Dick Cheney: Architect of Preemptive Wars.
Dick Cheney served as White House Chief of Staff under President Gerald Ford in the 1970s and then served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for a decade.
The Republican politician also served as Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush from 1989 to 1993.
He was Vice President under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2009.
Cheney was one of the main architects of the U.S. government’s “War on Terror” after the September 11 attacks. He was also a leading proponent of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. However, Dick Cheney later became a fierce critic of the Republican Party during the presidency of Donald Trump.
Few politicians in modern American history have played as decisive a role in shaping U.S. war and security policies as Dick Cheney. Cheney, who served as vice president under George W. Bush, effectively became one of the most influential and powerful unelected officials in American history. He was a politician who, through his influence within the government and his connections to the oil and arms cartels, shaped the course of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Architect of the Preemptive War Doctrine
After the September 11, 2001, attacks, Cheney was one of the main architects of the “preemptive war” doctrine; a policy according to which the United States could take military action without a direct attack from the enemy, under the pretext of a “potential threat.” The doctrine quickly became a tool for legitimizing the military invasion of Afghanistan (2001) and then Iraq (2003).
In the case of Iraq, Cheney was one of the first to claim that Saddam Hussein’s government was developing weapons of mass destruction and had links to terrorist networks such as al-Qaeda. It later became clear that many of these claims lacked credible intelligence and were in fact part of a broader project to control energy resources and redraw the geopolitical map of the Middle East.
Ties to oil and arms cartels
Before entering the White House, Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton, one of the world’s giants of the oil services industry. After the invasion of Iraq, subsidiaries of this company received billions of dollars in reconstruction, oil extraction, and military support contracts from the US government. This led critics to accuse Cheney of conflicts of interest and abuse of political power for personal and corporate gain.
In addition to the oil industry, Cheney had close ties to the US military-industrial complex. He was a supporter of increasing the military budget, the expansion of private war contractors such as Blackwater, and the promotion of extraordinary security policies at home; policies that many human rights organizations considered a threat to civil liberties.