The deceased US second-in-command Dick Cheney, who died at the age of 84, was regarded as among the most powerful incumbents of the vice-presidency in the nation's history. Whereas numerous vice-presidents were confined to minor or ceremonial roles, Cheney exercised substantial power during the term of George W Bush, to such an extent that he was frequently referred to as the "true president".
Bush resented such a characterisation and said the relationship was more complex. He noted that Cheney was respectful, invariably referring to him in public settings as the President, while he called him as Dick. Bush challenged even characterisations of their association as a team because it implied that they were equals. Regardless of such protestations, Cheney found the laidback president pliable on a broad range of policy decisions.
A Post-9/11 Era
Leading of a faction of conservative hawks that encompassed Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and assistant defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, he vigorously promoted the armed incursion of Iraq in 2003 in response to the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. When of the 9/11 assault, Bush had been participating in a session at a school in Florida. While Bush headed for a underground facility in Nebraska, Cheney took command, commanding the shooting down of any unidentified airplanes nearing the government building.
Cheney said the strikes transformed him, leading him to become intent on retribution. Together with other neo-conservatives, like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, he advocated for a takeover of Afghanistan in an attempt to capture Osama bin Laden. Cheney then strongly advocated for the armed intervention of Iraq, even though there was little proof of Saddam Hussein playing a role.
Controversial Policies
He expressed no regrets about the armed intervention, in which an reckoned 100,000 Iraqis lost their lives, or about the waterboarding of detainees apprehended after 9/11. He informed CNN in 2015 that the Iraq invasion effort, which was based on misleading intelligence repeated by Cheney, was the proper course of action. "It was the right thing to do back then. I believed it at the time and I believe it today."
However during that period, there were dissenting voices at a senior level about the poor management of Iraq. One of the government's own delegates to the area, General Anthony Zinni (2001-03), was not reappointed from the post. "I saw, at a minimum," he wrote later "clear negligence, inaction, and irresponsibility: potentially, falsehoods, ineptitude, and corruption."
Broader Context
Cheney was not solely to blame for the Iraq military action. Before 9/11, Wolfowitz had called for such action. He had written a document outlining scenarios in which American interests might be threatened (encompassing "availability of vital raw materials, mostly Persian Gulf oil"). Wolfowitz had contended that "the United States should be postured to take unilateral action when cooperative measures prove impossible," particularly mentioning defense operations against Iraq.
Bush also had arrived in the Oval Office generally inclined on carrying out what his father had specifically avoided to do in 1991; overthrow Saddam. After he had been dismissed by the administration, the finance chief Paul O'Neill revealed how, at the initial gathering of the National Security Council in January 2001, Bush had announced his plan of reducing America's engagement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and mooted armed intervention against Iraq.
Bush bore a individual resentment against Saddam, convinced he had been responsible for a plot to murder his parent, President George HW Bush, on a trip to Kuwait in 1993. He also resented that one of the biggest establishments in Baghdad had a surface artwork with a portrait of his predecessor's face that each person had to step on.
Investigation Approaches
However it was Cheney who was part of the most vehement behind attacking Iraq, repeatedly referencing intelligence reports that were whether insubstantial or completely inaccurate. He backed what the Bush administration euphemistically referred to as "advanced techniques", the employment of waterboarding and physical pressure.
Answering a Senate document in 2014 that concluded that no actionable intelligence had come from the interrogation methods, Cheney rejected the report as "full of crap". He told Fox News: "We instructed [the CIA] to establish protocols and establish initiatives to catch the perpetrators who took the lives of 3,000 of us on 9/11 and guarantee it never happened again. That's exactly what they did and they earn a lot of praise."
External Perception
Cheney reveled in nicknames given to him by critics such as Darth Vader and The Prince of Darkness, and by the notion that he was a sinister influence controlling Bush. In the journalist's 2013 book about the pair, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House, Cheney is quoted as saying: "Am I the sinister strategist in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his domain? It's a effective way to function, in fact."
Business Interests
Debate over his commercial relationships accompanied him through his period as VP. Even though he had limited background in business but established relationships in security, especially in Saudi Arabia, he was asked to become part of Halliburton, one of the world's biggest petroleum companies, in 1995 as chair and top executive.
In 2000 he assumed the role of Bush's running mate for the executive branch. Controversially, during the military campaign, Halliburton was given US agreements valued at substantial sums.
It greatly increased his wealth. His annual income during his time at the corporation grew from his quarter-million dollars when he was military head to $4.4m. When he left in 2000 he had a package worth over $20m|twenty
