Having stampeded his ill-informed predecessor into a series of catastrophic blunders, it appears that Dick Cheney has declared open bureaucratic war — the only kind he’s ever known how to fight — upon President Barack Obama. After decades bullying the CIA and other intelligence agencies to affirm his crackpot worldviews, he’s trying to pull the same routine on the White House to redeem his own shattered reputation. Or is it something more sinister?
As the longtime leader of the Republican Party’s Chicken Little faction, Cheney’s career testifies to his skill at backstairs intrigue. Longtime allies have speculated that his health problems, followed by the 9/11 attacks, drove him around the bend. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to two GOP presidents, told the New Yorker, “I don’t know him anymore.”
A less charitable view might be that maneuvering his way into the vice presidency finally gave Cheney the power to bend the CIA to his will. He’d been pestering the agency to report that the sky was falling since the 1970s, first as an acolyte of “Team B,” next the “Committee on the Present Danger” — well-financed efforts to depict the decrepit hulk of the Soviet Union as verging upon imminent world domination.
After the Berlin Wall’s collapse proved that the beleaguered CIA had actually dramatically overestimated Soviet might, Cheney, Rummy, Wolfie and the gang found a new obsession. Styling themselves the “Project for a New American Century,” they urged Bill Clinton to invade Iraq in 1999. Next would come Iran, and an American empire from the Mediterranean to the Himalayas.
This isn’t a fight Obama has wanted, but Cheney’s making it one he cannot avoid. Nothing short of a full-scale investigation can cauterize this wound.
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