Joan Didion on Cheney and "The Fatal Touch"

[BurtWorm]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19376


Cheney: The Fatal Touch
By Joan Didion

BOOKS DRAWN ON FOR THIS ARTICLE
A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs
by Theodore Draper
Hill and Wang, 690 pp., $27.95

Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror
by Richard A. Clarke
Free Press, 304 pp., $27.00

Burn Before Reading: Presidents, CIA Directors, and Secret Intelligence
by Admiral Stansfield Turner
Hyperion, 308 pp., $23.95

Disarming Iraq
by Hans Blix
Pantheon, 285 pp., $24.00

The Halliburton Agenda: The Politics of Oil and Money
by Dan Briody
Wiley, 290 pp., $16.95 (paper)

My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope
by L. Paul Bremer III, with Malcolm McConnell
Simon and Schuster,417 pp., $27.00

Now It's My Turn: A Daughter's Chronicle of Political Life
by Mary Cheney
Threshold, 239 pp., $25.00

The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11
by Ron Suskind
Simon and Schuster, 367 pp., $27.00

Plan of Attack
by Bob Woodward
Simon and Schuster, 467 pp., $28.00

The Rise and Rise of Richard B. Cheney: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Most Powerful Vice President in American History
by John Nichols
New Press, 268 pp., $14.95 (paper)

Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet
by James Mann
Penguin, 426 pp., $16.00 (paper)

Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, with Supplemental, Minority, and Additional Views
Government Printing Office, 690 pp. (1987)

31 Days: The Crisis That Gave Us the Government We Have Today
by Barry Werth
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday,398 pp., $26.00

Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror
by Mark Danner
New York Review Books, 580 pp., $19.95 (paper)

Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush
by John W. Dean
Warner, 281 pp., $14.95 (paper)

Years of Renewal
by Henry Kissinger
Touchstone, 1,151 pp., $24.00 (paper)



...


The question of where the President gets the notions known to the nation as "I'm the decider" and within the White House as "the unitary executive theory" leads pretty fast to the blackout zone that is the Vice President and his office. It was the Vice President who took the early offensive on the contention that whatever the decider decides to do is by definition legal. "We believe, Jim, that we have all the legal authority we need," the Vice President told Jim Lehrer on PBS after it was reported that the National Security Agency was conducting warrantless wiretapping in violation of existing statutes. It was the Vice President who pioneered the tactic of not only declaring such apparently illegal activities legal but recasting them as points of pride, commands to enter attack mode, unflinching defenses of the American people by a president whose role as commander in chief authorizes him to go any extra undisclosed mile he chooses to go on their behalf.

"Bottom line is we've been very active and very aggressive defending the nation and using the tools at our disposal to do that," the Vice President advised reporters on a flight to Oman last December. It was the Vice President who maintained that passage of Senator John McCain's legislation banning inhumane treatment of detainees would cost "thousands of lives." It was the Vice President's office, in the person of David S. Addington, that supervised the 2002 "torture memos," advising the President that the Geneva Conventions need not apply. And, after Admiral Stansfield Turner, director of the CIA between 1977 and 1981, referred to Cheney as "vice president for torture," it was the Vice President's office that issued this characteristically nonresponsive statement: "Our country is at war and our government has an obligation to protect the American people from a brutal enemy that has declared war upon us."

Addington, who emerged into government from Georgetown University and Duke Law School in 1981, the most febrile moment of the Reagan Revolution, is an instructive study in the focus Cheney favors in the protection of territory. As secretary of defense for George H.W. Bush, Cheney made Addington his special assistant and ultimately his general counsel. As vice-president for George W. Bush, Cheney again turned to Addington, and named him, after the indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby in connection with the exposure of Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife as a CIA agent, his chief of staff. "You're giving away executive power," Addington has been reported to snap at less committed colleagues. He is said to keep a photograph in his office of Cheney firing a gun. He vets every line of the federal budget to eradicate any wording that might restrain the President. He also authors the "signing statements" now routinely issued to free the President of whatever restrictive intent might have been present in whichever piece of legislation he just signed into law. A typical signing statement, as written by Addington, will refer repeatedly to the "constitutional authority" of "the unitary executive branch," and will often mention multiple points in a single bill that the President declines to enforce.

Signing statements are not new, but at the time Bill Clinton left office, the device had been used, by the first forty-two presidents combined, fewer than six hundred times. George W. Bush, by contrast, issued more than eight hundred such takebacks during the first six years of his administra-tion. Those who object to this or any other assumption of absolute executive power are reflexively said by those who speak for the Vice President to be "tying the president's hands," or "eroding his ability to do his job," or, more ominously, "aiding those who don't want him to do his job."

...

[BurtWorm]

1. What does Cheney believe?

From the article:


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.

[BurtWorm]

2. Cheney's ideology: Opportunism. Reward the Rich

...

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."

...

[warrens]

3. Dickiebird later claimed he had no idea Halliburton was in Iran

"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.

This guy really should be locked up. Preferably in Abu Ghraib.

[Laughing Mirror]

4. Brilliant

Every word.

[BurtWorm]

5. The essence of Dick

It was in some ways predictable that the central player in the system of willed errors and reversals that is the Bush administration would turn out to be its vice-president, Richard B. Cheney. Here was a man with considerable practice in the reversal of his own errors. He was never a star. No one ever called him a natural. He reached public life with every reason to believe that he would continue to both court failure and overcome it, take the lemons he seemed determined to pick for himself and make the lemonade, then spill it, let someone else clean up. The son of two New Deal Democrats, his father a federal civil servant with the Soil Conservation Service in Casper, Wyoming, he more or less happened into a full scholarship to Yale: his high school girlfriend and later wife, Lynne Vincent, introduced him to her part-time employer, a Yale donor named Thomas Stroock who, he later told Nicholas Lemann, "called Yale and told 'em to take this guy." The beneficiary of the future Lynne Cheney's networking lasted three semesters, took a year off before risking a fourth, and was asked to leave.

<quote brought to my attention by 3quarksdaily.

[carolinayellowdog]

6. Didion is a national treasure

Sometimes I wonder who will write the definitive book about these ghastly Bush years. Sidney Blumenthal seems a likely prospect, but Didion may have her greatest work ahead of her.

[BurtWorm]

7. kick