Cheney dramatically expanded the White House’s use of executive power to promote and carry out one of the most disastrous and avoidable wars in American history.
A look back at Dick Cheney’s controversial political achievements
USA TODAY’s Washington bureau chief Susan Page looks back on the political accomplishments of Dick Cheney, who has died at the age of 84.
WASHINGTON – His now infamous claim that “we will be greeted as liberators” will forever link former Vice President Dick Cheney to the Iraq war that began shortly after that fateful March 2003 statement.
But would this war, perhaps one of the bloodiest and most inevitable in American history, have happened without Cheney?
Historians may be arrogant. But by considering Cheney’s actions and statements, the answer appears to be a resounding “no.”
Cheney was the war’s chief architect and most influential advocate, selling his boss, then-President George W. Bush, on the idea of a first strike to overthrow Saddam Hussein and occupy America’s oil-rich former ally.
It began with a two-day meeting of the Bush national security team at the presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland, days after the September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda terrorist attacks.
The focus was on Afghanistan and when to dismantle al-Qaeda training camps protected by the country’s Taliban leadership.
According to journalist Bob Woodward’s 2004 book “Planning the Attack: The Definitive Account of the Decision to Invade Iraq,” Iraq was also brought up and Bush ultimately decided not to invade and instead called for a contingency plan.
But Woodward wrote that Cheney had a particular focus on Iraq even before 9/11.
Over the next 18 months, Cheney led the administrative and political pitch for war, dramatically expanding the use of White House executive power and filling Bush’s inner circle with like-minded individuals.
Among them are Paul Wolfowitz, Louis “Scooter” Libby, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney’s boss while serving as President Gerald Ford’s White House chief of staff in the 1970s.
In public, Mr. Cheney often linked the need for regime change in Iraq to the broader Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), which he oversaw as the de facto leader of the Bush administration’s war cabinet and the president’s gatekeeper.
“The danger to America requires action on many fronts at once,” Cheney said in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in August 2002, adding, “We must take the fight to the enemy.”
“Simply put, there is no question that Saddam Hussein now possesses weapons of mass destruction,” President Cheney told the assembled veterans. “There is no question that he is hoarding them to use against our friends, allies, and us.”
By the fall of 2002, Cheney was strongly leading the administration, claiming that Saddam not only possessed weapons of mass destruction but could share them with terrorists.
Cheney consistently promoted that intelligence, which later turned out to be flawed and at times politically fabricated.
As part of that campaign, Cheney and Chief of Staff Libby repeatedly visited CIA headquarters to question analysts about the relationship between Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda. Several later told the Washington Post and the President’s Committee on Weapons of Mass Destruction that they felt “pressured to conform their assessments to the policy goals of the Bush administration.”
Mr. Cheney also took the lead in pressuring Congress to authorize action against Iraq, “otherwise appearing weak in the face of international terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.”
After initial strong opposition, Secretary of State Colin Powell was far more skeptical, according to Woodward and other historians.
“But when push came to shove, Mr. Powell followed the president’s advice and donned the military uniform,” said a Washington Post article summarizing Mr. Woodward’s book.
After the US military carried out the “shock and awe” attack, they were not “welcomed as liberators” at all, but were ultimately treated as an invading force that needed to be repelled, which actually led to a never-ending civil war.
The coalition also found no weapons of mass destruction, and two years later the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, established by Bush, acknowledged in a report that this “weapons of mass destruction” debacle was “one of the most public and pernicious intelligence failures in recent American history.”
By the time the U.S. withdrew in 2011, the cost of the war was staggering, with at least 4,480 Americans dead and more than 32,000 injured. More than 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died in the war, which cost at least $806 billion.
According to an Axios/Ipsos poll, only about 36% of Americans think it was justified to invade Iraq by 2023, and 61% say it was the wrong decision.
Cheney never apologized for his stance on the Iraq war. In fact, he defiantly claimed in a 2015 Fox News interview that “I was right about Iraq.”
“Our objective was to defeat Saddam Hussein, and we accomplished that,” Cheney said. “The world would be a better place without him.”
