Dick Cheney's In My Time--A Personal and Political Memoir

Dick or "Rick", as W inscribed a photo to him, has generated more controversy in his media interviews this past week. Almost every columnist has opined about his unrepentent memoirs as Vice President and his sometimes nasty score-settling with those within the Bush Administration who happened to disagree with him.

I found the book peculiar for alot of reasons. Aside from the introduction of his experience on 9/11, the first 310 pages narrating his family history and his life until the time he was sworn in as Vice President are actually well-written and a remarkably objective account of his early life in politics and his rise from Gerald Ford's chief of staff to George H,W. Bush's Secretary of Defense. Having some familiarity with the players and the events of those times, I actually enjoyed his accounts of why he and Rumsfeld persuaded Ford to dump Nelson Rockefeller as Vice President and his whole discussion of the strategy for Gulf War I. And he even possesses grace notes like when he writes about how he was amazed at how classy Nelson Rockefeller was in sitting in the room discussing who should replace him. It is good political history told from someone who actually appears to be self-reflective. He recreates the atmosphere of his early campaigns for congress and his early days in the House with a good deal of detail.

But I was waiting. Even the 2000 campaign is told with some zest and truthfulness. There is a reason the Washington Post editorialized about how comforting it was that W had chosen Dick Cheney as his vice president. He was a figure in Washington who had earned trust and was seen as an earnest, albeit conservative technocrat. Even Cheney boasts that his proudest achievement was the Wyoming Wilderness Bill, which preserved miles and miles of wilderness lands for the future. He was seen as capable, an able manager and someone who was not an ideologue. His wife Lynne complimented him with her tenure at the National Endowment for the Humanities. This was a true Washington power couple.

The minute Cheney takes the oath of office, the book takes the dark turn we have been expecting. The first thing he writes about is the Bush Tax Cuts and how it was his vote that carried the day and that the savings to Americans was between $350-500 billion--think of that as we now debate the debt. He next complains about the estate tax, which Obama raised so that now you have to pay taxes if your estate is over $5 million. For all the attacks on him about his role at Halliburton, that part of his life is but three very sketchy pages with at least one page explaining his stock options. He then goes on about his Energy Plan and how the Supreme Court was correct in not allowing the names of the participants at his roundtable to be public. To that end, he says that the first real crisis of the Administration was California's energy crisis and he applauds the administration on the steps it took.

When we return to 9/11, Cheney gives full-throated support for the Bush Doctrine and the idea of pre-emptive war. He outlines in detail the first steps to invading Afghanistan and recounts the issues of the Northern Alliance and the Pastun tribes in the South. There is absolutely no discussion about Tora Bora and why and how we let bin Laden escape. Cheney doesn't even mention JSOC wasting hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters in the battle in the mountains. No, we liberated Afghanistan--which is portrayed as a free and liberated country the rest of the book. But we did capture some bad guys and we really had to figure out where to take them.

Cut to Gitmo, which is a model prison,better than most in Europe. Here in the post-9/11 environment, we needed to be able to extract urgent intel to save American lives. So our brave CIA interrogators, with reams of legal opinions, developed interrogation techniques. Cheney refers to a number of plots broken up by intel provided by torture but he's running against the documented history. He still refers to classified documents prepared by the CIA under his supervision that claim a whole range of terrorist plots broken up. But these documents have been examined by many other experts who claim they don't say what Cheney claims. His account of High Level Targets spilling the beans only after CIA enhanced interrogation runs counter to numerous accounts by FBI and CIA interrogators, who claimed these detainees were already talking prior to being whisked away to clandestine cells and Gitmo.

He claims this was a great intelligence accomplishment while others think it was a national disgrace. In part, his smoldering resentment against Colin Powell, which slowly starts during the Gulf War, erupts in full force in the memoir. Cheney trashes Powell claiming his aides threw away the arguments for invading Iraq because they disagreed with the intel Scooter Libby provided. Cheney claims they dismissed the human rights violations and the terrorist aspects of the brief. Col. Wilkerson has told anyone who will listen that the brief given to Powell from Cheney was filled with fabrication and contained nothing about human rights violations and terrrist attacks by Saddam Hussein. He even goes further saying that one of the most powerful pieces of evidence Powell presented to the United Nations was in fact a fabrication by someone tortured in Egypt. This was only found out later. But Cheney dismisses this with a reference to the lack of reliable intelligence on WMDs in Iraq but never talks about Powell's reason to distrust what he was hearing.

