[Kabar-indonesia] 2 of 2: NYRB: Cheney: The Fatal Touch

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-2 of 2-

NYRB:  Cheney: The Fatal Touch... continues...

To what end the story was being cooked was hard to
know. The Vice President is frequently described as
"ideological," or "strongly conservative," but little
in his history suggests the intellectual commitment
implicit in either. He made common cause through the
run-up to Iraq with the neoconservative ideologues who
had burrowed into think tanks during the Clinton years
and resurfaced in 2001 in the departments of State and
Defense and the White House itself, but the alliance
appeared even then to be more strategic than felt. The
fact that Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle and Elliott
Abrams shared with Cheney a wish to go to war in Iraq
could create, in its confluence with September 11,
what many came to call a perfect storm—as if it had
blown up out of the blue beyond reach of human
intervention—but the perfect storm did not make Cheney
a neocon.

He identifies himself as a conservative, both
political and cultural. He presents himself as can-do,
rock-solid even if he is forced to live in Washington
(you know he only does it on our behalf), one
politician who can be trusted not to stray far from
whatever unexamined views were current in the
intermountain West during the 1950s and 1960s. He has
described a 1969 return visit to the University of
Wisconsin, during which he took Bill Steiger and
George H.W. Bush to an SDS rally, as having triggered
his disgust with the Vietnam protest movement. "We
were the only guys in the hall wearing suits that
night," he told Nicholas Lemann. As a congressman he
cast votes that reflected the interests of an
energy-driven state that has voted Republican in every
presidential election but one since 1952. His votes in
the House during 1988, the last year he served there,
gave him an American Conservative Union rating of 100.

Yet his move to push Nelson Rockefeller off Gerald
Ford's 1976 ticket had seemed based less on
philosophical differences than on a perception of
Rockefeller as in the way, in the lights, a star, like
Kissinger, who threatened the power Cheney and
Rumsfeld wielded in the Ford White House. In 1976,
unlike most who called themselves conservatives,
Cheney remained untempted by Reagan and clung to Ford,
his best ticket to ride. Nor did he initially back
Reagan in 1980. Nor, when it has not been in his
interest to do so, has he since taken consistent
positions on what would seem to be his own most
hardened policies.

"I think it is a false dichotomy to be told that we
have to choose between 'commercial' interests and
other interests that the United States might have in a
particular country or region around the world," he
said at the Cato Institute in 1998, during the period
he was CEO of Halliburton, after he had pursued one
war against Iraq and before he would pursue the
second. He was arguing against the imposition by the
United States of unilateral economic sanctions on such
countries as Libya and Iran, two countries, although
he did not mention this, in which Halliburton
subsidiaries had been doing business. Nor did he
mention, when he said in the same speech that he
thought multilateral sanctions "appropriate" in the
case of Iraq, that Iraq was a third country in which a
Halliburton subsidiary would by the year's end be
doing business.

The notion that he takes a consistent view of
America's role in the world nonetheless remains
general. The model on which he has preferred to
operate is the cold war, or, to use the words in which
he and the President have repeatedly described the
central enterprise of their own administration, the
"different kind of war," the war in which "our goal
will not be achieved overnight." He has mentioned H.
Bradford Westerfield, a political scientist at Yale
and at the time Cheney took his introductory course a
self-described hawk, as someone who influenced his
thinking, but Westerfield later told the Nation
correspondent John Nichols that his own hard line had
softened by late 1967 or early 1968, when he came to
see that Vietnam "really was unwinnable" and "the
hawkish view was unrealistic."

Cheney, by then positioning himself in Washington,
never drew those conclusions, nor, when he saw
Westerfield in the 1990s at a memorial service for Les
Aspin, did he seem to Westerfield interested in
discussing them. "He seems to be determined to go his
own way, no matter what facts he is confronted with,"
Westerfield told Nichols. "As a veteran of the
political wars," Henry Kissinger later wrote about the
years when Saigon was falling and Donald Rumsfeld and
Richard Cheney were running the Ford White House,

    Rumsfeld understood far better than I that
Watergate and Vietnam were likely to evoke a
conservative backlash and that what looked like a
liberal tide after the election of the McGovernite
Congress in fact marked the radical apogee.

Rumsfeld and Cheney, in other words, had transcended
what others might present as facts. They could feel
the current. They knew how to catch the wave and ride
it.

