"In Alan's raised right hand, festooned with surgical clamps and now separated from the body that it had sustained for seventy-one years, rested the vice president's heart. It was huge, more than twice the size of a normal organ, and it bore the scars of its four-decade battle with the relentless disease that eventually killed it.
"I turned from the heart to look down into the chest.... The surreal void was a vivid reminder that there was no turning back."
3. The End of the "Demonstration Effect"
No turning back would be a good slogan for Dick Cheney. His memoirs are remarkable -- and he shares this with Rumsfeld -- for an almost perfect lack of second-guessing, regret, or even the mildest reconsideration. "I thought the best way to get on with my life and my career was to do what I thought was right," he tells Cutler. "I did what I did, it's all on the public record, and I feel very good about it." Decisions are now as they were then. If that Mission Accomplished moment in 2003 seemed at the time to be the height of American power and authority, then so it will remain -- unquestioned, unaltered, uninflected by subsequent public events that show it quite clearly to have been nothing of the kind. "If I had to do it over again," says Cheney, "I'd do it in a minute."
Yet lack of regret, refusal to reconsider, doesn't alter the train of cause and effect; certainty that decisions were right, no matter how powerful -- and the imperturbable perfection of Cheney's certainty is nothing short of dazzling -- cannot obscure evidence that they were wrong. Often the sheer unpopularity of a given course seems to offer to Cheney its own satisfaction, a token of his disinterestedness, as if the lack of political support must serve as a testament to the purity of his motives. "Cheney is an anti-politician," remarks Barton Gellman, author of the brilliant study of Cheney's vice-presidency, Angler.5 "But no president can be an anti-politician. No president can govern that way."
By 2007, even President Bush had begun to realize this, to understand the pitfalls and risks of Cheney's certainty. Having ventured his own one-word query in the interview with Robert Gates -- "Cheney?" -- Bush supplies his own answer: "He is a voice, an important voice, but only one voice." This observation would appear to be proved true in the debate over attacking Syria, in which Gates as secretary of defense joined Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and National Secretary Adviser Stephen Hadley in opposing Cheney. "The idea that we could bomb the Syria reactor to make a point about proliferation in the face of uncertain intelligence," Rice remarks in her memoirs, "was, to put it mildly, reckless."
It was not just the possibility that such a surprise attack could ignite a regional conflagration and pull the Syrians and Iranians deeper into the Iraq quagmire, or the fact that the American public was exhausted with war and desperate to withdraw from the Middle East rather than attack another country there. The Chinese were deeply involved -- they were critical to pressuring the North Koreans, who had helped build the Syrian reactor -- and, Rice notes, "they (and the rest of the region) would never have tolerated the military strike the Vice President recommended."6
No matter. Cheney prided himself on keeping political concerns out of decisions about "what was right"; and no war gone wrong, let alone a defeat at the polls, would change his views on the terrible "nexus" between terrorists and their state sponsors and weapons of mass destruction. As he tells Cutler: "You don't want Syria to have that kind of capability that they might be able to pass along to Hamas or Hezbollah or al-Qaeda." Despite the ongoing war in Iraq, and the widespread fears of a regional conflagration, and the war-weariness and anger among Americans, the United States had no choice but to attack Syria and to do it without delay. And as Gates remarks, though "Cheney knew that, among the four of us, he alone thought a strike should be the first and only option... perhaps he could persuade the president."7
Perhaps he could; if so, it would not be the first time that Cheney's voice, isolated or not, had carried the day. The vice president lobbied the president directly and then made his case to a National Security Council meeting in June 2007:
"I argued in front of the group and in front of the President.... I thought I was rather eloquent.... The President said, "All right, how many people agree with the Vice President?' And nobody put their hand up."
The days had passed when Bush would ignore the hands and choose Cheney's path anyway. There would be no return to the glorious "authority and influence we had back in '03." Having refused Israeli demands that he order an air strike, Bush also discouraged, at least nominally, direct Israeli action, supposedly intending to follow Rice's and Gates's insistence that the reactor be exposed at the United Nations. But the Israelis had other plans. Late one night in September 2007, American-made Israeli F-15s streaked across the Syrian border and, using precisely targeted bombs, "took out" the reactor. In the event, the Israelis made no grand announcement to promote Israel's "authority and influence" or that of its American ally. The Israelis kept the attack secret and insisted the Americans do the same -- as did the Syrians, who quietly demolished the ruins and plowed them under. The era of the "demonstration effect" was over.
4. Working the Dark Side
And yet we live still in Cheney's world. All around us are the consequences of those decisions: in Fallujah, Iraq, where al-Qaeda-allied jihadis who were nowhere to be found in Saddam Hussein's Iraq have just again seized control; in Syria, where Iraqi jihadists play a prominent part in the rebellion against the Assad regime; in Afghanistan, where the Taliban, largely ignored after 2002 in the rush to turn American attention to Saddam Hussein, are resurgent. And then there is the other side of the "war on terror," the darker story that Cheney, five days after the September 11 attacks, was able to describe so precisely for the country during an interview on Meet the Press:
"We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies... That's the world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective."
The day after Cheney made these comments President Bush signed a secret document that, according to longtime CIA counsel John Rizzo,
"was the most comprehensive, most ambitious, most aggressive, and most risky Finding or MON [Memorandum of Notification] I was ever involved in. One short paragraph authorized the capture and detention of Al Qaeda terrorists, another authorized taking lethal action against them. The language was simple and stark... We had filled the entire covert-action tool kit, including tools we had never before used."8
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