Cheney's Conspiracy Theory

While numerous bloggers have mentioned or written about Cheney's paranoia the mainstream press seems to have only hinted at it. I assume, in part, that the press is reluctant to portray the man who until recently has been seen to be the one actually running the country as someone whose conservative outlook is closer to the film Dr. Strangelove than it is to the worldview of Ronald Reagan.

Some bloggers and also a few journalists, pundits, radio show hosts, etc. have suggested that Cheney's move towards the "darkside" is the result of brain damage caused by heart disease and hardening of the arteries. Others have suggested the influence of Lynne Cheney. While I can't really speculate too much about the affect of heart disease on his thinking I can come up with a few thoughts about Lynne Cheney who happens to be a senior fellow at the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute. Since 9/11 she has written articles, speeches and books stressing the importance of our freedom and liberty and how difficult it was for our forefathers to establish freedom and how difficult it has been to keep. The unstated implication being that our liberty and freedom is under some kind of threat from some unnamed foe. This ambiguity is convenient because the reader is forced to supply their own enemy and it could be anyone from Osama bin Laden to the their next door neighbor. She is encouraging paranoia by suggesting the enemies of freedom and liberty could be anywhere and everywhere. Dick Cheney's insistence that we all be subject to possible surveillance, that members of anti-war groups be put on the no-fly lists and other over-the-top security measures are a reflection of his fear/paranoia that the enemy could be any of us.

In her book Telling The Truth: Why Our Culture and Our Country Have Stopped Making Sense--and What We Can Do About It (1996) Lynne Cheney attempted to write a scholarly treatise decrying political correctness and how some people's sense of truth is overly influenced by their political and cultural beliefs. She uses the philosophical concept of relativism to give her biased arguments an intellectual believability. However, she doesn't seem to get that her own beliefs are influenced by her own political and cultural beliefs. As a result, her underlying assumption is that her truth is better and more objective than the truth of anyone who doesn't agree with her. She grants herself the moral authority that history has revealed to be a very dangerous thing that has been used to justify many crusades past and present. Dick Cheney's desire to spread U.S.-style democracy to the world whether they want it or not is really just such a crusade.

Dick Cheney shares her sense of moral authority and exhibits the same trait of believing that he knows what is best and everyone who disagrees with him is somehow wrong. And ironically for someone who's wife wrote a book called Telling the Truth Cheney finds it very easy to tell his own version of truth and to on occasion lie when it suits his purposes. He seems to believe that truth is relative in the sense that it is whatever is convenient for him at the moment. The end justifies the means kind of truth. It's like he believes in his moral authority to such an extent that he believes he is above the truth and is therefore justified in telling lies that the average person would never have the nerve to try to get away with.

There has been quite a bit of blogging and book writing regarding 9/11 conspiracy theories which speculate that the U.S. government had a hand in the attacks but not so much regarding the conspiracy theory that Dick Cheney believes in -- that Saddam was in league with bin Laden. I think his fear/paranoia that Saddam and bin Laden were in cahoots and conspiring together to perpetrate an attack worse than 9/11 led him to, among other actions, throw out the Geneva Conventions and some of our civil liberties in hopes of acquiring intel to stop them.

The left has assumed that Cheney deliberately faked evidence of the conspiracy to justify the invasion of Iraq, however Laurie Mylroie, as reported in the great book Hubris , is a former Harvard instructor who provided the neo-cons with a lot of the misinformation, which she believed to be true, that they used to backup their theory that Saddam was a menace to the world. She writes in her book Bush vs. the Beltway that Mohammed Atta had visited Prague at least once to meet with an Iraqi intelligence agent. This alleged meeting which the CIA now says never took place, was the primary bit of evidence that the Bush Administration used to prove that there was connection between Saddam and al Qaeda. She also hints at the possibility that the Anthrax letters sent in the weeks after 9/11 could have been the result of cooperation between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

I think that Cheney fell hard for the arguments of Mylroie and put together his own shadow intelligence unit at the Pentagon to look over raw intelligence in hopes of proving these theories. Instead of listening to intelligence experts, who he may lost faith in because of their failing to stop 9/11, he decided that the worst case scenario presented by Mylroie was more plausible. And as George Tenet [see May 7 post] has recently said, they were acting on the possibility that Saddam might have WMD not the imminent certainty that he had them. Ron Suskind also wrote in The One Percent Doctrine that Cheney was operating on the theory that if there was even a 1% chance that Saddam had WMD they should proceed as if he actually had them.

It's not hard to understand Cheney's abundance of caution when it came to wanting to make sure there wasn't another 9/11 attack but clearly he lost his perspective and to some extent I really believe his fear became paranoia. This fear/paranoia plus his sense of moral authority led him to believe that he knew better than the U.N. and many of our friends and allies around the world who did not think a war in Iraq was warranted or necessary.

Links

A Face Only a President Could Love
[Cheney Interview]
Todd Purdum June 2006

Protecting our Precious Liberty"
and other writings by Lynne Cheney

The Democrats' Worldview
by Ivo Daalder

A Democratic Foreign Policy?
by G. John Ikenberry

The Spies Who Pushed for War
by Julian Borger

Letter to President Clinton (1998)
from the Project for the New American Century