Cheney goes after Colin Powell and Richard Armitage for not coming forward on the Valerie Plame case so as to stop the Fitzgerald grand jury investigation that convicted Scooter Libby of prejury. The facts are that both men actually went to the DOJ and Alberto Gonzalez immediately when Armitage realized he inadvertantly said that Plame worked for the CIA. Both Powell and Armitage were told by DOJ and the FBI to remain quiet about this as the investigation continued. Even still Cheney maintains that Iraq was trying to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger, despite Ambassador Wilson's discovery to the contrary.

Was Saddam trying to restart his nuclear program? According to Cheney, yes. According to the Kay Survey Report and the Dilfer Report, absolutely not. Did Saddam Hussein possess biological weapons, according to subsequent investigations, no and even if he did, they would have deteriorated already. Cheney claims Saddam was waiting for sanctions to end to re-start his programs. Did Saddam have any relations with Al Qaeda? Cheney says yes. The intelligence community says no. In this memoir, Cheney stands by the original reasons for invading Iraq and doesn't retreat.

He does not write about the effects of the preparations for the invasion of Iraq on our war in Afghanistan and the drawdown of our forces there. He does not write about the disbanding of the Iraq army and the mayhem that created. He does not talk about what de-Baathification did to the stabilization effort in Iraq. He does not write about Paul Bremer as American consul in Iraq. And interestingly he never talks about the financial costs of the war or where Wolfowitz, one of his colleagues, got the idea it would cost $86 billion, instead of the $1.5 trillion. Because Al Qaeda was already there, there is no discussion of when Al Qaeda really did show up.

Cheney also bends himself into a pretzel to explain the wonders of the surveillance and wiretapping program that his ace legal aide Richard Addington cooked up. This program, partly ruled illegal by our courts,had to be renewed by W every 45 days. Because of the court rulings,Attorney General John Ashcroft would have to sign off on the new surveillance plan. Deathly ill and being fed morphine at the hospital,Ashcroft made his Deputy the acting Attorney General. Cheney's account of how Ashcroft ended up not signing the plan is historically incorrect and he neglects to mention how this was another Nixonian Saturday Night Massacre and W retreated because he was told the entire top-tier of the Department of Justice was going to resign over the issue.

Any time real lawyers show up in this memoir they simply do not understand the reality of the post-9/11 world.

Cheney takes an extended shot at John McCain for his opposition to torture. Cheney cites several other Vietnm POWs who claimed "enhanced interrogation" was not torture. Unfortunately, we have the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture on record and in specific detail describing America's enhanced interrogation program as torture. Only today the former head of MI5 came out and said that the European countries by cooperating with the United States in the War on Terror committed horrible human rights abuses, including facilitating torture. And the list of people ratifying that view is too numerous to mention at this date.

I'll cut Cheney some slack on his description of why he advocated bombing Syria's nuclear facility. MOSSAD presented evidence that the structure in question was not connected to a power grid if it were meant for nuclear energy. They also showed photos of key North Koreans at the facility, who played a prominent role in that country's nuclear weapons program. Israel wanted the place gone before it went "hot." Cheney wanted to send a message to both North Korea and Iran with the American bombing of the facility. A sub-theme in the Bush Administration was nuclear proliferation and they had been stunned to realize Qaddafi was farther advanced than they thought when he willingly gave his up. So Cheney proposal made sense and the Israelis did it anyway.

