Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 2003, pages 18-19, 64

Neocon Corner

 

Vice President Dick Cheney: A Tricky, Foxy Grandpa

 

By Richard H.Curtiss

Vice President Richard B. Cheney has a very smooth and pleasant demeanor. A survivor of three heart attacks and a friend of the senior George Bush for more than two decades, Cheney looks like a kindly grandfather. It’s easy to forget that he’s only five years older than President George W. Bush.

Born Jan. 30, 1941 in Lincoln, Nebraska, Cheney and his family moved 13 years later to Casper, Wyoming, where Cheney was co-captain of his high school football team and senior class president. His high school sweetheart, Lynne, became his wife in 1964.

Cheney received a scholarship to Yale University. Unlike his current boss, however, he was forced to leave because of poor grades. Returning to Wyoming, he earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in political science. At a time when student draft deferments were easy to acquire, Cheney obtained five, thus avoiding the Vietnam War. Although well on his way to a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, he did not complete that degree. By that time, however, the first of his two daughters had been born, so Cheney no longer had to fear induction into the military.

Lynne Cheney did earn a Ph.D., in English literature, and began working as an editor. She subsequently had a regular column in Washingtonian magazine, authored two books, and served as chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1986 to 1993. She currently is a senior fellow at the notorious neocon bastion the American Enterprise Institute.

Not surprisingly, the Cheneys are considered a Washington “power couple.”

When he first entered the world of politics, Dick Cheney worked for Gerald Ford, who named Cheney his chief of staff upon becoming president in the mid-1970s, following the resignation of Richard M. Nixon. In 1978 Cheney was elected to Congress, where he served as Wyoming’s representative until 1989. During that time he ascended to the position of House Republican whip.

Even in those days, Cheney was known as a fixer and promoter. According to Kathy Kiely of USA Today, while serving in Congress “he and some congressional colleagues had taken advantage of a cozy relationship that allowed members to float checks on the House bank when they didn’t necessarily have sufficient funds to back them.”

(The other blots on Cheney’s record are two youthful arrests for drunken driving and a fine for fishing out of season.)

By the time of the first Gulf war, in 1991, Cheney was then-President Bush’s secretary of defense, and is credited with negotiating a deal with Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd allowing U.S. troops and equipment to operate out of the Kingdom. Although his colleagues Gens. Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf garnered most of the headlines, all three worked amicably together throughout that conflict.

Smart and hard-working, Cheney once described himself as a “professional politician.” However, according to retired Gen. Brent Scowcroft, former national security adviser to the first President Bush, “Dick Cheney lacks one essential attribute of the trade. His ego doesn’t need to be fed.”

Cheney seriously considered running for the Republican presidential nomination against incumbent President Bill Clinton in 1996. But after visiting 46 states to assess his fund-raising prospects in 1995, Cheney decided he would not be able raise the money necessary for a campaign.

Following Clinton’s reelection, Cheney accepted the position of chief executive officer at Dallas-based Halliburton Industries. During his tenure there, from 1995-2000, he specialized in obtaining government contracts. Prior to his stewardship, Halliburton had received $1.2 billion in contracts, according to The Guardian. Five years later, the company had won $2.3 billion in contracts.

Now, according to a May 30 BBC News “World Edition” report, Cheney is facing a lawsuit filed by Washington, DC-based Judicial Watch, accusing him of defrauding Halliburton shareholders by overstating profits, thus inflating the price of shares. The BBC reported on another lingering controversy, the $368,000 Cheney received in deferred compensation from his former company, which was awarded $3.1 billion in contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq. The fact that the Bush administration did not seek competitive bids on the Iraq contracts casts a further shadow on the deal.

Cheney also is still seeking to live down his involvement in a promotional video for thedisgracedand defunct Arthur Andersen accounting firm. In the video Cheney describes the firm, which was convicted of obstructing justice and shredding documents in the Enron scandal, as providing advice “over and above” that normally expected from auditors.

By the time the extent of these corporate scandals became apparent, however, Cheney had resigned from Halliburton in order to work on the presidential campaign of George W. Bush. Assigned to vet Republican vice presidential hopefuls, Cheney was busy compiling a roster of possibilities. Very early in the process, however, it became clear that Cheney himself was Bush’s first choice.

