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The former Vice President, Secretary of Defense, and Representative for the state of Wyoming, Richard B. "Dick" Cheney (1941 - 2025) was laid to rest today and I have thoughts.
On one hand I have a lot of genuine respect for the man. He had principles and he stuck to them. He didn't try to hedge, or weasel out, he bit the bullet. I don't think that anyone can reasonably claim that they never new where they stood with Dick Cheney. As Ed Morrissey says "RIP to an American Original". On the other hand his legacy is complicated.
For those too young to remember the 2000 election, Cheney was viewed one of the elder statesmen of the Republican party and what we might call today an "enlightened centrist". He and George Bush Jr. (son of Former president George HW Bush) were presented as a return to the norms of civility and collegiality after the chaos, acrimony, and culture-warring that had defined much the Clinton administration. The idea was that by embracing "Compassionate Conservativism" the conflict between traditional conservatives and what we would recognize today as the proto-woke could be resolved. It was a nice idea that did not survive first contact with the enemy. The 2000 election was decided by the supreme court which put both sides on edge, and then 8 months later everything would go up in smoke with the two towers.
This brings us Cheney's legacy. Cheney sought to change the world through democratic reforms imposed by American arms. He was the chief Architect of global war on terror and an ardent supporter of the wider trend of "globalization", give the Communists or the Jihadis a taste of McDonalds and they'll come around to our way of thinking. Again, It was a nice idea that did not survive first contact with the enemy. And because Cheney had been all in, because he hadn't tried to hedge, or weasel out, because the establishment/centrist wings of both parties had adopted his model and backed his every play, there was nowhere to deflect to when everything went to shit both at home and abroad.
He could not claim that "Real Neoliberalism/Compassionate Conservativism has never been tried" or that he only got to implement half of his intended foreign policy because the "enlightened centrists" had been given everything they wanted. The plan was tried, and it failed. Not only did it fail, it failed so spectacularly that many prior supporters including myself turned away in revulsion asking ourselves "what have we done?". Cheney's Legacy is ultimately one of failure. One that would set the conditions for the rise of both the Tea Party and Trump as well as the accelerationist woke at the expense of the of the sort of norms-based centrism espoused by publications like The Bulwark and The Atlantic and Cheney himself.
At the same time, I can not help but see his passing as the passing of an era, and I am not going to wish ill upon the dead.
Much hay is currently being made in certain circles about whether Trump and Vance were snubbing him by not attending the funeral or if they were specifically not invited, but I feel like it's a bullshit distraction, I don't think anyone can reasonably claim that they never knew where they stood with Dick Cheney
Rest In Peace Dick.
Did he fail? They lied about WMD so why wouldn't he lie about his other causes for the war?
He enriched the military industrial complex which was lacking a justification for its budget in 2003. He swamped Europe with migrants pushing the agenda of mass migration and cheap imported labour. He destroyed several countries in the middle east making them easy to bully and extract resources from. Not only that, but he got ordinary republicans on board with creating a surveillance state that knows more about its citizens than stasi did. In his new toasty warm dwelling he probably looks up at Earth with pride as he effectively achieved what he wanted, a global police state run by the US which culture is consumerism.
That is very good question, that depends on how you define "success". Cheney was successful in the sense that he was able to ensure that his preferred policies were implemented and would become the default policies of the United States Government for close to 30 years. At the same time, the outcome of this success was the destruction of Cheney's faction within the Republican party.
They didn't lie. The Saddam Hussein's government was in fact producing chemical and biological weapons. They even tried to use them in the opening phases of the invasion, but the casualties were almost entirely on the Iraqi side as coalition forces were universally vaccinated against Anthrax and issued protective equipment while the Iraqis were not. Meanwhile, the Iraqis had been working very hard to convince everyone else in the region that they had some sort of nuclear capability mostly as a means of keeping up with their chief rival Iran. While we now know those claims were false, I do not think it is fair to fault anyone for taking those claims seriously at the time.
As for the rest, time will tell.
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Nobody "lied about WMD" except Saddam. They were mistaken.
We've collectively memory-holed the anthrax attack on the US in the days after 9/11, which at the the time was a major reason for the WMD claim:
So why were the anthrax attacks tied to Iraq? There were intelligence reports that a 9/11 hijacker was supplied with anthrax by Al-Qaeda at a meeting at the Iraqi consulate in Prague. Never happened, he was never even in Prague at this time. Yet Dick Cheney repeated the allegation as the nation prepared for war with Iraq:
Ostensibly the source for this lie was Czech intelligence. But LATimes reported something different back in October 2001:
This is October 27th 2001, less than 2 months after 9/11. Lies about Iraqi WMDs and Iraqi/Al Qaeda connection less than two months after the attack.
Yes, the WMDs were lies manufactured by people with an interest in having the US overthrow Saddam. There is no other reason for a fabrication like this. They lied about WMDs they were not mistaken. Or at least, the key provocateurs lied and traitors like Dick Cheney were just duped. But that's not being "mistaken" that's being lied to at best or at worst knowingly perpetuating the lie as a false pretext for war.
By the way, the consensus is now that the origin of the Anthrax spores was not Iraq, it was from a specific batch of the "Ames" strain that originated from a U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland. But in October 2001 we have these intelligence reports claiming it was supplied by Iraq. Really makes you think...
Ah yes the Anthrax scare, the same perfect scenario the government literally did educational faux documentary videos to prepare its staff about. I'm at a point where I think that whole episode was another false-flag.
When you get deep into the weeds of it... it's pretty weird.
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It is absurd slander to suggest that the war on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya or anywhere else is “responsible” for mass immigration to Europe.