Cheney leaves no paper trail. He has not always felt
the necessity to discuss what he plans to say in
public with the usual offices, including that of the
President. Nor, we learned from Ron Suskind, has he
always felt the necessity, say if the Saudis send
information to the President in preparation for a
meeting, to bother sending that information on to
Bush. Only on the evening of September 11, 2001, did
it occur to Richard A. Clarke that in his role as
national security coordinator he had briefed Cheney on
terrorism and also Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell,
but never the President. Since November 1, 2001, under
this administration's Executive Order 13233, which
limits access to all presidential and
vice-presidential papers, Cheney has been the first
vice-president in American history entitled to
executive privilege, a claim to co-presidency
reinforced in March 2003 by Executive Order 13292,
giving him the same power to classify information as
the president has.

He runs an office so disinclined to communicate that
it routinely refuses to disclose who works there, even
for updates to the Federal Directory, which lists
names and contact addresses for government officials.
"We just don't give out that kind of information," an
aide told one reporter. "It's just not something we
talk about." When he visits his house in Jackson Hole
and the local paper spots his plane and the
anti-missile battery that accompanies him, the office
until recently refused to confirm his presence: "In
the past, they've been kind of weird," the paper's
co-editor told The Washington Post in August. "They'd
say, 'His airplane's here and the missile base is
here, but we can't tell you if he's here.'"

His every instinct is to withhold information, hide,
let surrogates speak for him, as he did after the
quail-shooting accident on the Armstrong ranch. His
own official spoken remarks so defy syntactical
analysis as to suggest that his only intention in
speaking is to further obscure what he thinks.
Possibly the most well-remembered statement he ever
made (after "Big-time") was that he did not serve in
the Vietnam War because he had "other priorities." Bob
Woodward, in Plan of Attack, describes an exchange
that took place between Cheney and Colin Powell in
September 2002, when Cheney was determined that the US
not ask the UN for the resolution against Iraq that
the Security Council, after much effort by Powell,
passed in November:

    Powell attempted to summarize the consequences of
unilateral action.... He added a new dimension, saying
that the international reaction would be so negative
that he would have to close American embassies around
the world if we went to war alone.

    That is not the issue, Cheney said. Saddam and the
clear threat is the issue.

    Maybe it would not turn out as the vice president
thinks, Powell said. War could trigger all kinds of
unanticipated and unintended consequences....

    Not the issue, Cheney said.

In other words the Vice President had by then passed
that point at which going to war was "not about our
analysis." He had passed that point at which going to
war was not about "finding a preponderance of
evidence." At the point he had reached by September
2002, going to war was not even about the
consequences. Not the issue, he had said. The
personality that springs to mind is that of the
ninth-grade bully in the junior high lunchroom, the
one sprawled in the letter jacket so the
seventh-graders must step over his feet. There was in
a June letter from Senator Arlen Specter to Cheney,
made public by Specter, an image that eerily conveyed
just that: "I was surprised, to say the least, that
you sought to influence, really determine, the action
of the Committee without calling me first, or at least
calling me at some point," Specter wrote, referring to
actions Cheney had taken to block his Judiciary
Committee from conducting a hearing on NSA
surveillance. "This was especially perplexing since we
both attended the Republican Senators caucus lunch
yesterday and I walked directly in front of you on at
least two occasions enroute from the buffet to my
table."

There was a reason, beyond the thrill of their sheer
arrogance, why the words "other priorities" stuck in
the national memory. They were first uttered not in
but outside the room in which Cheney's 1989
confirmation hearings were held, to a Washington Post
reporter who asked why the candidate for secretary of
defense had sought the five (four student and one
"hardship") deferments that had prevented him from
serving in Vietnam. This is what the candidate said:

    I had other priorities in the '60s than military
service. I don't regret the decisions I made. I
complied fully with all the requirements of the
statutes, registered with the draft when I turned 18.
Had I been drafted, I would have been happy to serve.
I think those who did in fact serve deserve to be
honored for their service.... Was it a noble cause?
Yes, indeed, I think it was.

The words stuck because they resonated, and still do.
They resonated the same way the words "fixed himself a
cocktail back at the house" resonated when Katharine
Armstrong, Cheney's hostess and fill-in (in the vacuum
of his silence) apologist, used them to explain what
he had done after the quail-hunting accident in lieu
of either going to the hospital with Harry Whittington
or explaining to the sheriff's office how he had just
shot him. "Fixed himself a cocktail back at the house"
suggested the indifference to assuming responsibility
for his own mistakes that had become so noticeable in
his public career. "Ultimately, I am the guy who
pulled the trigger and fired the round that hit
Harry," he managed, four days later, to say to Fox
News in a memorable performance of a man accepting
responsibility but not quite. "You can talk about all
the other conditions that existed at the time, but
that's the bottom line. It's not Harry's fault. You
can't blame anybody else."

