The previous White Home chief of workers, member of Congress, secretary of protection and US vice-president Dick Cheney has died, his household has mentioned. He was 84.
Cheney was one of many nation’s strongest vice-presidents, extensively reported to wield nice affect over the much less skilled George W Bush, the president beneath whom he served.
Cheney was in workplace on 11 September 2001 through the terrorist assaults on New York and Washington. Whereas Bush was hurried to security, Cheney labored with the protection secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to assume policy control. Troops had been quickly in Afghanistan, combating the Taliban and looking al-Qaida.
However Cheney’s place in historical past will likely be dominated by the choice to invade Iraq. He had been protection secretary through the first Gulf struggle towards Saddam Hussein, in 1990 and 1991, however now Cheney and Bush’s public rationale for struggle was that the Iraqi dictator was linked to al-Qaida and thus 9/11, and possessed weapons of mass destruction. By March 2003, when US and coalition forces invaded, no proof had been discovered for both cost, and each had been quickly proved false.
Though Cheney sought worldwide cooperation, he additionally thought, he later wrote, that the Bush administration “had an obligation to do no matter it took to defend America”.
The demise toll was excessive. According to the Watson Faculty of Worldwide and Public Affairs at Brown College, since 2001 “at the very least 800,000 individuals have been killed by direct struggle violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan”.
The remedy of prisoners taken by the US in its “struggle on terror” additionally proved hugely controversial. Out of workplace, Cheney continued to defend using torture towards detainees after 9/11.
A Yale dropout who averted service in Vietnam, Cheney nonetheless turned a large of Republican politics.
He was a White Home aide beneath Richard Nixon; the youngest ever White Home chief of workers, to Gerald Ford; a member of Congress beneath Ronald Reagan; secretary of protection to George HW Bush, and vice-president to George W Bush.
When the youthful Bush plucked him from the Halliburton corporation to be his working mate within the 2000 presidential election, Cheney had already survived three coronary heart assaults. Nor was he proof against mishap: as soon as, whereas vice-president, he shot a hunting partner within the face.
Cheney’s daughter, Liz Cheney, adopted him into Republican politics as a US Home consultant from Wyoming in the identical seat her father had held whereas a congressman, however she was censured by the get together after strongly criticising Donald Trump over the January 6 riot.
The elder Cheney additionally attended an occasion to mark the one-year anniversary of the assault alongside his daughter, the place he expressed “deep disappointment” in Republican get together management, saying: “It’s not a management that resembles any of the parents that I knew once I was right here for 10 years” and that “you’ll be able to’t overestimate how essential [January 6] is”.
Cheney introduced in 2024 that he would vote for Kamala Harris relatively than the Republican nominee Donald Trump, saying that “in our nation’s 248-year historical past, there has by no means been a person who’s a larger menace to our republic than Donald Trump” and that he felt an obligation to “put nation above partisanship to defend our structure”.
Chatting with the Guardian in 2018, on the discharge of Vice, a darkly comedian biopic starring Christian Bale, the Cheney biographer Jake Bernstein mentioned: “There was some rehabilitation with George W Bush. As compared with Donald Trump, everybody begins to look higher. However Dick Cheney appreciated the actual fact everybody referred to as him Darth Vader. I don’t assume there’ll be an effort on his half to melt his picture.”
