And yet another member of the former “War on Terror” team has passed away. Dick Cheney, who served as the most powerful vice president in U.S. history during two terms in the George W. Bush administration (2001-2009), died Monday at the age of 84.
A memorial statement released by his family said Cheney was “a great and good man who loved our country and taught his children and grandchildren the values of courage, honor, love, kindness and the life of fly fishing.”
Still, many inhabitants of the planet will remember the late Vice President for something warm and fuzzy rather than love or fly fishing. As the chief architect of the “Global War on Terror,” which began in 2001 and enabled the United States to carry out terrorism in various parts of the world in the name of fighting “terrorists,” Cheney died with immeasurable blood on his hands, especially in Iraq.
In the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Cheney asserted that the “Iraqi regime” was “very busy building up its capabilities in the area of chemical and biological agents” and that the country “continues to pursue the nuclear program it began years ago.” According to the Vice President’s hallucinations, the purpose of developing this weapon was “to cause mass death.”
As Foreign Policy fascinatingly noted in its 2012 list of the world’s top 100 thinkers, this included not just Cheney but many others with objectively questionable credentials in terms of thought. “If scaring us foolishly was a religion, Dick Cheney would be its high priest.”
But Cheney’s fear-mongering and repeated lies about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction worked their magic in paving the way for “mass casualties” in this country. It also paved the way for lining certain pockets, such as those related to Halliburton, the American oil and engineering company where Cheney himself was CEO from 1995 to 2000 and which happened to win a $7 billion no-bid contract in post-invasion Iraq.
Anyway, it was business as usual in the land of conflicts of interest and revolving doors.
Until his death, Cheney espoused an unrepentant stance against the injustice of genocide and the suffering that came with it, telling CNN 12 years after the virtual crushing of Iraq, “It was the right thing to do then. I believed it then, and I believe it now.” Never mind the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the displacement of millions, and the spraying of this country with toxic radioactive weapons that will continue to affect Iraq’s health basically forever.
As observed by Al Jazeera, the nation’s rising cancer rates are partly due to the US military’s use of depleted uranium weapons, whose remains “remain radioactive for more than 4.5 billion years, representing a frightening long-term environmental disaster.”
But I hear fly fishing is great in Baghdad.
And the Iraq war isn’t the only thing Cheney doesn’t regret. In response to a 2014 CIA torture report that said the United States used “enhanced interrogation techniques” such as rectal hydration and waterboarding to extract information, Cheney held up his guns and said, “We’ll do it again in a heartbeat.”
Nor is the “War on Terror” the only defining sadistic episode from a man who has made his mark on the American political scene for decades. For example, in December 1989, U.S. forces unleashed hell on the impoverished El Chorrillo neighborhood of Panama City, Panama, potentially killing thousands of civilians and earning El Chorrillo the nickname “Little Hiroshima.”
The U.S. Secretary of Defense leading this operation was none other than Cheney, this time under the leadership of George H.W. Bush, whose administration was intent on curing the American public’s post-Vietnam aversion to overseas military combat with excessive displays of high-tech firepower and easy “victories.” After the devastation in which many of the wooden shacks in El Chorrillo went up in flames, Cheney boasted that the horrific scene was “the most surgical military operation of any scale ever undertaken.”
The “surgical” stunt in Panama was a test run for Operation Desert Storm against Iraq in 1991, and Cheney also oversaw his own test run for future mass deaths in the country.
Now Cheney is no more, but has joined the great beyond with his former war crimes comrades Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell. In the wake of his death, US news agencies and media outlets have limited themselves to memorializing him as a “polarizing” and “controversial” figure who, as the Associated Press diplomatically put it, “was proven wrong in points in the Iraq war without losing the belief that he was essentially right.”
As always, the corporate media can never call a spade a spade, and they can never call a war criminal a war criminal. But against the backdrop of the US-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip and other global disasters, the death of a mass murderer can hardly be considered bad news.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