Within a year of George W. Bush’s inauguration the 9/11 catastrophe took place. At the urging of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a Cheney chum, Bush decided to initiate what he called “regime change” in Iraq, regardless of whether the rest of the world agreed. When the U.S. attacked Iraq in March of this year, it had virtually no allies except for British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The war itself was over in less than three weeks. It has been succeeded, however, by a guerrilla war that up to now shows no sign of abating. To make things worse, Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, the ostensible casus belli, have yet to be found.

 

A Loss of Credibility

As the administration’s first term draws to a close and the 2004 elections near, the president is facing a severe loss of credibility, and there is no shortage of Democrats vying to replace him. One of their strategies is to use Cheney’s association with Halliburton to strengthen their argument that Bush is a candidate of Big Oil. In addition, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) believes that Cheney’s “far right” voting record will work against him. As a congressman, Cheney opposed regulating business and the environment, voting against the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Act and the Endangered Species Act. He also opposed federal funding for abortions, including cases of rape, incest or where a woman’s life was endangered, and voted against the Equal Rights Amendment, as well as a range of gun-control measures. During the Iran-contra controversy, Cheney defended the actions of Lt. Col. Oliver North.

More recently, the vice president has repeated the charge that Saddam Hussain had links to al-Qaeda. The American public has been very slow to understand that there was no connection between the former Iraqi leader and the events of Sept. 11. Finally—almost certainly at the behest of Secretary of State Colin Powell—the president made it clear. Just days later, however, Cheney again implied a connection.

Perhaps hoping to take advantage of the American public’s extraordinary confusion over the whole matter, the vice president may intend to continue reiterating this misrepresentation in the hope of making it stick. This is a tactic right out of the copybook of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels: to repeat a lie so often that people come to believe it.

Nor would this be an unprecedented move on the vice president’s part. Soon after the 9/11 attacks, Cheney and his chief-of-staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, began appearing regularly at CIA briefings. Time and again they raised the subject of Iraq’s missing weapons of mass destruction—despite CIA briefers’ insistence that there was no connection between Sept. 11 and Iraq.

At the moment, then, it appears that the American people will continue to be subjected to more unsubstantiated lies—at least until the 2004 elections are over.

Richard H. Curtiss is executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

 

 

High-Handed Donald Rumsfeld: A Millstone Around George W. Bush’s Neck

 

By Richard H. Curtiss

Henry Kissinger once said that, of all the despots he’d had to deal with, none was more ruthless than Donald H. Rumsfeld. According to Robert Novak on CNN’s “The Capitol Gang,” Donald Rumsfeld “has no friends.”

In fact, the secretary of defense and Vice President Dick Cheney are long-time friends and associates, going back to when both were Republican congressmen in the 1960s. Both later served in the same cabinets, and each has been a secretary of defense.

Yet Novak had a point. Rumsfeld is a solo operator, a grandstander who, if he cannot intimidate colleagues, cuts them off publicly. He is not a “nice guy,” except with those he considers his equals—like Cheney, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Defense Advisory Board member Richard Perle.

Right now Rumsfeld is confronted with difficult decisions as to how the Defense Department can raise the money for revolutionary new weapons. He and his Republican colleagues are pushing the so-called “star wars” program, and the decisions they make will affect warfare for many years to come.

To finance these technical innovations, however, Rumsfeld must eliminate some current major weapons systems. Since most members of Congress like anything that provides jobs within their own districts, it falls to Rumsfeld to makes the major decisions regarding which weapons systems will be continued and which will not.

At the same time, Rumsfeld seems more and more enamored of his press notices. While he may talk uninterruptedly for several minutes at a time, he seems less and less interested in staying on topic, and more and more concerned with thinking up clever debating points and repartee. At times his dialogues are pointless and long-winded. There are those who think he may have become a little silly in the head.

Some members of the Pentagon press corps suggest that Rumsfeld no longer represents the cutting edge of the Bush administration but instead has become a millstone around the president’s neck. With his popularity now dropping, Bush may be reluctant to make a radical change in the remaining months before election day. Others argue that dropping his defense secretary may be the only way to safeguard Bush’s re-election prospects.

How did Don Rumsfeld get into this fix? Born in Chicago, Illinois in 1932, he attended Princeton University on a scholarship, graduating in 1954. He married Joyce Pierson that same year, and the couple has three children.

Following Navy service from 1954 to 1957, Rumsfeld worked as an administrative assistant to a U.S. congressman. After a stint at a banking firm, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1962, making him one of the youngest members of Congress. He served there for six years.