Like "it's not Harry's fault," which implied that you
or I or any other fair observer (for example Katharine
Armstrong, characterized by Cheney as "an acknowledged
expert in all of this") might well conclude that it
had been, "other priorities" suggested a familiar
character wrinkle, in this case the same willingness
to cloud an actual issue with circular arguments ("I
complied fully with all the requirements of the
statutes") that would later be demonstrated by the
Vice President's people when they maintained that the
Geneva Conventions need not apply to Afghan detainees
because Afghanistan was a "failed state." What these
tortured and in many cases invented legalities are
designed to preclude is any acknowledgment that the
issue at hand, whether it is avoiding military service
or authorizing torture, might have a moral or an
ethical or even a self-interested dimension that
merits discussion.

This latter dimension, self-interest, which was the
basis for John McCain's argument that we could not
expect others to honor the Geneva Conventions if we
did not do so ourselves, was dismissed by David
Addington, at the time Cheney's legal architect, in
the "new paradigm" memo he drafted in 2002 to go to
the President over White House Counsel Alberto R.
Gonzales's signature. "It should be noted that your
policy of providing humane treatment to enemy
detainees gives us the credibility to insist on like
treatment for our soldiers," the memo read, sliding
past a key point, which was that the "new paradigm"
differentiated between "enemy detainees" and "illegal
enemy combatants," or "terrorists," a distinction to
be determined by whoever did the detaining.

    Moreover, even if GPW [Geneva Convention III
Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War] is not
applicable, we can still bring war crimes charges
against anyone who mistreats US personnel. Finally, I
note that...terrorists will not follow GPW rules in
any event.

This is not law. This is casuistry, the detritus of
another perfect storm, the one that occurred when the
deferments of the Vietnam years met the ardor of the
Reagan Revolution.

About this matter of priorities. At an October 2005
meeting at Stanford University of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences, the historian David M. Kennedy
expressed concern about the absence of political
accountability in a nation where

    no American is now obligated to military service,
few will ever serve in uniform, even fewer will
actually taste battle—and fewer still of those who do
serve will have ever sat in the classrooms of an elite
university like Stanford.... Americans with no risk
whatsoever of exposure to military service have, in
effect, hired some of the least advantaged of their
fellow countrymen to do some of their most dangerous
business while the majority goes on with their own
affairs unbloodied and undistracted.

Early in 1995, his tenure as George H.W. Bush's
secretary of defense timed out, Dick Cheney was
raising money for a stalled 1996 presidential run when
he was asked, legendarily out of the blue on a
fly-fishing trip but in fact unsurprisingly for
someone with government connections in both energy and
defense, to become CEO of Halliburton. In the early
summer of 2000, flying home with his daughter Mary
from a hunting trip, Cheney, then five years into his
job at Halliburton, a period for which he had
collected $44 million (plus deferments and stock
options) and during which the Halliburton subsidiary
Brown & Root had billed the United States $2 billion
for services in Bosnia and Kosovo, told Mary that Joe
Allbaugh, the national campaign manager of Bush's 2000
campaign, had asked him to consider being Bush's
running mate. In July 2000, after conducting a search
for another candidate and detailing the reasons why he
himself would be a bad choice ("Knowing my dad, I'm
sure he didn't hold anything back as he laid out the
disadvantages of selecting him as the nominee"), in
other words assuring himself carte blanche, Cheney
agreed to join the ticket.

In February 2001, Joe Allbaugh, whose previous
experience was running the governor's office for Bush
in Texas, became head of FEMA, where he hired Michael
D. ("Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job") Brown. In
December 2002, Allbaugh announced that he was
resigning from FEMA, leaving Brown in charge while he
himself founded New Bridge Strategies, LLC, "a unique
company," according to its Web site, "that was created
specifically with the aim of assisting clients to
evaluate and take advantage of business opportunities
in the Middle East following the conclusion of the
US-led war in Iraq."

