Pacific Views

Dick Cheney Sets US Foreign Policy

Josh Marshall links an article in The New Republic discussing Cheney's role in creating the Bush White House foreign policy. This article explains why Bush II so thoroughly reputiated the Bush I policy and how Cheney came to build his own private intelligence agency. Franklin Foer & Spencer Ackerman show that Cheney came to believe during his time in Bush I that only by the spread of democracy through the world would America be safe. That democracy can be imposed by military force and that the US must be the only superpower and willing to use force to prevent the proliferation of WMD were inherent in his beliefs.

Foer and Ackerman report that during the Bush I days, Dick Cheney became concerned when seeing the CIA failures to accurately assess weapons programs. In particular, he found worrying the failure of the CIA in the 1980s to predict how extensive Saddam's WMD programs were as well as the fact that the CIA completely missed the Soviet biological program. So his response was to start to second guess the CIA agents and when he moved into the White House as VP, to set up his own Intelligence agency. He thought that he and his neocon cronies were better able to judge the quality of the information coming in all over the world. However, unlike the CIA, the conclusions where never rigorously tested and much garbage was accepted as true by Cheney's group. Because of his misjudgements, Cheney bears as much responsibility as George W. Bush (who "made the decision") for our illegal and ill-considered war in Iraq.

Since Cheney shaped his views when he realized the CIA was experiencing massive failures, one would hope that faced with the even greater failures of his own intelligence agency, that he would reconsider his own assumptions. Yet, as Foer and Ackerman say, this is not too likely:

With Bush repeatedly affirming Cheney's place on the 2004 ticket, there is no evidence the vice president has reconsidered either the ideological vision that has taken him this far or the process he has used to implement it. And, of course, there are enormous foreign policy challenges remaining on the U.S. agenda: the nuclear crises in North Korea and Iran, America's estrangement from the rest of the world, and above all the unfinished war on terrorism. Anyone who thinks the Bush administration will take a softer line on these questions than it did on Iraq is probably kidding himself. Cheney will continue to push the agenda he set out 15 years ago: aggressive promotion of democracy through military power. This is no mere intoxication with ideas of the moment, spurred by a zealous staff or the pain of September 11. This is who Dick Cheney--the most powerful vice president in history--is.

Molly Ivins said she thought that George W. Bush was not a bad person, but that he picked the wrong mentor in Cheney, who has a pessimistic and faulty view of the world. Cheney had been instrumental in most of the worst decisions this administration had made and it is good that more attention is being paid to his role. In my opinion, Dick Cheney is the Darth Vader of this administration and it is our duty as patriotic Americans to find a way to prevent the further encroachment of his dark vision onto our world.

Posted by Mary at November 21, 2003 12:49 PM | TrackBack