One-time VP Dick Cheney: A Look Back on His Powerful Government Service

The former US second-in-command Dick Cheney, who has died at age 84, was seen as arguably the most significant incumbents of the vice-presidency in US history. While countless vice-presidents were limited to peripheral or figurehead roles, Cheney exercised huge sway during the administration of George W Bush, so much so that he was commonly described as the "actual president".

Bush resented that description and stated the connection was more nuanced. He pointed out that Cheney was deferential, consistently calling him in public settings as the President, while he addressed him as Dick. Bush questioned even descriptions of their relationship as a partnership because it suggested that they were peers. Regardless of these objections, Cheney found the easygoing president accommodating on a whole raft of governmental choices.

The Aftermath of 9/11

At the head of a group of neo-cons that included military head Donald Rumsfeld and assistant defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, he pushed hard for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 in answer to the September 11th attacks on New York and Washington. During of the 9/11 attack, Bush had been attending a session at a school in Florida. While Bush made his way to a underground facility in Nebraska, Cheney took command, commanding the shooting down of any unidentified planes heading toward the US Capitol.

Cheney stated the strikes transformed him, making him become focused on retaliation. In conjunction with other neo-cons, like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, he advocated for a invasion of Afghanistan in an effort to apprehend Osama bin Laden. Cheney then strongly advocated for the military action of Iraq, though there was no evidence of Saddam Hussein being involved.

Controversial Policies

He showed no remorse about the armed intervention, in which an estimated 100,000 Iraqis perished, or about the waterboarding of detainees apprehended after 9/11. He informed CNN in 2015 that the Iraq military action, which was predicated on faulty intelligence circulated by Cheney, was the right path to take. "It was the right thing to do back then. I had faith at the time and I maintain that stance now."

Yet during that period, there were opposing views at a high level about the poor management of Iraq. One of the administration's own special envoys to the area, General Anthony Zinni (2001-03), was dismissed from the role. "I observed, as a baseline," he later wrote "true dereliction, negligence, and recklessness: potentially, deception, ineptitude, and corruption."

Additional Factors

Cheney was not entirely accountable for the Iraq invasion. Before 9/11, Wolfowitz had advocated for such action. He had written a memo detailing situations in which US concerns might be endangered (encompassing "access to essential resources, mostly Persian Gulf oil"). Wolfowitz had asserted that "America should be postured to operate alone when joint efforts cannot be arranged," specifically citing defense operations against Iraq.

Bush additionally had assumed the presidency somewhat determined on implementing what his father had notably declined to do in 1991; remove Saddam. Following he had been fired by the administration, the treasury secretary Paul O'Neill recounted how, at the first meeting of the National Security Council in January 2001, Bush had declared his plan of diminishing America's engagement in the Middle East dispute and suggested defense operations against Iraq.

Bush bore a individual resentment against Saddam, believing he had been responsible for a conspiracy to murder his father, President George HW Bush, on a trip to Kuwait in 1993. He also disliked that one of the biggest accommodations in Baghdad had a ground design with a portrait of his parent's visage that each person had to walk over.

Investigation Approaches

Yet it was Cheney who was one of the most vehement advocating invading Iraq, consistently quoting information documents that were both insubstantial or totally misleading. He backed what the Bush government politely called as "intensive questioning", the employment of interrogation method and torture.

Answering a Senate analysis in 2014 that concluded that no valuable data had come from the torture, Cheney dismissed the conclusions as "full of crap". He told Fox News: "We asked [the CIA] to implement measures and create initiatives to capture the perpetrators who took the lives of 3,000 of us on 9/11 and ensure it was not repeated. That was specifically what they did and they merit a lot of recognition."

External Perception

Cheney reveled in nicknames given to him by critics such as Darth Vader and the sinister presence, and by the idea that he was a shadow power manipulating Bush. In the journalist's 2013 volume about the duo, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House, Cheney is cited as commenting: "Do I represent the sinister strategist in the shadows that remains unseen leave his domain? That is a effective way to function, truthfully."

Commercial Ties

Debate over his commercial relationships followed him throughout his time as VP. Even though he had minimal expertise in business but established relationships in military, especially in Saudi Arabia, he was asked to become part of Halliburton, one of the world's most substantial oil and gas conglomerates, in 1995 as chair and CEO.

In 2000 he was selected as Bush's VP candidate for the presidency. Contentiously, during the military campaign, Halliburton was given US deals valued at multiple billions.

It greatly increased his wealth. His yearly earnings during his period at the firm grew from his $258,394 when he was military head to over four million. When he left in 2000 he had a severance arrangement worth more than $20m|twenty