The media will have a great deal to say about Dick Cheney’s death and his career. His shining moment was certainly his opposition to Donald Trump’s authoritarianism. But his lasting legacy will be the tremendous damage he did to U.S. national security with his campaign for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
When George W. Bush and Dick Cheney lowered their hands after being sworn in for their second terms in 2004, they were smiling. And with good reason. They had gotten away with the greatest con in the history of the American presidency (until Trump). They willfully and systematically misled the American people and our closest allies on the most crucial question any government faces: Must we go to war?
Not one of the dozens of claims they made about Iraq’s alleged stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, missiles, unmanned drones, or most importantly, Iraq’s nuclear weapons and ties to Al Qaeda, were true. Not one. Yet no one in the administration was ever held accountable for the hundreds of false statements or—if you believe they made the statements in good faith—for their faulty judgments and incompetence. Almost all the key officials, save former CIA Director George Tenet, were still in office to celebrate the administration’s reelection. (When Tenet resigned for “personal reasons,” Bush praised him for having done “a superb job”; he then made more than $500,000 in speaking fees in his first years out of office.)
We now know with absolute certainty, as Cheney liked to...
The media will have a great deal to say about Dick Cheney’s death and his career. His shining moment was certainly his opposition to Donald Trump’s authoritarianism. But his lasting legacy will be ...