Former US vice president dies aged 84

Washington: Dick Cheney, the fiercely assertive conservative who became one of the most powerful and polarizing vice presidents in U.S. history and a leading proponent of the invasion of Iraq, has died at the age of 84.

The immensely powerful Cheney served father and son presidents; He led the armed forces as chief of defense during the Persian Gulf War under President George H. W. Bush and returned to public life as vice president under Bush’s son, George W. Bush.

Cheney was actually the chief operating officer of the young Bush’s presidency. He often had a commanding share in the execution of the decisions most important to the President, and some of which concerned him greatly; He accomplished all of this while living with decades of heart disease and a post-management heart transplant. Cheney has consistently defended the extraordinary tools of surveillance, detention, and investigation used in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

He became a target of President Donald Trump years after leaving office, especially after his daughter Liz Cheney became a prominent Republican critic and watchdog of Trump’s desperate attempts to stay in power following his election defeat and his actions in the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.

“There has been no person in the 246-year history of our country who has posed a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said in a television ad for his daughter. “He tried to steal the last election by using lies and violence to keep himself in power after voters rejected him. He is a coward.”

In a change Democrats of his era could never have imagined, Dick Cheney said he would vote for presidential candidate Kamala Harris over Trump last year.

Cheney, who has survived five heart attacks, has long considered himself living on borrowed time, declaring in 2013 that he now wakes up every morning “with a smile on his face, grateful for the gift of another day”; It was a strange image for a figure who always seemed to command the walls.

The vice presidency has been defined by the age of terror. Cheney explained that he turned off the wireless function of his defibrillator years ago because he feared terrorists could remotely send a fatal shock to his heart.

During his time in office, the vice presidency was no longer merely a ceremonial afterthought. Instead, Cheney turned it into a network of back channels that could influence policy on Iraq, terrorism, presidential powers, energy and other cornerstones of the conservative agenda.