\n<\/p>\n
And so another member of the old \u201cwar on terror\u201d team has left the world. Dick Cheney, who served as the most powerful vice president in the history of the United States during the two-term administration of George W Bush (2001-2009), died on Monday at the age of 84.<\/p>\n
According to a memorial statement issued by his family, Cheney was \u201ca 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.<\/p>\n
And yet many inhabitants of the Earth will remember the late VP for rather less warm and fuzzy things than love and fly fishing. As the chief architect of the \u201cglobal war on terror\u201d \u2013 which was launched in 2001 and enabled the US to terrorise various locations worldwide under the guise of fighting \u201cterrorists\u201d \u2013 Cheney died with untold quantities of blood on his hands, particularly in Iraq.<\/p>\n
In the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Cheney swore<\/a> that the \u201cIraqi regime\u201d had been \u201cvery busy enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents\u201d and that the country had continued \u201cto pursue the nuclear programme they began so many years ago\u201d. Per the vice president\u2019s hallucinations, this pursuit of weaponry was \u201cfor the purpose of inflicting death on a massive scale\u201d.<\/p>\n As Foreign Policy magazine charmingly noted in its 2012 compilation of the \u201cTop 100 Global Thinkers\u201d, which included Cheney as well as numerous other characters with objectively dubious credentials in terms of thinking: \u201cIf scaring us silly were a religion, Dick Cheney would be its high priest.\u201d<\/p>\n But Cheney\u2019s fearmongering \u2013 and repeated lies concerning Iraq\u2019s alleged weapons of mass destruction \u2013 worked like a charm in paving the way for the infliction of \u201cdeath on a massive scale\u201d in the country. It also paved the way for the lining of certain pockets, such as those associated with the US oil and engineering firm Halliburton, where Cheney himself served as CEO from 1995 until 2000 and which just happened to win $7bn<\/a> in no-bid contracts in post-invasion Iraq.<\/p>\n Anyway, it was business as usual in the land of conflicts of interest and revolving doors.<\/p>\n Until his dying day, Cheney espoused a no-regrets approach to the illegal perpetration of mass slaughter and attendant suffering, telling CNN<\/a> 12 years after the effective pulverisation of Iraq: \u201cIt was the right thing to do then. I believed it then, and I believe it now.\u201d Never mind the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, the forcible displacement of millions, and the dousing of the country in toxic and radioactive munitions that will continue to impact Iraqi health basically for eternity.<\/p>\n Escalating cancer rates among the population have been attributed in part to the US military\u2019s use of depleted uranium weapons, the traces of which \u201crepresent a formidable long-term environmental hazard as they will remain radioactive for more than 4.5 billion years\u201d, as Al Jazeera has observed.<\/p>\n But, hey, I hear the fly fishing is great in Baghdad<\/a>.<\/p>\n And the Iraq war is hardly Cheney\u2019s only nonregret. In response to the 2014 CIA torture report on the US use of \u201cenhanced interrogation techniques\u201d such as rectal rehydration and waterboarding to extract information, Cheney stuck by his guns<\/a>: \u201cI would do it again in a minute.\u201d<\/p>\n Nor is the \u201cwar on terror\u201d the sole defining sadistic episode in the legacy of a man who was a fixture on the American political scene for decades. In December 1989, for example, the US military unleashed hell on the impoverished neighbourhood of El Chorrillo in Panama City, Panama, killing potentially several thousand civilians and earning El Chorrillo the nickname \u201cLittle Hiroshima\u201d.<\/p>\n The US defence secretary presiding over the operation was none other than Cheney, this time under the leadership of George HW Bush, whose administration was eager to cure the American public of its post-Vietnam War aversion to military combat abroad with an excessive display of high-tech firepower and an easy \u201cvictory\u201d. After the bout of devastation, during which many of El Chorrillo\u2019s wooden shacks went up in flames along with their inhabitants, Cheney boasted that the deadly spectacle had \u201cbeen the most surgical military operation of its size ever conducted\u201d.<\/p>\n The \u201csurgical\u201d stunt in Panama was a test run for Operation Desert Storm against Iraq in 1991, which was also overseen by Cheney in his own sort of test run for the future infliction of mass death in the country.<\/p>\n Now Cheney is no more, joining his former comrades in war crimes Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell in the great beyond. In the wake of his demise, US news agencies and media outlets have restricted themselves to memorialising him as a \u201cpolarising\u201d and \u201ccontroversial\u201d figure who, as The Associated Press diplomatically put it<\/a>, \u201cwas proved wrong on point after point in the Iraq War, without losing the conviction he was essentially right\u201d.<\/p>\n As usual, the corporate media can never bring themselves to call a spade a spade \u2013 or a war criminal a war criminal. But against the current backdrop of Israel\u2019s US-backed genocide in the Gaza Strip and other global calamities, the loss of another mass murderer can hardly be considered bad news.<\/p>\n The views expressed in this article are the author\u2019s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera\u2019s editorial policy.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n And so another member of the old \u201cwar on terror\u201d team has left the world. Dick Cheney, who served as the most powerful vice president in the history of the United States during the two-term administration of George W Bush (2001-2009), died on Monday at the age of 84. According to a memorial statement issued […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1177,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1176\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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