Deconstructing Dick Cheney

<a href=www.thestar.com>Source Mar. 23, 2003. 02:05 PM DAVID OLIVE

In his brief televised address last Monday, George W. Bush offered no rationale for the U.S. attack on Iraq.

The U.S. president left that task to his vice-president, Dick Cheney, described last week by the Wall Street Journal as having "the highest credibility with Bush" among White House war advisers.

For months, Cheney has quietly disparaged the diplomatic manoeuvres on Iraq, counselling Bush to topple Saddam Hussein by force.

Last Sunday, the reclusive Cheney made his first talk-show appearance in seven months to offer perhaps the U.S. administration's fullest justification yet for war in Iraq.

Here are excerpts from Cheney's interview with Tim Russert on Meet The Press:

Cheney: "We have to address the question of where might these terrorists acquire weapons of mass destruction ... and Saddam Hussein becomes a prime suspect.... We know he has a long-standing relationship with various terrorist groups, including the Al Qaeda organization."

Even the most hawkish supporters of war on Iraq acknowledge that the Bush administration has continually failed to establish a substantive link between Saddam and Al Qaeda, which drew most of its funding and its Sept. 11 hijackers from Saudi Arabian sources and sought refuge in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Sudan and Florida, but not Iraq.

There is no evidence Saddam, in his more than 20 years in power, shared his weapons with terrorists.

And International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors can find no evidence of a current Iraqi nuclear program.

Terrorists would most likely tap the huge and poorly guarded nuclear-weapons stockpile of Russia, or equip themselves with nuclear material that an impoverished North Korea, desperate for hard currency, is openly threatening to sell to all comers.

Cheney: "I have argued in the past, and would again, if we had been able to pre-empt the attacks of 9/11, would we have done it? And I think absolutely."

Cheney is suggesting here that the U.S. wishes it could have mounted a pre-emptive strike on a nation behind the Sept. 11 tragedy. But there was no such nation.

As for what the U.S. could have done by way of pre-emption, the U.S. intelligence community failed to do what was expected of it pre-Sept. 11.

Late in the day, Bush was presented in August, 2001, with a U.S. intelligence warning of a Sept. 11-type threat and chose not to act on it.

Earlier in 2001, Cheney short-circuited a congressional effort to bolster anti-terrorism measures.

He chose instead to spearhead an anti-terrorism task force of his own, with the goal of ensuring that the White House, rather than Congress, would get the credit for any reforms that resulted. But the Cheney task force was virtually inactive in the months prior to 9/11.

Cheney: "If you look at the track record of the International Atomic Energy Agency.... They have consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing."

The credibility problem here rests with the Bush administration, not the IAEA. Early this year, the U.S. and Britain gave U.N. inspectors what they described as irrefutable proof that Iraq tried to obtain uranium from Niger, presumably for a nuclear weapon. The documents were almost immediately exposed as forgeries.

Cheney: "Our objective will be ... a government that's preserving the territorial integrity of Iraq and stands up a broadly representative government of the Iraqi people."

It is unlikely the people Cheney has in mind to lead a post-war Iraq would be "broadly representative" of Iraqi civilians.

Cheney and his top aides are pressuring a reluctant U.S. State Department to find a significant governing role in a post-war Iraq for Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi exile whose family ran the country decades ago.

Chalabi is now eager to head a post-war Iraq. The wealthy Chalabi, a golf partner of Cheney since the mid-1990s, was convicted in a Jordanian banking scandal about a decade ago.

Cheney: "We need to be prepared to provide humanitarian assistance, medical care, food, all of those things that are required to have (post-war) Iraq up and running. And we are well-equipped to do that."

Not so, says the head of InterAction, the leading U.S. coalition of non-government overseas relief organizations.

"We don't think the relief and reconstruction needs of the Iraqi people will be adequately met, based on the overly optimistic scenarios we understand the U.S. government is using," InterAction head Mary McClymont told the Wall Street Journal.

Cheney: "That flow of (Iraqi oil revenue), obviously, belongs to the Iraqi people, needs to be put to use by the Iraqi people, and that will be one of our main objectives."

If oil-rich Nigeria, Venezuela, Iran, Sudan, Mexico and Indonesia are any indication, very little oil revenue trickles down to ordinary citizens.

