The Politics of the Cheney Endorsement

As a matter of pragmatic electoral calculation, Walz is almost certainly wrong. Dick Cheney’s approval rating when he left office was 13 percent. Harris was already in grave danger of losing Michigan, a crucial swing state, and it’s hard to imagine a bigger middle finger to that state’s massive Arab American population than touting the endorsement of the architect of the most horrifying aspects of George W. Bush’s “war on terror.”

And even among non-Arab-American voters, the decision to constantly play up this endorsement is fantastically counterproductive. For one thing, the Cheney family are personally unpopular across just about every element of the political spectrum except for partisan Democrats willing to forgive and embrace any Republican who turns against Trump. In his conversation with Stewart, Walz invoked “the don’t tread on me . . . the libertarian piece . . . the constitutional piece” of the Republican coalition. But as someone who’s debated a lot of libertarians and disagreed with them about almost everything except for Bush and Cheney’s wars in the Middle East, a point on which we typically agree, I can hardly imagine a figure less likely to attract the support of this constituency.

More important, one of Trump’s major sources of appeal has always been the vague impression that he’s “antiwar.” His record in office makes nonsense of that reputation, as does much of what he advocates now. Harris could be going around the country pointing out that Trump is the president who doubled the rate of drone strikes and tore up Obama’s détente with Iran. Instead, she’s trumpeting the support of Dick Cheney at every opportunity. No wonder Trump is now leading among Arab American voters.

These points about the horse race, though, don’t really get at the biggest problem with the Harris-Walz campaign’s open-arms embrace of the Cheneys. To see the bigger issue, ask yourself how you would feel if Slobodan Milošević were still alive and if a leading candidate for the Serbian presidency was constantly bragging that “I have the support of everyone from Milošević to” some Serbian pop star. Or if Saddam Hussein were alive and his endorsement was sought out in the race for Iraq’s presidency.

If these analogies seem hyperbolic to you, they shouldn’t.

Election Stealing, Indefinite Detention, and Torture

Dick Cheney may have all sorts of reasons for disliking Donald Trump, even beyond his daughter’s conflicts with the former president. Like many “Never Trump” Republicans, he doubtless thinks Trump is dangerously chaotic, that his crass and unpredictable personal style makes him bad for America’s global prestige, and so on. But in a move deeply insulting to the intelligence of the voting public, he keeps claiming that his main objection is that Trump tried to steal the 2020 election.

He’s not wrong that Trump did this. The problem is that Dick Cheney and his friends successfully stole a presidential election twenty years earlier. The Bush-Cheney ticket not only lost the national popular vote, but won the presidency by stealing the electoral votes from the state of Florida. That state’s ludicrously antidemocratic laws prohibited ex-felons from voting, and shortly before the election Republican secretary of state Katherine Harris oversaw a deeply flawed process in which a great many people who didn’t actually have felonies on their record were purged from the voting rolls. Far more likely Democratic voters were purged than the alleged gap between George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore. But even with the voters who were allowed to participate, it’s likely that Gore would have won the state if the US Supreme Court hadn’t decided in a straight-party-line decision to stop the recount there.

In 2020, the January 6 riot only briefly delayed the certification of the election result in the Senate. In 2000, the “Brooks Brothers Riot” of GOP operatives shut down the Florida recount for long enough to give the Bush-Cheney team’s legal machinations time to work.

The September 11 terrorist attack happened the year after Bush and Cheney “won” the 2000 election. Cheney, who was widely understood at the time to be such an unusually influential vice president he was almost a de facto copresident, spearheaded the administration’s response.

In an interview with Tim Russert five days after the attack, Vice President Cheney explained what that response was going to look like:

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. . . .

He was true to his word. The administration’s subsequent war on terror involved everything from warrantless mass wiretapping of American citizens to torture of suspects in US custody who’d never been charged with anything to the use of unmanned drones to extrajudicially kill people sitting at cafés in places like Pakistan and Yemen based on nothing more than some CIA analyst’s unproven suspicion that they were involved with terrorism. Bush and Cheney came up with a novel legal theory according to which suspected terrorists were neither criminal suspects nor prisoners of war but rather belonged to a special category of “enemy combatants.” That put the suspects in a legal no-man’s-land where they could be indefinitely detained and lacked nearly all normal rights and protections.

The enemy combatant theory was used to justify setting up CIA black sites around the world where suspects were locked up without being charged with anything (never mind having the evidence against them tested in a trial) and subjected to what Cheney preferred to call “enhanced interrogation.” These black sites were kept secret from the public when they were initially set up, but the existence of the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, for example, was public knowledge. Many suspects from Afghanistan were sent there and kept in brightly lit cells for many years before the US government quietly admitted that it didn’t have any evidence against them and let them go. Even this only happened because the Supreme Court eventually forced the administration to allow detainees at “Gitmo” trials by military tribunal. Until then, the public was simply assured that everyone locked up there was “the worst of the worst.”