Many Muslim migrants to Europe arrived as guest workers from places like Pakistan and Turkey that were at peace at the time of mass emigration; they arrived in large numbers decades before 9/11.
Many recent migrants come from places like Eritrea, Congo, India and Somalia which, while sometimes subject to localized conflicts, people leave mainly for economic reasons. The average Somali doesn’t move to Sweden to “flee war”, they move for an easier, better and more comfortable life. The “war” framework is literally buying into the leftist idea that they are legitimate refugees.
During the entire history of global colonialism countries routinely invaded, conquered, sacked and otherwise reassembled the affairs of countless other countries (including much of the Middle East) with zero mass immigration to Europe. You can just say “no”. Dick Cheney didn’t make Sweden the “humanitarian superpower”. He didn’t make Angela Merkel say “wir schaffen das”. China doesn’t have all of Burma and Mongolia walk in because people know there’s no hope there and they will be returned.
The most expensive outlay in the War on Terror (the Iraq invasion) was a humanitarian success. Certainly there were issues (like the brief ISIS thing) and there is a good case to be made that it was a bad deal fiscally for the US (I agree with this assessment), but Iraq today is far more prosperous than it was in 2003. Dollar denominated GDP is up over 1000% (so in real terms), GDP per capita is up 4x even though oil has been in a slump since 2014 (indicating again real economic growth rather than just higher resource revenues). Baghdad is a boomtown now.
It isn't a universal law that invading a country will create a refugee crisis but both Libya and Syria were dams holding back the tide. Gaddafi quite explicitly said as much, and it's become abundantly clear that he wasn't lying. Unless the Europeans are willing to sink migrant boats by the thousands and let them all drown then simply "saying no" is about as effective as a 5'2 woman "saying no" to a 7' felon. Furthermore, overthrowing these regimes created an enormous power vacuum that created chaos in neighboring countries too. For example, the Sahel only became a hotbed of terrorism after Gaddafi fell and his weapons were smuggled over to the local Al Qaeda affiliates.
Yeah if you brush over the brutal sectarian conflict and ISIS to only look at per capita GDP then it looks great.
West Germany had higher per capita GDP in 1955 than Germany in 1935 too, are we to conclude that Hitler was a humanitarian success?
There is no need to deliberately sink the boats (although to be clear, you wouldn’t have to sink many to prevent all crossings; most people don’t want to die). You go to Libya, find the most powerful warlords on the coast (there are only a couple of major factions) and pay them $500m a year to deal with the migrant issue, payment upon results. They could use the money and will be happy to help.
If GDP per capita was higher in 1946 there might be a point. In Iraq there has been largely continuity of government since 2005. The Shiites dominate but that is expected given they are a majority.
That was how it worked under Gaddafi and by all accounts the Europeans have tried to replicate the old arrangement.
Except Gaddafi had an iron grip on power whereas these warlords are themselves dependent on countless smaller militias, each of which have their own independent enterprises to profit from human trafficking. Haftar can make all sorts of promises but he can't actually enforce them even in the territory he supposedly controls. Even Al-Jolani has proven to be largely impotent at disarming the militias and he doesn't have to worry about competition.
If dumping money on warlords was enough to create a state then the Taliban wouldn't have rolled over Afghanistan faster than the Marines could leave. Forget 500m, they absorbed trillions and for all intents and purposes that money may as well have been thrown into a bonfire for all the good it did.
In 2006 Iraq was in the midst of a bloody campaign of sectarian violence in which Sunnis were purged from most of Baghdad. Estimates for the number of refugees and casualties created by the chaos of the period ranges between six and seven figures.
And that was before ISIS!
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This is almost entirely untrue, the Italians made a brief but largely failed effort to negotiate an arrangement but Frontex undercut them at every turn and it’s not viable without a broader deal, which requires a border agency that doesn’t undercut that kind of arrangement at every turn. Even if it wasn’t possible to stop crossings, of course, that doesn’t prevent an even simpler arrangement, in which every migrant illegally landed is simply deported, immediately, by air to Libya without any European legal process whatsoever, whereupon the local warlords can do with them what they wish. A second crossing (unlike the English Channel) from North Africa is beyond most of their means, so most would return to their countries.
As I’ve stated many times, victory in Afghanistan was absolutely possible in 2001. Restore the highly popular king (which America refused to do out of some absurd ideological republicanism) and execute about 1-3% of the adult male population per year. Implement a strict two child policy. Introduce communal and summary punishment, including the extermination of whole villages. Internal population transfers to rotate people away from traditional ethnic communities, breaking up family and ancestral ties. Extreme control of the Pakistani border to prevent almost all crossings. Regularly kill large numbers of ruling warlords (under the king’s nominal authority) to prevent complacency, and in certain territories kill a large proportion of tribal patriarchs to dismantle Pashtunwala by force, the same way Stalin and Mao handled rebellious tribes (they failed in some cases, as in Chechnya (where they weren’t close to tough enough), but succeeded in many others).
Of course this was unpalatable to western liberal elites, but I can’t stand the idea that it was impossible. With enough brutality, almost any society can be dismantled and reconstituted. It is only a question of will and incentives.
Savagery around the world is pretty common. As in Syria with the Alawites it was unlikely that Sunni minority rule over the largely Shia population would end entirely peacefully. It is still clear that, very dumb “Buh buh GDP doesn’t mean anything” European-leftist type arguments, average quality of life in modern Iraq for many people is substantially higher than in 2003.
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smuggling
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You won't need that much. If you kill couple of boats the rest won't set sail at all. And I think that with drone tech advancing so much - creating a solar powered unmanned submarine that will just ram them with private funding is feasible.
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