Tag: Dick Cheney

26 January 1998

Posted on by Featherproof Books

 

The Project for a New American Century (PNAC)—founded by, amongst others, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Zalmay Khalilzad, Richard Armitage, and Scooter Libby (all future Bush administration principals and officials)— releases its first public letter where it demands that President Clinton undertake the “removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime” in Iraq, labeling containment “dangerously inadequate.”

The Project for a New American Century is later labeled “neocon” and influential in setting up a war with Saddam Hussein but the Clinton administration started down this path to a final showdown, both overstating the WMD threat and declaring that regime change was the only path to normalization of relations.

10 January 2001

Posted on by William Arkin

 

President-elect George W. Bush is briefed in the famous and highly secure JCS “tank” at the Pentagon—on the national security situation and the immediate threats ahead.

The focus is on the immediate threat from Iraq, the absence of U.N. inspectors, the unravelling of international sanctions, the continued build-up of weapons of mass destruction, the hardening of Iraq’s air defense and communications infrastructure with buried fiber optics, Iraqi relations with terrorists, and Saddam’s Hussein’s human rights record. It is a bracing and single-minded presentation. In other words, Iraq wasn’t just some concoction of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz. It was the number one threat as conceived by the Pentagon.

13 October 2000

Posted on by William Arkin
Dick Cheney

 

Vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney urges swift retaliation for the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. “Any would-be terrorist out there needs to know that if you’re going to attack, you’ll be hit very hard and very quick. It’s not time for diplomacy and debate. It’s time for action.”

It is tantamount to approval for the Clinton administration to attack al Qaeda, even with an upcoming election.

The October surprise “norm” for a sitting president—if there is one—is to settle (or at least not exacerbate) pending foreign policy complications for an incoming administration, thereby not tilting the election one way or another. Bill Clinton himself inherited a losing hand in both Somalia and Iraq from George Bush the elder. Somalia would end up a disaster for the Clinton team and Iraq of course would dog the White House for the next eight years. And Barack Obama would hesitate to take stronger action against Russia in 2016, not wanting to tilt the election or tie the hands of an incoming Hillary Clinton administration.

Perhaps Cheney’s bluster was just pre-election posturing, but more important, the former secretary of defense believed that the implications of striking at al Qaeda was cost-free, that attacking—“very hard and very quick”—had no implications for blowback on the United States, that an attack on the U.S. itself wasn’t even conceived. Ultimately this belief was as much responsible for the new Bush administration’s slow development of a counter-terrorism policy in the nine months of 2001 before 9/11—that it just didn’t see al Qaeda as more than a run-of-the-mill terrorist organization. 

5 October 2000

Posted on by William Arkin

 

Candidates Dick Cheney and Joseph Lieberman discuss Iraq during a vice presidential debate.

There isn’t really much debate. Both the former secretary of defense and the Connecticut senator support more aggressive action to achieve regime change in Iraq—and both are generally critical of Clinton administration policy.

Cheney defends his record in stopping the 1991 Gulf War short of overthrowing the Iraqi leader and marching on Baghdad by saying that Saddam’s military was “decimated” and that Iraq was “back in the box” after being ejected from Kuwait.

Cheney blames the Clinton administration for allowing sanctions to fray. If it were discovered that Iraq is rebuilding weapons of mass destruction, Cheney says the U.S. might have to consider military action. On a question regarding “taking out” Saddam Hussein, Cheney says: “We might have no other choice.”

But for all of the later criticism of the Bush administration’s supposed conspiracy to depose Saddam and go to war in Iraq, the debate proved a hawk-fest, Lieberman just as hostile towards any kind of normalization of relations, almost competing with Cheney as to who would guarantee military action.