All elections mark beginnings and endings.
One thing this election brought was the end of the dynasty that began when Dick Cheney, age 34, became President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff. After Ford lost to Jimmy Carter in 1976, Cheney went back to his native Wyoming and in 1978 was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a moderate Republican. In the 1980s as minority whip, he promoted President Ronald Reagan’s program of cuts in taxes and regulations, which produced strong economic growth.
As defense secretary under President George H. W. Bush, Cheney helped organize the Gulf War, 1990-91, which ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. Bush lost to Bill Clinton in 1992.
In 1994 Cheney was asked on C-SPAN why Bush had not gone further, liberating Baghdad and ousting Saddam. “Then what are you going to put in its place?” he replied in a clip that later resurfaced on YouTube. “That’s a very volatile part of the world. And if you take down the central government of Iraq, you can easily see pieces of Iraq fly off.”
Cheney served as the chairman and CEO of giant defense contractor Halliburton from 1995 to 2000.
Ironically, and tragically, Cheney’s 1994 prediction came true with him as vice president under President George W. Bush. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq and ousted Saddam under the pretext he had “weapons of mass destruction,” which it turned out didn’t exist.
The “pieces of Iraq” flew off. The country devolved into chaos in a long war that killed 4,418 U.S. troops and wounded 31,994.
Brown University also estimated at least 182,000 Iraqi civilians were killed and calculated the cost to U.S. taxpayers has been $8 trillion for the Iraq War and the related wars in Syria, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The botched execution of the war would contribute to over 15 years of intense violence, including the rise of ISIS.
Dick Cheney was the biggest warhawk in the Bush administration, and has continued to defend the legacy of the Iraq War. He became extremely bitter when Donald Trump launched his first campaign for president in 2015 with such attacks as, “Cheney started the war in Iraq, which should have never been started. Because as I said then, and I say now, you will destabilize the Middle East.”
The 2016 election sent Trump to the Oval Office and Dick’s daughter Liz to Congress from Wyoming. She got upset with Trump’s continual attacks on her father, which, along with her support for President Biden’s Ukraine War policy, prompted Trump to brand her a “radical war hawk.” She blasted Trump on the committee that looked into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Voters booted her from office in 2022.
Both Cheneys then supported Kamala Harris for president in what was supposed to be a significant political development. It put one of the most infamous Republican war hawks on the side of the Democratic ticket, a development that would’ve seemed bizarre and unthinkable two decades ago.
As it turned out, the American people overwhelmingly rejected the Harris-Cheney alliance and by extension accepted Trump’s stridently anti-war rhetoric. We’ll take it.
After half a century of being a political force on the right, the Cheney brand is dead. The disastrous foreign policy for which the Cheneys have been associated has made it possible for figures like Trump and forever war-critics like Tulsi Gabbard to rise in prominence.
It’s a remarkable thing to have witnessed. We can only hope that the lessons of the failed wars of the recent past are heeded and a smarter, less interventionist foreign policy becomes the norm. The Cheneys and their ilk have caused enough destruction.