Resigning from Congress in 1969 to join the Nixon administration as director of the Economic Opportunity Program, Rumsfeld became a member of the president’s cabinet from 1971 to 1972. He served as U.S. ambassador to NATO from 1973 to 1974, when he was called back to Washington to serve as chief of staff to President Gerald Ford. He was named secretary of defense in 1975.

Following the election of President Jimmy Carter, Rumsfeld became chairman of the G.D. Searle Company in Skokie, Illinois in 1977. In that periodhe received the nation’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In 1982 President Ronald Reagan appointed Rumsfeld to the General Advisory Committee on Arms Control, and as his special envoy to the Middle East in 1983 to 1984. At that time Reagan decided that the Iranians would win their war with Iraq unless Washington intervened on behalf of the Iraqis. As a result, the U.S. went on a buying spree for high-tech helicopters and other weapons much needed by Baghdad.

As a result, the Iran-Iraq war ended in a stalemate, but no peace treaty was signed. The U.S. continued to support Iraq until Saddam Hussain attacked Kuwait in August 1990. When then-President George H.W. Bush said Saddam Hussain had to withdraw from Kuwait, the Iraqi leader did not.

So, half a year later, the United States sent troops into Kuwait to push the Iraqis out. Defeated, the U.S. assumed Saddam Hussain would fall but, again, he did not.

From 1990 to 1993, Rumsfeld was chairman and chief executive officer of General Instrument Corporation, which specialized in broadband transmission, distribution and access control technologies. He then served as chairman of the board of Gilead Sciences, Inc., a pharmaceutical company.

Toward the end of the Clinton administration, Rumsfeld signed an “open letter” written by the Project for the New American Century, calling on the U.S. to eliminate “the threat posed by Saddam.” It urged the U.S. to “provide the leadership necessary to save ourselves and the world from the scourge of Saddam and the weapons of mass destruction that he refuses to relinquish.”

Others who signed the letter were such neoconservatives as Vice President Dick Cheney; I. Lewis Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff; Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz; former chairman of the Pentagon Advisory Board Richard Perle; John Bolton, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control; Weekly Standard editor William Kristol; and Eliot Abrams, the National Security Council’s top official on the Middle East.

When Rumsfeld moved decidedly into neocon territory is not clear. By the time he was confirmed as secretary of defense for the second time, however, he had moved much farther to the right. It has been said that Rumsfeld and the neocons consciously set out to neutralize Secretary of State Colin Powell, the Bush administration’s most popular member, and also the most moderate.

Some members of the current Bush administration set traps for Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage. Rumsfeld made things worse with his formulation dividing U.S. allies between “Old Europe” and “New Europe.” Not only did this enrage the Europeans, but it has created a huge rift in the rest of the world.

Thanks to Powell’s coaching, Bush now realizes that this disastrous split must be healed. An unrepentent Rumsfeld, however—even though he no longer talks about “Old Europe”—seems to be consciously trying to keep open the wounds.

As reported by Douglas Jehl and David Firestone in The New York Times: “White House officials have made it clear that they are increasingly frustrated and impatient with Rumsfeld, particularly after he publicly criticized the president’s closest foreign policy adviser, Condoleezza Rice, in an internal power struggle that the defense secretary made public.

“A Republican who is close to the White House said the view there had been that Mr. Rumsfeld ‘went off the deep end’ in his reaction to Mr. Bush’s decision to designate Dr. Rice as the overall coordinator of Iraq policy.

“Rumsfeld, however, did nothing to help the Bush administration. Asked at a press conference Rumsfeld said he was unaware of Dr. Rice’s plans. Asked the same question later, he fobbed it off with words that made it clear that he was not interested in pursuing the subject.”

Rumsfeld’s frequent and wordy notes are known in the Pentagon as “snowflakes” or “Rummygrams.” Either way, the secretary loves to show off his wit and erudition, and claims “they are important to keep his staff on their toes.”

Others say they are demeaning, annoying and a huge distraction from the serious business at hand.

Meanwhile, Rumsfeld goes right on creating new problems. He recently sent a long memo to four of his aides pointing out that the war on terrorism would be a “long, hard slog”—instead of the relentlessly rosy, and increasingly divorced from reality, scenario Rumsfeld previously described before Congress and at press conferences.

The press immediately latched on to contradiction between Rumsfeld’s public and private utterances. It is left to Bush’s new press spokesman, Scott McClellan, to repair the damage.

Given the ever-nearing 2004 election, it’s not clear what, if anything, Bush will do about Rumsfeld. The administration’s yawning vulnerability, however, is becoming increasingly manifest.

Richard H. Curtiss is executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

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