Dick Cheney, vice-president and giant of Republican politics, dies aged 84 | Dick Cheney
Dick Cheney, the divisive U.S. vice president under George W. Bush who helped lead the country into the disastrous invasion of Iraq, died Monday, his family said. He was 84 years old.
Cheney served at various times as a member of Congress, White House chief of staff, and secretary of defense, but he made the greatest impact as one of the nation’s most powerful vice presidents, wielding great influence over the less experienced Bush.
Cheney was in office during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Cheney worked with defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld as Bush was taken to safety. assume policy control. Troops were soon in Afghanistan, fighting the Taliban and hunting Al Qaeda.
However, Cheney’s place in history will be determined by the decision to invade Iraq. He was secretary of defense during the first Gulf war against Saddam Hussein in 1990 and 1991, but now Cheney and Bush’s public justification for the war was that the Iraqi dictator was linked to Al Qaeda and therefore 9/11 and had weapons of mass destruction. When US and coalition forces occupied the area in March 2003, no evidence was found for either accusation, and both were soon revealed to be unfounded..
Although Cheney sought international cooperation, he also considered: he wrote laterThe Bush administration “had an obligation to do whatever it took to defend America.”
The death toll was high. By the way According to the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, “at least 800,000 people have been killed directly as a result of war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan” since 2001.
The treatment of prisoners taken by the USA during its “war on terror” also turned out to be quite controversial. Outside of office, Cheney continued to advocate torture of detainees after September 11.
Cheney, who dropped out of Yale and avoided serving in Vietnam, nevertheless became a giant of Republican politics.
He was a White House aide under Richard Nixon; Youngest ever White House chief of staff, according to Gerald Ford; Member of Congress during the Ronald Reagan era; He was George H. W. Bush’s secretary of defense and George W. Bush’s vice president.
When Young Bush took it from there halliburton company Cheney, who would be his running mate in the 2000 presidential election, had already survived three heart attacks. Nor was he immune to accidents: Once, when he was vice president, he shot a hunting partner in the face.
Cheney’s daughter, Liz Cheney, followed her father into Republican politics as a U.S. House representative from Wyoming in the same seat he held as a congressman, but was censured by the party after harshly criticizing Donald Trump over the Jan. 6 insurrection.
The elder Cheney also attended an event with his daughter to mark the one-year anniversary of the attack, where he expressed his “deep disappointment” in the leadership of the Republican party, saying: “This is leadership unlike any of the people I’ve known in my 10 years of being here” and “you can’t overstate how important it is.” [January 6] it is”.
Cheney announced that he would vote for Kamala Harris instead of Republican candidate Trump in 2024, saying that “in the 248-year history of our country, there is no person who poses a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump” and that he felt it his duty to “put the country above partisanship to defend our constitution.”
Speaking to the Guardian about the release of Vice, a dark comedy biopic starring Christian Bale in 2018, Cheney biographer Jake Bernstein said: “There’s been some rehabilitation with George W Bush. Everybody’s starting to look better compared to Donald Trump. But Dick Cheney liked it when everyone called him Darth Vader. I don’t think he’s going to make an effort to soften his image.”
