"Syria was facilitating the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq, where they killed US soldiers. Iran was providing funding and weapons for exactly the same purpose, as well as providing weapons to the Taliban in Afghanistan. They were both involved in supporting Hezbollah in its efforts to threaten Israel and destabilize the Lebanese government. They constituted a major threat to America's interests in the Middle East."
By the vice president's own analysis the "demonstration model" approach, judged by whether it was "guiding the behavior" of the axis of evil countries and their allies, was delivering distinctly mixed results. No matter:
"I told the president we needed a more effective and aggressive strategy to counter these threats, and I believed that an important first step would be to destroy the reactor in the Syrian desert."
Launching an air strike on Syria, as he tells Cutler, "would sort of again reassert the kind of authority and influence we had back in '03 -- when we took down Saddam Hussein and eliminated Iraq as a potential source of WMD."
"Back in '03" had been the Golden Age, when American power had reached its zenith. After Kabul had fallen in a few weeks, the shock and awe launched from American planes and missiles had brought American warriors storming all the way to Baghdad. Saddam's statue, with the help of an American tank and a strong chain, crashed to the pavement. The first of the "axis of evil" countries had fallen. President Bush donned his flight suit and swaggered across the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. It was the "Mission Accomplished" moment.
And yet is there not something distinctly odd in pointing, in 2007 -- not to mention in the memoirs of 2011 and the film interview in 2013 -- to "the kind of authority and influence we had back in '03"? Four years after the Americans had declared victory in Iraq -- even as the vice president was "strongly recommending" that the United States attack Syria -- more than a hundred thousand Iraqis and nearly five thousand Americans were dead, Iraq was near anarchy, and no end was yet in sight. Not only the war's ending but its beginning had disappeared into a dark cloud of confusion and controversy, as the weapons of mass destruction that were its justification turned out not to exist. The invasion had produced not the rapid and overwhelming victory Cheney had anticipated but a quagmire in which the American military had occupied and repressed a Muslim country and, four years later, been brought to the verge of defeat. As for "authority and influence," during that time North Korea had acquired nuclear weapons and Iran and Syria had started down the road to building them.
Given this, what exactly had the "demonstration model" demonstrated? If such demonstrations really did "guide the behavior of anyone with the temerity...to flout the authority of the United States," how exactly had the decision to invade Iraq and the disastrous outcome of the war guided the actions and policies of those authority-flouting countries? The least one could say is that if the theory worked, then that "authority and influence we had back in '03," in conquered Baghdad, had been unmasked, as the insurgency got underway, as an illusion.
The pinnacle of power had been attained not in Baghdad but long before, when the leaders decided to set out on this ill-starred military adventure. By invading Iraq Bush administration policymakers -- and at their head, Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld -- had managed to demonstrate to the world not the grand extent of American power but its limits. The most one could say is that the "demonstration model" had had the opposite result of that intended, encouraging "rogue states," faced with the prospect of an aggressive United States determined to wield its unmatched conventional military forces, to pursue the least expensive means by which to deter such an attack: nuclear weapons of their own. Now the Iraq war suggested that even if the Americans did invade, a determined core of insurgents equipped with small arms, suicide vests, and other improvised explosive devices might well be enough to outlast them, or at least outlast the patience of the American public.
2. The Smile of Secret Power
By November 2007 two in three Americans had concluded that the Iraq war had not been worth fighting. President Bush, bidding fair to become the least popular president since modern polling began, had just led the Republicans to a decisive "thumping" at the polls, losing control of both houses of Congress -- and had felt obliged finally to fire Rumsfeld, Cheney's longtime mentor, over the latter's dogged and strenuous objections. It was Rumsfeld who had brought the young Cheney into the White House in the late 1960s and who had presided over his astonishing rise, and it was Rumsfeld who had been Cheney's critical partner in advocating "the strategy of the demonstration effect." Even as Bush secretly interviewed Robert M. Gates, Rumsfeld's prospective replacement, at his Crawford, Texas, ranch two days before the election, discussing Iraq, Afghanistan, and the perilous state of the American military, the vice president's shadow loomed. According to Gates, "After about an hour together, the president leaned forward and asked if I had any more questions. I said no. He then sort of smiled and said, "Cheney?'"3
Two syllables. One word. Hearing it Gates "sort of smiled back." Reading it, we do the same. But what exactly does that word, accompanied by that "sort of" smile, mean? It raises first and foremost a question about power -- secret power. Untrammeled power. Hard power. The power behind POTUS. The Dark Side. The man who, even as he could no longer prevent his longtime mentor and close collaborator from being fired, himself never could be.
Richard Bruce Cheney, the man who had acceded to Governor George W. Bush's request in 2000 that he lead his search to find a perfect vice president, and who found that this arduous and exacting effort led to none other than himself, would be there at Bush's side, or somewhere in the murk behind him, until the bitter end. For all his experience and sophistication, that grimly blank expression -- calmly unflinching gaze, slightly lopsided frown -- embodied a philosophy of power unapologetically, brutally simple: attack, crush enemies; cause others to fear, submit. Power from time to time must be embodied in vivid violence, like Voltaire's executions, pour encourager les autres.
When it comes to Cheney's rise and his persistence we are in the realm of miracles and wonders. In 1969, Cheney was a 28-year-old fledgling academic wannabe from Wyoming laboring obscurely as an intern on Capitol Hill -- and lucky to be there, having twice flunked out of Yale, twice been jailed for drunk driving. Five years later he was Gerald Ford's White House chief of staff. Can American history offer a more rapid rise to power? Even the firework arc of his mentor Donald Rumsfeld pales before it.4 He'd owed his rise in large part to Rumsfeld's patronage, but also to Watergate itself, to the once-in-a-lifetime opportunities offered by the resignation of one president and the humbling of his successor. At close range Cheney, still in his early thirties, had seen the secret organs of executive power, notably the CIA, exposed to the light, humiliated, leashed. If it was true that "after 9/11, the gloves came off," Cheney, as a young and unlikely power in the Nixon and Ford White Houses, had had a front-row seat to observe the methods by which Congress first put those gloves on.
After Ford's defeat in 1976, Cheney won Wyoming's single House seat and rose with astonishing speed, advancing within a decade from freshman to minority whip, the number-three leadership position. He was on his way to the Speakership when he accepted President George H.W. Bush's offer to become secretary of defense and then, after leading the Pentagon during the wildly popular Desert Storm, left after Bush's defeat to become CEO of Halliburton, the giant oil services company. After gaining wealth and influence as a corporate leader, he finally departed to become -- to use the commonplace but entirely inadequate phrase -- "the most powerful vice president in history."
And all the while, like an ominous ground bass booming along beneath this public tale of power and triumph, runs another, darker narrative of mortality, in some ways even more remarkable. While campaigning for the House in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1978, Cheney was struck down by a heart attack. His doctor, and coauthor of Heart: An American Medical Odyssey, Jonathan Reiner, remarks that he knows no one who had a heart attack in the Seventies who is still alive today. For Cheney that 1978 coronary would be the first of five, his survival increasingly owed to the most advanced medical technology that with almost miraculous fortune became available just as he needed it to survive -- as if, Cheney writes, he "were traveling down a street, late for work, and all the lights ahead of me were red, but they turned green just before I got there."
In the book's most striking scene, Reiner recalls hearing a colleague summoning him back to the operating table late one afternoon in March 2012: "Hey, Jon, take a look." Entering, he is confronted with a singular vision:
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