This was the US-led war in Iraq that had not then yet
begun. When David Kennedy spoke at Stanford about the
vacuum in political accountability that could result
from waging a war while a majority of Americans went
on "with their own affairs unbloodied and
undistracted," he was talking only about the absence
of a draft. He was not talking about the ultimate
step, the temptation to wage the war itself to further
private ends, or "business opportunities," or other
priorities. Nor was he talking about the intermediate
step, which was to replace the manpower no longer
available by draft by contracting out "logistical"
support to the private sector, in other words by
privatizing the waging of the war. This step, now so
well known as to be a plot point on Law and Order
(civilian contract employees in Iraq fall out among
themselves; a death ensues; Sam Waterston sorts it
out), had already been taken. There are now, split
among more than 150 private firms, thousands of such
contracts outstanding. Halliburton alone had by July
2004 contracts worth $11,431,000,000.

Private firms in Iraq have done more than build bases
and bridges and prisons. They have done more than
handle meals and laundry and transportation. They
train Iraqi forces. They manage security. They
interrogate prisoners. Contract interrogators from two
firms, CACI International (according to its Web site
"a world leader in providing timely solutions to the
intelligence community") and Titan ("a leading
provider of comprehensive information and
communications products, solutions, and services for
National Security"), were accused of abuses at Abu
Ghraib, where almost half of all interrogators and
analysts were CACI employees. They operate free of
oversight. They distance the process of interrogation
from the citizens in whose name, or in whose
"defense," or to ensure whose "security," the
interrogation is being conducted. They offer "timely
solutions."

In his 1991 book A Very Thin Line, Theodore Draper
wrote:

    The Iran-contra affairs amounted to more than good
plans gone wrong or even bad plans gone wildly wrong.
They were symptomatic of a far deeper disorder in the
American body politic. They were made possible by an
interpretation of the Constitu-tion which Poindexter
and North thought gave them a license to carry on
their secret operations in the name of the president,
in defiance of the law and without the knowledge of
any other branch of government.... Somehow the highly
dubious theory of a presidential monopoly of foreign
policy had filtered down to them and given them a
license to act as if they could substitute themselves
for the entire government.

There remains a further reason why "other priorities"
still nags. It suggests other agendas, undisclosed
strategies. We had watched this White House effect the
regulatory changes that would systematically dismantle
consumer and workplace and environmental protections.
We had watched this White House run up the deficits
that ensured that the conservative dream of rolling
back government will necessarily take place, because
there will be no money left to pay for it. We had
heard the Vice President speak as recently as January
2004 about our need to recolonize the world, build
bases, "warm bases, bases we can fall in on, on a
crisis and have present the capabilities we need to
operate from." "Other priorities" suggests what the
Vice President might have meant when he and the
President talked about the "different kind of war,"
the war in which "our goal will not be achieved
overnight." As a member of the House during the cold
war and then as secretary of defense during the Gulf
War and then as CEO of Halliburton, the Vice President
had seen up close the way in which a war in which "our
goal will not be achieved overnight" could facilitate
the flow of assets from the government to the private
sector and back to whoever in Washington greases the
valves. "The first person to greet our soldiers as
they arrive in the Balkans and the last one to wave
goodbye is one of our employees," as he put it during
his Halliburton period.

He had also seen up close the political advantage to
which such a war could be put. "And so if there's a
backlash pending I think the backlash is going to be
against those who are suggesting somehow that we
shouldn't take these steps in order to protect the
country," as he put it when asked last December if his
assumption of presidential autonomy might not provoke
a congressional backlash. In the apparently higher
interest of consolidating that political advantage he
had made misrepresentations that facilitated a war
that promised to further destabilize the Middle East.
He had compromised both America's image in the world
and its image of itself. In 1991, explaining why he
agreed with George H.W. Bush's decision not to take
the Gulf War to Baghdad, Cheney had acknowledged the
probability that any such invasion would be followed
by civil war in Iraq:

    Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you
do with it. It's not clear what kind of government you
would put in.... Is it going to be a Shia regime, a
Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts
toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the
Islamic fundamentalists?... How long does the United
States military have to stay to protect the people
that sign on for that government, and what happens to
it once we leave?

By January 2006, when the prescience of these
questions was evident and polling showed that 47
percent of Iraqis approved of "attacks on US-led
forces," and the administration was still calculating
that it could silence domestic doubt by accusing the
doubter of wanting to "cut and run," the Vice
President assured Fox News that the course had been
true. "When we look back on this ten years hence," he
said, a time frame suggesting that he was once again
leaving the cleanup to someone else, "we will have
fundamentally changed the course of history in that
part of the world, and that will be an enormous
advantage for the United States and for all of those
countries that live in the region."

—September 7, 2006

-END/2 of 2-

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