http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19376 . . . We had watched this White House effect the regulatory changes that would systematically dismantle consumer and workplace and environmental protections. We had watched this White House run up the deficits that ensured that the conservative dream of rolling back government will necessarily take place, because there will be no money left to pay for it. We had heard the Vice President speak as recently as January 2004 about our need to recolonize the world, build bases, "warm bases, bases we can fall in on, on a crisis and have present the capabilities we need to operate from." "Other priorities" suggests what the Vice President might have meant when he and the President talked about the "different kind of war," the war in which "our goal will not be achieved overnight." As a member of the House during the cold war and then as secretary of defense during the Gulf War and then as CEO of Halliburton, the Vice President had seen up close the way in which a war in which "our goal will not be achieved overnight" could facilitate the flow of assets from the government to the private sector and back to whoever in Washington greases the valves. "The first person to greet our soldiers as they arrive in the Balkans and the last one to wave goodbye is one of our employees," as he put it during his Halliburton period.
He had also seen up close the political advantage to which such a war could be put. "And so if there's a backlash pending I think the backlash is going to be against those who are suggesting somehow that we shouldn't take these steps in order to protect the country," as he put it when asked last December if his assumption of presidential autonomy might not provoke a congressional backlash. In the apparently higher interest of consolidating that political advantage he had made misrepresentations that facilitated a war that promised to further destabilize the Middle East. He had compromised both America's image in the world and its image of itself. In 1991, explaining why he agreed with George H.W. Bush's decision not to take the Gulf War to Baghdad, Cheney had acknowledged the probability that any such invasion would be followed by civil war in Iraq:
Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you do with it. It's not clear what kind of government you would put in.... Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists?... How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens to it once we leave?By January 2006, when the prescience of these questions was evident and polling showed that 47 percent of Iraqis approved of "attacks on US-led forces," and the administration was still calculating that it could silence domestic doubt by accusing the doubter of wanting to "cut and run," the Vice President assured Fox News that the course had been true. "When we look back on this ten years hence," he said, a time frame suggesting that he was once again leaving the cleanup to someone else, "we will have fundamentally changed the course of history in that part of the world, and that will be an enormous advantage for the United States and for all of those countries that live in the region."
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