Capital cities in countries with fighting-armies can generate a magnetic force-field that will attract the most ambitiously hypocritical within the societies they govern – the shameless and conscience-free adventurers whose ambition and psychopathic personalities equip them perfectly for life in the decision-making centre. They will happily send men to their deaths in the uniform that they had already gone to great lengths to avoid wearing. Bill Clinton was such a man, and so was Clinton’s Republican near-counterpart Dick Cheney, who in the 1960s absolutely hated war when it seemed that he might be called to serve in one.
But, some forty years later, he absolutely revelled in war now that he had achieved power over the US military. One can almost imagine him, with wall-maps and pointers, and maybe wearing a pseudo-military baseball hat, as he utters words of command, with a gravelly gravitas and heroic understatement, that will send young men into the killing fields, either to kill or be killed. A manly tear glistens in his eye as, unspoken yet lingering in the air, are his own imagined words: Men, I just wish I were going with you, but fortune alas has not been so kind to me. I wish you well on the field of honour and may you all come back home in one piece. God speed, and God bless America.
Around the world in 2003, millions of people marched against the coming war, but I did not. Twenty-one years ago, I was almost alone within the ranks of Irish journalists in supporting the US-led invasion of Iraq because I genuinely believed the allegations by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Prime Minister Blair that Iraq had retained its weapons of mass destruction.
My grounds for doing so now seem utterly flimsy, but did not at the time. The first was that nobody could possibly invent a pretext for war when the invasion which the “pretext” had enabled would then reveal the absence of any such pretext, meaning that it had all been a lie and a con from the outset. I simply did not believe that both the British prime minister and the US President were both that stupid and that villainous.
The second justification now seems just as flimsy: because the passionate self-hating multicultural, Western liberals in both the US and Europe opposed any military action against Saddam, I was therefore in favour of it. This is rather like disapproving of the use of water for putting out a fire because it has also been known to drown people. On the other hand, those same, self-hating, multicultural Western liberals four years ago endorsed both Black Lives Matter and the insurrection that destroyed Donald Trump’s presidency, and today they demand open borders for Europe and the USA. So, I did have a point, but only sort of….
Certainly, there was (and remains) no simple solution to the Iraqi dilemma of 2003. To have let Saddam Hussein remain in power would probably have meant that his monstrously evil sons would in due course have inherited governance over Iraq, creating a conjoined axis of evil alongside that of the splendidly wicked Assad dynasty in control of Syria, with its vast army and air force. Bestraddling both regimes, and threatening them also, were Islamist terrorists whose capacity for evil was greater than theirs by a factor of ten – but most people did not know that. However, Cheney, Bush and Blair probably did. Yet they took the war option, leading to catastrophe and the deaths of – how many? – up to half a million people, and the partial-genocide of the poor Yazidis, with thousands of women and girls forced into violent sex-slavery to service ISIS fighters.
With a record like that to defend, one would think that Cheney would thereafter shut up, though long before then his personal history should have ensured that he kept his tongue lodged firmly under his heel. He had been a young man in the early 1960s when the US began to defend South Vietnam from a terrorist-insurgency being mounted by North Vietnam, and he was therefore eligible for the draft. But students – quite wrongly – could get deferments from military service so long as they remained at college, meaning that Dick Cheney’s four-year degree-course mysteriously lengthened to six years. This says two things. The first is that he had a healthy regard for his own life, and nobody can blame him for that. The second is that once he had avoided the military draft – which hundreds of thousands of working-class men could not do, with tens of thousands of them dying in South-East Asia – he thereafter forfeited the right to control, influence or lead the armed forces within whose ranks he had declined to serve.
But that of course is the kind of moral judgement that narcissists such as Cheney, Blair and Clinton would not even begin to understand. For that treasonous trinity, every word in the previous sentence following “South-East Asia” might as well have been written in Old High Aramaic, but using Chinese characters as daubed by Bart Simpson. (Though admittedly Blair’s face today, which resembles the painting in Dorian Grey’s attic, suggests he does have some regrets about his role in the 2003 war.)
Once Cheney had married and had successfully fathered the baby that would keep him safely away from the Mekong Delta, he high-tailed it to Washington, where he became an intern for a Wisconsin politician who promptly did the decent thing and died. This meant that Cheney was now free to offer his services to whomever within the DC beltway, and he soon made common cause with a like-minded soul, Donald Rumsfeld.
What the two men had in common was a weapons-grade ambition that could burn its way out of the impermeable concrete used for storing nuclear waste. For such as them, “scruple” was merely an acronym for screwing people, which they did. Rumsfeld became Secretary of Defence on and off for twenty years, though at least he had served his time in the US Navy as a flier.
As for Cheney, his primary qualifications for high office in Washington were the same as his “opponent,” Bill Clinton, namely as draft-dodgers. Of course, this would genuinely not have occurred to either man, for what they also had in common was the status of a high-alpha male. In their traitorous company, even patriotic generals and admirals nonetheless straightened their backs and adjusted their ties, no matter the contempt they must logically have felt for them. The male hierarchy is not shaped by courage or achievement but the raw and unscrupulous chemistry of hormones.
Naturally, when his time came to serve as Secretary for Defence, Cheney gave major contracts to the Halliburton, the Texas oil company, and equally naturally, when out of office, he became Halliburton’s CEO, for which he even developed Halliburton’s paramilitary mercenary wing, now called contractors. Sceptics might think there was something a little iffy about such a relationship, but such people don’t know how alpha-males work. Theirs is a world where pieces naturally fit. Ordinary logic and ordinary scruples – there, that word again – simply do not apply. This is not written sardonically or cynically but factually. If E=MC2 makes sense, which it doesn’t to rational people, then so does the Halliburton-Pentagon nexus. We just don’t need to understand it, OK?
Cheney was the most powerful vice president in American history, all memory of his failure to serve his country at a time of war having vanished like the 1960’s mists over the Mekong Delta. In this role, he became the primary author of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and therefore of all the subsequent calamities. In retirement, this surely should have silenced him, but not so. Last week, the man who falsely declared that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and who embarked on a war that destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives, thousands of them American, had this to say of Donald Trump.
“In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again. As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.”
For a man such as Cheney to accuse anybody of using “lies and violence” to get his way is a hypocrisy as irresistible as the ambition that once could have punched its way through the deadly Kármán line that protects earth’s upper atmosphere. No doubt, most American voters either are too young or too stupid to know who or what Dick Cheney once was, so will his opinions today make any difference whatsoever? Possibly not. The real wonder is that his ego, unbowed by shame or guilt, nonetheless feels free to offer his opinions on matters of state. As the most powerful and influential vice president in US history, he has now endorsed the claims upon the White House of the most incompetent vice president in nearly a quarter of a millennium, and who probably thinks that Halliburton won an Oscar for starring in the film, Monster’s Ball. So, if Trump defeats Harris, leaving her a free woman at a loose end, will Cheney then propose her as CEO of Halliburton? Logical and only fair, surely?
Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.
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