Dick Cheney’s Legacy Is One of Brutal Carnage

Dick Cheney, former U.S. Vice President under George W. Bush, Chief of Staff under Gerald Ford, Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush, and U.S. Representative from Wyoming, has died at age 84. 

Widely considered one of the most powerful VP’s in modern U.S. history, Cheney is known foremost for his role in the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. As our Policy Director Chip Gibbons put it in a new piece remembering Cheney for Jacobin, “when reflecting on Cheney’s legacy, we are obligated to acknowledge the millions of lives he cut short.”

Cheney is rightfully remembered as the architect of the War on Terror, where he promoted mass surveillance, torture, and indefinite detention. While Cheney’s role in these policies are his most heinous crimes, Chip situates them in the long arc of Cheney’s career spent defending the “executive branch’s power to launch wars abroad and conduct surveillance at home.” His dramatic expansion of executive power during the Bush years is contextualized within Cheney’s longer career, which included soft peddling CIA surveillance of Vietnam War protesters, running cover for the Contra War, and overseeing the U.S invasion of Panama. 

And Cheney’s legacy is far from the past, as Chip argues:

Not only is Cheney responsible for his own attacks on democracy, but there are solid through lines between him and Trump. Trump’s first campaign was marked by calls for surveillance of mosques, support for torture, escalating air wars in the Middle East, and retaliatory killing of “terrorists’” families. Can anyone seriously argue these are not the logical extensions of Cheney’s war on terror?

And in Trump’s second term, he has claimed the right to bomb countries without congressional authorization, labeled domestic opponents terrorists to tap into the nation’s vast counterterrorism surveillance apparatus, carried out assassinations of alleged drug traffickers, and is clearly seeking regime change against a left-wing government in Venezuela. These are the policies Cheney spent his life advocating for. Trump even achieved Cheney’s long-term dream of bombing Iran.

Trump’s greatest danger to our democracy as an authoritarian comes from the unchecked executive power amassed in the national security state Cheney spent his lifetime working to build. According to Cheney, the US government could not only wiretap a US citizen without a warrant but detain them without any recourse to the courts or possible intervention from Congress. Like Cheney, Trump almost certainly salivates at the thought of carrying out such policies.

Read the full piece over at Jacobin.