What would Dick Cheney do?
I was a colleague and friend of Cheney in the late 1960s when I had a Congressional Fellowship and he was on the staff of Donald Rumsfeld when he was congressman and later a Nixon cabinet member running the federal poverty program. I have followed closely their long-connected careers.
After the terrorist attack on America on 9/11/2001, Rumsfeld and Cheney became the leading security hawks in the Republican Party and stayed that way for their long careers. Cheney, who became vice president under George W. Bush, remained hard-nosed in defense of U.S. interests until the end of his days last week.
He probably would have agreed with Trump’s aggressive decision last June to take out Iran’s nuclear capabilities with precision attacks by American pilots in B-2 Spirit stealth bombers. The level of damage to Iran’s three nuclear facilities has been debated, but there is no question that the strikes greatly inhibited any threat to U.S. military bases by Iran, an outright enemy of America.
But, on almost every other issue my long-ago friend departed from Trump’s political agenda. He supported the impeachment effort led in part by his daughter Liz Cheney, a Republican leader in congress from Wyoming.
He declared Trump unfit to be president after Trump decisively lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden and then orchestrated an attempted insurrection on the U.S. Capitol.
Cheney was not an idealogue. When we worked in the poverty program in 1969, he supported an experiment on a negative income tax for poor people in Appalachia. That trial program proved that poor people would not foolishly blow the cash outlay on booze and cigarettes, but would buy food and health care necessary for their families. The current program of Earned Income Tax Credit is a successor to that experiment.
Cheney supported “Rummy” when he went back to congress to save the Head Start Program.
Cheney’s best qualities were critical thinking and the ability to sort through numerous options for solving challenges facing the country.
One thing I learned is that mistakes at the middle and low levels of policy get lost in history, but mistakes in judgement by top national leaders have profound long-running consequences. Cheney’s biggest mistake when he was vice president came in 2003 when he trusted our intelligence agencies that assessed Iraq as possessing weapons of mass destruction. He started the Iraq war that lasted eight years. No weapons of mass destruction were found.
The track records of Cheney and Trump should lead to litmus tests before our country goes to war — or not. One of the key tests has to be that aggressive military actions need the support of the U.S. Congress on a bipartisan basis and, even more importantly, the support of the American people.
An end-game, an exit plan would be another test.
President Trump had none of those when he started his new, undeclared war against Central and South American drug cartels. He unilaterally started striking small boats alleged to be smuggling drugs. No proof has been offered that they were indeed drug smugglers. There was no due process, legally or politically, for the strikes.
Cheney would have opted for continuing interdictions by the U.S Coast Guard, the capture of the crews and the valuable questioning of the prisoners for their connection to and knowledge of the cartel leaders. Instead, the crews have been de facto murdered and rendered useless for intelligence about the drug cartels leadership.
Most certainly, Cheney would have taken a hard line on Russian President Vladimir Putin, who will go down in history, alongside Stalin, Hitler, Mao, as among the most brutal tyrants in history. Putin deploys torture, rape, kidnapping of children bombing of civilian apartments, schools and hospitals. He literally is leveling Ukraine cities.
Trump’s mercurial hate-love relationship with Putin vacillates by the month, as Putin toys with Trump to prolong the war. Putin has only intensified his attacks since “cease-fire talks” began.
Dick Cheney would have cut through Putin’s manipulations. He would have had no illusions about how Putin operates.
As one clairvoyant general recently clarified: Russia will only stop when it is stopped, and no sooner.
In his delusional search for a Nobel Peace prize, Trump has sided with the aggressor in the four-year war, not the victim. Russia could be stopped with military support, which Trump has recently cut off, and with real sanctions on Russia’s oil industry that enables his war.
Under President Biden, the U.S. was supplying Ukraine with weapons, munitions and intelligence for a total cost that averaged about $40 billion per year. That’s less than 5% of the U.S. defense budget.
Cheney would have deduced that the 5% was grievously weakening our biggest enemy in the world. The Russian military has incurred an estimated 1 million casualties at the hands of the tough, shrewd Ukrainian military, and the Russian economy is on the ropes. Cheney would have noted that no American blood has been spilled. He would have known that the fight with Russia would require staying power.
The current cease-fire put forward by Trump’s inexperienced loyalists stinks. It follows Putin’s playbook. Trump did not consult Ukraine before airing his proposal.
The Cheney I knew was a tough negotiator. The Trump that we all have come to know, despite his chest-pounding as an artful deal-maker, is an ineffective negotiator who makes seat-of-the pants mistakes.
Cheney was a serious, disciplined man who studied for a doctorate at University of Wisconsin-Madison before opting for a career in politics. In contrast, Trump is an undisciplined, unserious man.
