3 ways Dick Cheney shaped US foreign policy
Dick Cheney, who rose to become one of most powerful figures in American politics as the 46th vice president of the United States, made an indelible mark on foreign policy and the reach of the executive branch.
That legacy includes one of the worst strategic decisions in U.S. history in crafting the argument for the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, which was based on false information and led to nearly 5,000 deaths of U.S. troops and hundreds of thousands of killed Iraqis.
Cheney, who died on Monday from complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease at age 84, held a myriad of roles in nearly four decades including White House chief of staff, congressman, Defense secretary and most memorably vice president during former President George W. Bush’s administration.
Here are his major contributions to U.S. foreign policy.
Promoted expansive presidential power
Cheney was well on the record in his opinion on presidential restraints, frequently arguing that they diminished U.S. power, especially when it came to its military effectiveness.
While serving as the lone congressman for Wyoming in the 1980s, he argued for broad presidential powers as the efficient solution to quickly solve problems instead of waiting for approval from Congress.
“I just basically disagree with those who think we need additional restrictions on the president’s conduct of foreign policy,” he wrote at the end of former President Reagan’s first term. “We do not need further restrictions … we need a president who is free to successfully use the tools at his command.”
Later in 2005, following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, he insisted that because of the nature of the threats to the U.S., the commander-in-chief needs to have their constitutional powers unimpaired.
“I believe in a strong, robust executive authority and I think that the world we live in demands it,” he told reporters at the time, directly linking the nearly unbridled executive authority under Bush to the nation’s safety.
“You know, it’s not an accident that we haven’t been hit in four years,” Cheney added.
After the terrorist attacks, Cheney led Bush’s response, which included the controversial and potentially illegal authorization to capture suspected al Qaeda terrorists across the globe and hold them indefinitely in sites such as Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, a practice known as “extraordinary rendition.”
The Bush administration also employed “enhanced interrogation,” or torture such as waterboarding to gain useful information from prisoners and monitoring private communications without a warrant.
All three tactics were justified by the administration’s lawyers through hasty new orders and bending existing laws, but they ultimately harmed Washington’s reputation.
Started forever wars in Middle East
Following the 9/11 attacks, Cheney became the main architect of the administration’s war on terror, pressing not only for an attack on al Qaeda in Afghanistan but also for the U.S. to enter another war in Iraq to topple then-leader Saddam Hussein and occupy the oil-rich country.
Publicly, he claimed that the invasion of Baghdad was necessary due in part to the false claims that it possessed “weapons of mass destruction,” claiming in March 2003 that the U.S. “will be greeted as liberators.”
But Cheney’s decision was arguably one of the most disastrous in American history. He was criticized for failing to estimate the risks and costs of entering the conflict — including the death toll and the billions of dollars that would be spent — which stretched nearly nine years into the end of 2011.
No weapons of mass destruction were ever found, and the U.S. occupation sparked sectarian violence across Iraq that gave way to destabilization and extremist groups such as ISIS.
The Afghanistan War, meanwhile, stretched for nearly 20 years, until former President Biden’s withdrawal of troops in 2021.
Defended torture as weapon of war
Cheney’s message was blunt in the days after 9/11 as to how the U.S. would respond to any threats: “It’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective. It is a mean, nasty, dangerous, dirty business out there, and we have to operate in that arena.”
He noted that the U.S. would have to “work sort of the dark side,” to defeat the enemy, which included the most controversial tools of the war that he pushed through and signed off on, including the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation techniques that are seen today as torture.
At the time, some in the Bush administration balked at the tactics, like waterboarding, including then-FBI Director Robert Mueller, who cautioned that it could hurt the country’s ability to prosecute terrorists.
Violent images of prisoners being interrogated at Abu Ghraib prison complex eventually came out, damaging the United States’ standing on the world stage and sparking a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s interrogation program.
The 2014 report, which included vivid descriptions of unresponsive prisoners after waterboarding and others chained from bars in stress positions for long periods of time, shocked many but did not move Cheney.
He remained unapologetic, insisting at the time that waterboarding and other such tactics were not considered torture and that the actions of the CIA didn’t amount to those of terrorists targeting the U.S.
“Torture, to me . . . is an American citizen on his cellphone making a last call to his four young daughters shortly before he burns to death in the upper levels of the Trade Center in New York on 9/11,” Cheney said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” at the time.
“There’s this notion that there’s moral equivalence between what the terrorists did and what we do, and that’s absolutely not true,” he continued. “We were very careful to stop short of torture.”
On his role in creating the interrogation program he said, “I’d do it again in a minute.”
The overwhelming majority of experts dispute that torture actually works as an interrogation technique, arguing that any information that comes out of it is unreliable as people under duress will say anything needed to convince their torturers to stop.