Cheney and Bush: Blood Brothers

So yesterday, some LaRouche hawks were on campus and tried to convince me to join them in impeaching Cheney. Taking their words with a grain of salt, I consulted with a cooler head on what\'s going on with the "torturemeister." It\'s an insightful article if you\'ve got the time:

Out of the bunker
Nov 24th 2005
From The Economist print edition

Dick Cheney may be hugely unpopular, but George Bush needs him badly

“A BONELESS wonder” was how Winston Churchill once described the first Labour prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald. Dick Cheney is about as far from boneless as it is possible to get. The vice-president is the most uncompromising politician in today\'s Washington: an embodiment of ideological rigidity who not only has plenty of bones of his own, but also lots of other people\'s bones stored in the Old Executive Office Building. Three years ago he was the keenest advocate of invading Iraq. Today he is the steeliest defender not only of that war but also of the wider war on terror, in which—in his view—Iraq is a mere front.

Mr Cheney\'s natural reaction to every brickbat and setback is to dig deeper and fight harder. The chorus of war critics is getting louder. So Mr Cheney questions not just their arguments but their integrity. John McCain wants to prevent Americans from engaging in “cruel, inhuman and degrading” punishment. So Mr Cheney tries to persuade Senate Republicans that tying the president\'s hands may cost “thousands of lives”. Mr Cheney\'s hardline aide, Scooter Libby, is forced to resign. So Mr Cheney replaces him with an even harder-line figure, David Addington, the man who led the fight to keep the proceedings of Mr Cheney\'s energy task-force secret, who drafted Alberto Gonzales\'s 2002 memorandum that argued that enemy combatants are not covered by the Geneva Conventions, and who was behind the presidential order establishing military tribunals.

Mr Cheney\'s defence of his position has a quality rare in Washington: the sound of conviction. The man who Mr Bush calls “Vice” is not just playing the traditional role of a vice-president in an embattled presidency—like Spiro Agnew, savaging the “nattering nabobs of negativism” during Vietnam. He is defending a policy he passionately supports. For Mr Cheney, the big fact about America is that it is at war with Islamofacism. And it must do everything possible—from beating back war critics to reserving the right to torture detainees—in order to win that war.

This uncompromising stand has raised eyebrows in the Washington establishment. “The real anomaly in the administration is Cheney,” Brent Scowcroft recently told the New Yorker. “I consider Cheney a good friend—I\'ve known him for 30 years. But Dick Cheney I don\'t know any more.”

In one way, the idea that Mr Cheney has undergone a personality change is unfair: he was always a belt-and-braces pessimist and an ardent conservative. As a Wyoming congressman, he compiled a voting record to the right of Newt Gingrich\'s (he voted against the equal-rights amendment, for example); as defence secretary, he constantly found his most powerful prejudice confirmed, that the world is a very dangerous place. But even allowing for this, September 11th 2001 clearly changed him. As Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution points out, a pragmatic hardliner became an ideological hardliner. He lost his patience with the world\'s ditherers and debaters. And his world-view was sprinkled with neo-conservative pixie-dust.

Somewhere in this transformation Mr Cheney seems to have lost his most prized political asset—his judgment. Whenever he had a chance on Iraq, he seems to have pushed the evidence further than it could reasonably be pushed. He not only argued that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction; he insisted that he was close to acquiring a nuclear bomb. He not only complained in private about the hand-wringers and poseurs in the United Nations; he suggested from the first that America could go ahead without the blessing of that body, as if international opinion is an irrelevance in modern warfare. Somehow, one of life\'s natural Hobbesians not only underestimated how difficult it would be to transform a Baathist dictatorship into a functioning democracy, but even bought the clap-trap about Iraqis greeting Americans with flowers.

Blood brothers

Which brings us to a question that is currently perplexing Cheney watchers: why is the administration relying so heavily on such a divisive, even discredited, figure to defend the Iraq policy? Mr Cheney\'s poll numbers are dismal. The indictment of his chief of staff has raised serious questions about his honesty. And his defence of torture makes many middle-of-the-road people nervous.

One reason is that the administration is hardly spoiled for choice when it comes to articulate defenders of the war (and Mr Cheney is nothing if not articulate). Another is that the time for emollience has long passed. So what if Mr Cheney can\'t charm nervous independents and wavering Democrats? These days the administration is in the business of shoring up the conservative base, which is the only thing that stands between Mr Bush and free-fall. But the most important reason is that Mr Bush still agrees with Mr Cheney.

Washington has recently been consumed by rumours that Mr Cheney is for the high jump. Didn\'t he spend a suspicious amount of time in the sticks recently, holidaying in Wyoming and pheasant-hunting in South Dakota? And wasn\'t he one of the last to know that Mr Bush had chosen Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court? The rumour-mongers interpret Mr Cheney\'s recent ubiquity as more proof that he is desperately trying to save his job.

But the truth is more mundane. Mr Bush may well have been annoyed that his most trusted adviser promised an easy victory in Iraq, and that he over-sold the case on Iraq\'s WMD. He is certainly embarrassed by the Plame affair. But Mr Bush was just as transformed by September 11th as Mr Cheney was. He was just as keen on getting rid of Saddam. And he is remarkably loyal to his fellow Iraq hawks, as Donald Rumsfeld\'s continued presence in the administration makes clear. For better or worse, Mr Bush and “Vice” will probably have to ride this storm together.