One of the Bush-Cheney administration’s most prominent lawyers argued explicitly that nothing done to a “detainee” with a bucket of ice water or a rusty pair of pliers counted as “torture” unless the amount of pain inflicted was equivalent to what would be experienced during “organ failure or death.” That was good enough for Cheney to have a legal fig leaf to justify such “enhancements” of interrogation procedures.

Here’s the vice president in 2008, for example, justifying his administration’s use of waterboarding against such suspects:

Was it torture? I don’t believe it was torture. We spent a great deal of time and effort getting legal advice. . . . I signed off on it; others did, as well, too. I wasn’t the ultimate authority obviously. As the vice president, I don’t run anything. But I was in the loop. I thought that it was absolutely the right thing to do.

The idea that this wasn’t torture is absurd on its face. Waterboarding, known for centuries as “water torture,” simulates drowning. It’s one of the classic forms of torture favored by everyone from the Spanish Inquisition to WWII-era Japanese militarists. Detainees were also stripped naked or put in adult diapers, subjected to techniques like “walling” (where a collar was put around their necks and they were slammed repeatedly against a wall), and forced to stay in “stress positions” for long enough to cause muscle failure. At least one hundred suspects died in CIA interrogation. These techniques led to the deaths of more than a hundred detainees that we know about, and likely many more.

But Cheney, who modestly corrected himself after saying he “signed off on it,” continued to be so confident that it was “absolutely the right thing to do” that he continued to publicly advocate that these practices be brought back for many years after he and Bush left office.

Iraq and Afghanistan

As bad as all that was, it’s far from the worst of Cheney’s crimes. He was instrumental in the administration’s embrace of hardcore neoconservative foreign policy goals. The implementation of these goals started with the cluster bombing, invasion, and long-term occupation of Afghanistan. The official justification for that war was that Afghanistan refused to extradite terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden to the United States. That theory never really stood up to scrutiny. (Would other nations around the world be justified in occupying and invading the United States because we were sheltering Henry Kissinger, for example, from prosecution elsewhere?)

When it became clear that Bin Laden wasn’t going to be captured in Afghanistan, the justification shifted to the claim that the United States was spreading democracy and gender equality. Unsurprisingly, this too failed to materialize in any durable way. Long-term social progress nearly always has to come from within a society, not from the bayonets of a deeply hated occupying force. After twenty years of the US bombing wedding parties and knocking down the doors of Afghan villagers in house-to-house searches, the longest war in American history ended in 2021 with the same government Bush and Cheney overthrew in 2001 returning to power.

And even this wasn’t as criminal as the war in Iraq, a country whose government had no involvement whatsoever with the perpetrators of the 9/11 attack. The official justification was that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein (a) had or was actively developing chemical, biological, or nuclear “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs) and (b) that, despite years of conflict between Hussein’s regime and political Islamists, Hussein would decide for some reason to share these WMDs with his mortal enemies in al-Qaeda.

The second, speculative premise never made much sense. And the first, factual premise was a pure invention. In later years, apologists for the Bush-Cheney administration often claimed that the president and vice president believed “flawed intelligence” supplied by intelligence services in the United States and elsewhere, but the reality is very different. Bush insisted that it would be too dangerous to wait for the “smoking gun” of definitive proof when that smoking gun could turn out to be a “mushroom cloud.” Meanwhile, Cheney in particular hunted for any cherry-picked intelligence he could find (including some babbled by torture victims saying whatever they thought their captors wanted to hear) to support his position, and he had no compunction about misrepresenting what intelligence agencies were telling him.

In August 2002, for example, Cheney declared at a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) that “there’s no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction” and that “there is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” General Anthony Zinni, commander in chief of the US Central Command, was on stage at the VFW when Cheney said this, and he later said:

It was a total shock. I couldn’t believe the vice president was saying this, you know? In doing work with the CIA on Iraq WMD, through all the briefings I heard at Langley, I never saw one piece of credible evidence that there was an ongoing program.

The war based on Cheney’s lies turned millions of Iraqis into internal or external refugees. The Lancet, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, estimated 654,965 “excess deaths” in Iraq during the first three years of the war. The spiraling waves of chaos and violence unleashed the invasion, including sectarian bloodshed, the introduction of the previously absent al-Qaeda into Iraq, the rise of ISIS, and more continued to rock the region for decades.

I’m old enough to remember when centrist Democrats were angry at Bernie Sanders for accepting the endorsement of Joe Rogan in the 2020 election. How, they wanted to know, could he accept the support of such a problematic comedian and podcaster?

This year, the Democrats have been making great hay of Green Party candidate Jill Stein being endorsed by David Duke — a vile but completely marginal racist crank looking to stir the pot — even though Stein immediately repudiated that endorsement. Somehow, though, Harris and her surrogates can justify bragging about the support of one of the most consequentially vile war criminals of the twentieth century.

It’s probably a massive electoral blunder. If Donald Trump wins the election a week from Tuesday, this will belong somewhere on the list of reasons why. Either way though, Harris’s rehabilitation of Dick Cheney’s reputation is an obscenity.