The former US second-in-command Dick Cheney, who passed away at the age of 84, was regarded as one of the most influential incumbents of the vice-presidency in American history. Although countless VPs had to settle for peripheral or figurehead positions, Cheney exercised enormous sway during the term of George W Bush, to such an extent that he was often referred to as the "actual president".
Bush disliked such a characterisation and claimed the connection was more complicated. He observed that Cheney was deferential, consistently referring to him in official appearances as President, while he addressed him as Dick. Bush disputed even characterisations of their association as a partnership because it suggested that they were peers. Regardless of such protestations, Cheney considered the laidback president malleable on a wide array of administrative determinations.
A Aftermath of 9/11
In charge of a contingent of conservative hawks that encompassed military head Donald Rumsfeld and Pentagon second-in-command Paul Wolfowitz, he vigorously promoted the military intervention of Iraq in 2003 in response to the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. When of the 9/11 attack, Bush had been attending a gathering at a school in Florida. Whereas Bush traveled to a secure location in Nebraska, Cheney took charge, commanding the downing of any unresponsive planes nearing the government building.
Cheney claimed the assaults transformed him, making him become determined on retaliation. Together with other neo-cons, like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, he advocated for a invasion of Afghanistan in an effort to seize Osama bin Laden. Cheney then vigorously pushed for the military action of Iraq, even though there was no evidence of Saddam Hussein playing a role.
Controversial Decisions
He expressed no regrets about the armed intervention, in which an reckoned 100,000 Iraqis died, and not about the waterboarding of detainees apprehended after 9/11. He told CNN in 2015 that the Iraq military action, which was founded on inaccurate information repeated by Cheney, was the correct decision. "It represented the correct action to do back then. I believed it at the time and I maintain that stance presently."
But during that period, there were dissenting voices at a top tier about the poor management of Iraq. One of the White House's own special envoys to the region, General Anthony Zinni (2001-03), was dismissed from the role. "I saw, as a baseline," he later wrote "obvious failure, negligence, and recklessness: at worst, lying, incompetence, and graft."
Wider Perspective
Cheney was not solely accountable for the Iraq military action. Before 9/11, Wolfowitz had called for such action. He had written a memo setting out scenarios in which national priorities might be endangered (including "availability of essential resources, mainly Persian Gulf oil"). Wolfowitz had argued that "the United States should be postured to operate alone when cooperative measures cannot be arranged," explicitly mentioning armed actions against Iraq.
Bush too had arrived in the White House generally inclined on implementing what his father had famously refused to do in 1991; remove Saddam. Following he had been dismissed by the administration, the treasury secretary Paul O'Neill recounted how, at the opening session of the National Security Council in January 2001, Bush had declared his plan of diminishing America's participation in the Middle East dispute and suggested armed intervention against Iraq.
Bush held a private grievance against Saddam, believing he had been responsible for a plot to assassinate his parent, President George HW Bush, on a trip to Kuwait in 1993. He furthermore resented that one of the largest establishments in Baghdad had a surface artwork with a image of his parent's face that everyone had to tread upon.
Questioning Techniques
However it was Cheney who was one of the most outspoken behind attacking Iraq, frequently quoting agency briefings that were either insubstantial or completely misleading. He backed what the Bush administration indirectly described as "intensive questioning", the application of simulated drowning and physical pressure.
Responding to a Senate analysis in 2014 that found that no valuable data had come from the interrogation methods, Cheney disregarded the findings as "riddled with crap". He told Fox News: "We asked [the CIA] to take steps and create programmes to catch the individuals who took the lives of 3,000 of us on 9/11 and ensure it was not repeated. That's exactly what they did and they merit a lot of credit."
Public Image
Cheney reveled in monikers assigned to him by detractors such as the dark character and the dark figure, and by the notion that he was a shadow power directing Bush. In the journalist's 2013 volume about the pair, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House, Cheney is cited as commenting: "Do I represent the evil genius in the corner that operates invisibly emerge from his lair? This represents a nice way to function, actually."
Corporate Connections
Dispute over his business interests accompanied him during his tenure as VP. Although he had minimal expertise in commerce but strong connections in security, notably in Saudi Arabia, he was offered a position at Halliburton, one of the world's biggest petroleum conglomerates, in 1995 as chairman and top executive.
In 2000 he was selected as Bush's election partner for the executive branch. Controversially, during the conflict in Iraq, Halliburton was given US deals valued at multiple billions.
It significantly boosted his finances. His yearly compensation during his period at the company grew from his quarter-million dollars during his time as Pentagon chief to over four million. When he departed in 2000 he had a compensation package worth in excess of $20m|twenty