One widely anticipated change in affairs, though: French oil giant Total SA, long active in Iraq, likely will be pushed aside by U.S. and British entrants including ExxonMobil Corp. and Royal Dutch/Shell Group, until now forbidden by their governments from exploiting the world's second-largest oil reserves.

Cheney: "As we go forward and look at the threat of rogue states and terrorists equipped with deadly weapons in the future, the only nation that really has the capability to deal effectively with those threats is the U.S. ... The fact of the matter is for most of the others who are engaged in this debate (at the Security Council), they don't have the capability to do anything about it."

As it happens, Security Council member China has a larger army than the U.S. and Britain combined. All five permanent council members Ñ the U.S., Britain and the anti-Iraq war China, France and Russia, have nuclear capability.

Nuclear weapons are the only proven "weapons of mass destruction" Ñ capable of widespread property destruction and the immediate, certain death of millions of people.

In asserting that other nations are not up to the job, Cheney is in fact claiming a new role for the U.S. as the world's sole "constabulatory" power, a term he and other hawks are using with increasing frequency.

The assumption of this role requires that international bodies, including those of America's own creation (the United Nations, NATO, the Organization of american States, etc.), must be discredited.

Cheney: "In the past, many of our friends in Europe and elsewhere around the world, when they see a state that's sponsored terror, frankly, was willing to look the other way ...."

The U.S. itself has looked the other way when confronted with reports of chronic human-rights violations by countries it supports.

It did so in the 1980s when Saddam was inflicting brutalities on his own people while warring with a U.S. enemy, Iran.

As CEO of the oil-services giant Halliburton Co. in the 1990s, Cheney headed a company in violation of U.S. government bans on the sale of goods to Iraq and other countries deemed by the U.S. State Department to be "rogue nations."

As late as 2000, Halliburton was Iraq's largest supplier of oil-field services, and CEO Cheney was lobbying the U.N. to lift sanctions on Saddam's regime.

Cheney: "After we got hit on 9/11, (the president) enunciated the Bush doctrine that we will hold states that sponsor terror, that provide sanctuary for terrorists, to account.... That's a brand-new departure. We've never done that before. It makes people very uncomfortable, but it's absolutely essential."

Dating from 1903, when the U.S. supported an uprising in the breakaway Colombia state of Panama to facilitate a U.S.-built canal, Washington has sponsored efforts at regime change in Guatemala, Iran, Cuba, South Vietnam, Chile, Afghanistan, Libya, Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama, Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia. This is not a complete list.

Cheney: "The U.S. has established over the last several years ... an unfortunate practice that we've often failed to respond effectively to attacks on the U.S.

We had situations in '83 when the Marine barracks was blown up in Beirut. There was no effective U.S. response.

"In '93, the World Trade Center in New York hit; no effective response. In '96, Khobar Towers.

"In '98, the east Africa embassy bombings. In 2000, the USS Cole was hit.

"And each time there was almost no credible response for the United States to these attacks."

What these incidents have in common is that Iraq had nothing to do with them.

Russert asked what would be next after Iraq. Would the U.S. consider military action to pre-empt the nuclear programs of North Korea or Iran?

Cheney: "I didn't come this morning to announce any new military ventures or, frankly, to take any off the table. We haven't thought in those terms."

In the late 1990s, Cheney, future U.S. defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and several men who now work for them as top advisers began to think very much in those terms.

They signed a founding manifesto of the Project For A New American Century, a conservative Washington think-tank.

The manifesto called for the United States to stop working through the U.N., NATO and other organizations that constrain U.S. power, and to promote regime change around the world.

The director of the Project For A New American Century is William Kristol, who first gained attention as a vice-presidential adviser nicknamed "Dan Quayle's brain."

Kristol, who now edits the Rupert Murdoch-financed Weekly Standard, probably the most influential of America's neo-conservative journals, has said Saddam's ouster is only the beginning.

"We haven't persuaded the Bush administration of everything," Kristol was quoted recently.

"They need to rethink their policy toward Saudi Arabia.... The administration kicked the can down the road on North Korea, but that remains a threat."

Additional articles by David Olive