What became clearer to me as I read the memoir was that Cheney's post-9/11 strategy was simply not sustainable and that his newfound reflex to use military force for every circumstance was even too extreme for W, who began asserting himself more after 2004. To reflect the awareness of that distancing Cheney spends an enormous amount of space in attacking Condi Rice. The real meat of his criticism of Rice was over how she handled the negotiations with North Korea over its nuclear capability. This section of the memoir could be a primer on the history of negotiating with North Korea over its nuclear program. Here I believe he has her dead to rights on how she refused to get a written commitment from them after they deceived the United States, China, South Korea and Japan on several occasions. Instead, Rice entered into bilateral negotiations with the North Koreans using Ambassador Hill. Here, Cheney returns to the sober technocrat of old who complains we had kept our Chinese negotiating partners out of the loop and they were the ones who have real leverage over North Korea. Nicely ironic for someone who argued for unilateral action in the early days of the Bush Administration. But here he reads right. W caved and took North Korea off the list of countries who sponsor terror as a carrot to get negotiations started again.

While he voices some complaints about W in this memoir, he actually is pretty loyal. So how did we end up where we are today--three wars, massive debt, an economy in ruins? W was so calm during the economic meltdown and he had an extraordinary economic team that implemented TARP, gave the first loans to the auto industry, but could not overcome the speculation on the subprime mortgages.

Whose fault was this? Well none other than Barney Frank, who when the Democrats took back the Senate and the House in 2006 wouldn't implement the reforms proposed by the Bush Administration for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Barney Frank has been quite humorous in speaking about this accusations from Republicans.

W was compassionate and caring about the people in New Orleans affected by Hurricane Katrina. He even had the military mobilized to help. But the Administration could not overome the Democratic Governor of Louisiana, who dithered about "federalizing" the emergency. Cheney does not write that for four consecutive years prior to Katrina FEMA practiced responding to a crisis, which was modelled literally on a Katrina-sized hurricane hitting New Orleans. Heckuva job, Brownie.

Remember how Bush had to get out of the recession he inherited from Clinton--a very minor downturn. He could have done this faster if Secretary Treasury Paul O'Neil only showed up to meeting on the economy. O'Neil, Cheney tells us, was more concerned about pure water for Africa than the economy. He also opposed the Bush tax cuts as loopy.

But at least the process for selecting Roberts and Alito was the best way of selecting Supreme Court Justices ever. The selection of Harriet Miers was the fault of W, who always wanted diversity in hiring.

So it was pretty much a perfect administration given the circumstances. If everyone had agreed with Rick, it would have even been better.

I found the tone of the memoir about the W administration so different from the reminisces in the first 60% of the book that it is jarring.

Even though he basically hates Obama, he was proud to be on the platform when the first African-American was sworn in as President. His appearance shortly thereafter to defend torture and GITMO was meant to defend the honorable people who would be put at risk if the Obama Administration were going to investigate them. It's like W refusing to pardon Scooter Libby--he left a "soldier on the battlefield."

Maureen Dowd has already made fun of Cheney's dream, while he spent months in a coma after his last heart operation. But my response was that according to my medical instructions, they would've pull the plug on me long before. Virtually, no American could afford the medical care he has been given.

I tend toward Brent Scowcroft's observation that Cheney medical condition affected him mentally when he was vice-president. He was a different person and not the mature technocrat the Washington Post had editorialized about.

The question Democrats have to answer is "Would Al Gore have invaded Iraq?" In marshalling his evidence to defend the invasion of Iraq, Cheney assembles the statements of the Clinton Administration officials and their observations about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. I'm afraid the answer is "yes". But I can't see it being done without calling for sacrifice from Americans and I can't see it being done with two--not one--tax-cuts. And I also can not see it without a rational plan for stabilizing the country.

Marc Rich has a new essay in this issue of New York magazine, which is as pessimistic assessment of the last decade as you can get. He reminds us of another episode that Cheney doesn't comment on in his memoirs. 9/11 was quickly followed by the ENRON scandal, which served as the template for almost all the crimes Wall Street committed during the Bush years. "If the terrorists didn't win,"Rich asked,"Who did?"

Dick Cheney's memoir is not going to rehabilitate the George W. Bush Administration or change anyone's opinion about Cheney's own performance as Vice President. I only wished he had taken the care to answer the significant and lengthy criticism of his policies of torture, extraordinary rendition (which doesn't appear in the book). the Patriot Act, the surveillance program and other policies that created the new American Security State. Instead,these are glossed over and neglected. This might have added us in figuring out who really did win.