\n<\/p>\n
Unlike most politicians, Dick Cheney didn\u2019t care if he was liked.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you want to be loved, then go be a movie star,\u201d he said in the 2013 documentary, I am Dick Cheney.<\/p>\n
That view didn\u2019t stop him from becoming the most powerful vice president in the history of the United States. And it afforded Cheney the thick skin he needed to weather sharp criticism of his tactics during the so-called \u201cwar on terror\u201d following the 9\/11 attacks on New York and Washington.<\/p>\n
Cheney died on Monday, aged 84, due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, according to a statement issued by his family. He had suffered heart-related problems for much of his adult life.<\/p>\n
\u201cDick Cheney was a great and good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country, and to live lives of courage, honor, love, kindness, and fly fishing,\u201d the family said in its statement.<\/p>\n
But to millions around the world, he was also a deeply divisive figure, his legacy tainted by bloodshed and chaos following the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, lies about Baghdad\u2019s non-existent weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), domestic cyber-snooping and the torture of Guantanamo Bay inmates.<\/p>\n
Contemporaries saw him as the power behind the throne of President George W Bush, using his political clout and acumen to dominate his boss and hatch the \u201cwar on terror\u201d and other neoconservative plans.<\/p>\n
\u201cCheney has to be counted among the most influential Americans of the last 40 years. He was the consummate bureaucratic operator,\u201d Jake Bernstein, co-author of Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe engineered his own selection as vice president and used what was often a ceremonial post to transform US policy. His legacy continues: the surveillance society, the reputational stain of state-sponsored torture, the failure to deal with climate change and the bloat of private military contractors are just a few areas in which his imprint lingers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cheney was born in Nebraska and grew up in Casper, a calm and pleasant oil city in Wyoming, with his hard-working, Democrat-voting parents: Marjorie and Richard Herbert Cheney, a soil management expert.<\/p>\n
He abandoned a scholarship at Yale University and fell into a losing streak of blue-collar jobs and drunk-driving tickets, but re-booted his career as a political science scholar and joined the tumult of Washington politics.<\/p>\n
He became fellow neoconservative Donald Rumsfeld\u2019s protege. They forged a duo that led Republican administrations for decades \u2014 Rumsfeld was Bush\u2019s defense secretary. Observers noted how the two men finished each other\u2019s sentences and dubbed them the Praetorian Guard for their Roman-like disciplined efficacy.<\/p>\n
By 1975, Cheney was chief of staff of the Gerald Ford White House, the youngest person to hold the post. Later, as a House Representative for Wyoming, Cheney was a traditionalist voice on abortion, gun control and the environment.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe smart young congressman, Dick Cheney, was a hit in Washington: a model of the practical, get-things-done conservative and a leader, right out of the box,\u201d Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank, told Al Jazeera in 2015.<\/p>\n
\u201cOver time, he grew convinced that the country needed a hardliner, and he had the credentials to take that posture,\u201d said Gelb, who died in 2019.<\/p>\n
Cheney bucked the trend of old-fashioned Republicanism in one key aspect. Mary, the younger of two daughters with his high-school sweetheart and wife, Lynne, is a lesbian. The Cheneys were opposed to banning same-sex marriage.<\/p>\n
As secretary of defense under President George HW Bush (1989-93), Cheney scaled back military spending as the Soviet Union fell apart and ran successful campaigns in Panama and against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein\u2019s forces in Kuwait.<\/p>\n
\u201cBack then, he was disciplined, conservative and careful; using additional military strength and limiting a war\u2019s goals so as to accomplish its objectives. He knew that starting a war meant that you also needed to win it,\u201d Michael O\u2019Hanlon, a defence expert at the Brookings Institution, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n
But that attitude appeared to have changed over the following decade, by the time the US was processing its response to 9\/11.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs vice president, he favoured less careful preparation for the post-Saddam, post-Taliban environments in Iraq and Afghanistan. He used twice as many people to evict Saddam from Kuwait as the George W Bush administration did to overthrow Iraq\u2019s government and then try to stabilise the country afterwards,\u201d O\u2019Hanlon said.<\/p>\n
In 1995, with Democrats in the White House, Cheney became CEO of Halliburton. The US oil and engineering firm has been embroiled in controversy over environmental damage and its growing list of US military contracts.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs CEO of Halliburton, Cheney was a key figure in the early history of the \u2018privatised military industry\u2019 that nowadays encompasses hundreds of firms, thousands of employees and billions of dollars in revenue,\u201d Peter Singer, author of Corporate Warriors, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe privatisation of warfare has allowed startling new capabilities and efficiencies in how war is carried out, but the introduction of the profit motive onto the battlefield raises troubling questions for democracy, ethics, management, human rights and national security.\u201d<\/p>\n
Back in the White House in 2001, Cheney brought in his trusted partner, Rumsfeld, as defense secretary, and brought allies in to other tiers of administration.<\/p>\n
On September 11 of that year, Cheney was in the White House, deciding whether to shoot down the last airborne hijacked passenger jet, when Bush was reading The Pet Goat with schoolchildren in Florida.<\/p>\n
As the US launched regime-toppling attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, Cheney was implicated in the planning of the wars that ignored facts and \u2014 in the case of the conflict in Iraq \u2014 the United Nations charter. As the wars dragged on, killing tens of thousands of people, devastating the attacked countries and draining US resources, the criticism mounted. By 2008, when Barack Obama swept to power, the nation\u2019s mood had turned decisively against the wars.<\/p>\n
Cheney\u2019s justification for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 \u2013 Saddam Hussein\u2019s secret WMDs \u2013 turned out to be bogus. Dismantling Iraq\u2019s army and Baath party left the nation ungoverned and prone to the destabilising tactics of al-Qaeda and the ISIL (ISIS) armed groups.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was a misfit with his hawkish use of conventional military force in the 21st century, when the enemy was less frequently a traditional nation state, which responds to threats of force, but sub-groups that were not intimidated by US military might,\u201d added Gelb in 2015.<\/p>\n
Cheney loved hunting \u2014 in 2006, he accidentally shot a Texas lawyer and friend, Harry Whittington, with a hunting shotgun while they were shooting quail. Whittington survived after major operations.<\/p>\n
As vice president, Cheney also helped design a 9\/11 response that saw increased government cyber-snooping on US citizens and the harsh interrogations of \u201cterrorism suspects\u201d at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and a global web of so-called \u201cblack sites\u201d.<\/p>\n
Even after a Congressional study found that using such \u201cenhanced interrogation\u201d techniques as waterboarding, hooding and sleep deprivation were brutal and ineffective in 2014, Cheney defended his choices.<\/p>\n
The report was \u201cfull of crap\u201d, Cheney said. Hunting down the killers of more than 3,000 World Trade Center victims and stopping more al-Qaeda attacks trumped legal niceties, he said. \u201cI would do it again in a minute,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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