powell writes. "At a time when we were dismantling huge intermediate-range nuclear missiles, why should we be putting money into refining small tactical nukes of questionable value? My argument ran into a stone wall.... Hard-line Pentagon civilian policymakers opposed me, including Dick Cheney."
The national press has been telling us what a "great manager" Cheney was at DoD. But for whom? Cheney showed a particular indulgence for military-industrial-complex contractors headed by political cronies. Under his predecessor, Reagan Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci, the Pentagon had developed an advance procurement system--stretching forward two decades--with no-bid contracts awarded for a raft of weapons and intelligence systems. On leaving government, Carlucci joined the Carlyle Group, a prime military contractor, bringing with him knowledge of which firms would get those contracts. Carlyle then began buying them up, and made a bundle when the Pentagon bucks began flowing their way, later selling many of them at a huge profit.
Says a high-ranking military officer (now retired) who has an intimate knowledge of those deals but would only speak with a guarantee of anonymity, "These contracts were let with no normal safeguards or protections to insure that the government got what it paid for," on Cheney's watch. "We have been paying through the nose for a long time for those contracts," for everything from arms-control-treaty hardware and software systems to the J-STARS system, which monitors on-the-ground movement of vehicles and personnel and was extensively used in Desert Storm and Kosovo. Cheney, he says, could have reviewed or canceled these contracts at any time but refused to do so. "Why," he asks, "are we letting contracts for multiyear procurement framed in a way that all the risk is being taken by the government and not by the people who got these wonderful contracts? Even if we had to pay a contractual penalty on some of them, don't you think it would have made sense to at least review them? It would take some real forensic accounting to figure out how much more these deals cost the taxpayers than they should have. And this was not just Carlyle exclusively--the joy was spread around. It's a damned odd way of doing business."
Undoubtedly, one reason Cheney was so indulgent of folks like Carlucci who cashed in on their government service (James Baker and Dick Darman are now also on the Carlyle payroll) is that he planned to do the same thing himself. When Cheney became CEO of Halliburton in 1995, the energy conglomerate did only a third of its business abroad. Building on the relationships he knitted at Defense, particularly during the Gulf War, Cheney has aggressively expanded Halliburton's foreign operations to more than 70 percent of its $14.9 billion annual business, boosting the company's stock value more than 100 percent. Cheney nearly tripled Halliburton's spending on federal lobbying (not counting the millions it has ladled out to a host of conservative business and trade associations). No surprise, then, that with Cheney in charge Halliburton has doubled its government contracts, to $2.3 billion. The company's latest annual report lists its Brown & Root Services Division's "two largest customers" as the US Defense Department and the British Defense Ministry. Halliburton has also raked in $1.5 billion in US government loans from the Export-Import Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, up from $100 million in such loans before Cheney took over. That's a lot of "compassion" for these phony fiscal conservatives, and it explains why the Center for Public Integrity has branded Cheney's company a "corporate-welfare hog."
Cheney has made several fortunes from his helmsmanship at Halliburton: According to Reuters, he was paid nearly $2 million in compensation in 1999 (down from $4.4 million the previous year) and given stock options worth from $7.4 million to $18.8 million (depending on the stock's future performance). This is on top of the $45.5 million in stock that Cheney owns as the company's largest shareholder, plus another $12.5 million in exercisable stock options. Given this accumulated lucre, Cheney's recent wailings about the financial hardship he would endure as a mere Vice President should leave few of us weeping.
Cheney has not been chary about doing business with some of the world's most despotic oligarchies and corrupt dictatorships. Poppy helped him gin up clients: When Bush père went to Riyadh in March 1996 to receive a medal from Saudi Arabia's King Fahd, Cheney went along for the ride, and was included by the elder Bush in his meetings with the Saudi Defense Minister "to discuss issues of common interest," as a Saudi Embassy press release delicately put it. These tyrants include not only the Saudis and the gaudy Gulf emirs (one of Halliburton's five international offices is in Dubai) but also the sanguineous regimes in Syria, Turkmenistan, Burma and Algeria. With one notable exception--Larry Kaplan's dissection of Halliburton's dirty dealings with Heydar Aliyev's brutal Azerbaijani dictatorship in the August 8 New Republic--the press has largely ignored the Cheney-run company's squalid relations with these regimes, where bribery-to-do-business is the rule. Oil-industry sources say that one way oil-related giants like Halliburton get around the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is by giving sizable gifts to the private foundations run by these ruling elites, which makes the ultimate destination of this laundered money nearly impossible to trace.
In Nigeria, environmental groups have accused Halliburton under Cheney of murder. According to Oronto Douglas, a respected leader of an indigenous minority who heads Nigeria's Environmental Rights Action, an unarmed youth named Gidikumo Sule was killed by the Mobile Police in July 1997 in the course of a protest that involved the seizure of a Halliburton barge at Opuama, a village in the Niger delta. Halliburton is a major subcontractor of Chevron in Nigeria; their dumping of poisonous chemicals into the water during drilling operations has poisoned the water supply. The Opuama protesters were also denouncing Halliburton's failure to keep its promises to employ local youths. Says the ERA's Douglas, "The Mobile Police are paid for by the oil companies, both under the military dictatorship of General Abacha we had then and the civilian dictatorship we have now, and deploying them is always done at the oil companies' request. We call them the 'Kill and Go' squads, because they can kill and go away with no questions asked. At Opuama, the order to open fire was given by Halliburton officials. Their lives were not threatened--these protests always involve nothing more lethal than placards, song and chants." Douglas says he is also investigating more recent incidents, in which Halliburton officials ordered what he calls "brutal repression" of peaceful protesters near Warri and Gbaruamata; four people were seriously injured. (Halliburton did not respond to a request for comment.)
All of this suggests that Cheney's past is not yet a dry well.
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20000821&s=ireland |
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| NYCTrancefan |
| Dick Cheney is the prime example of an ugly American. He is utilizing fears and paranoia to attempt to scare people into voting Republican, because we will fight all the wars for you folks. What a disgusting sack of turd this man is. His degenerate behavior in playing on the mind of many uninformed Americans is unbelievable. Just shout the words Osama, terrorism, liberal and you can garner some votes, without even getting indepth on the issues that is:nervous: |
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