Poor Old Dick

[tw]

From The Economist of 17 Feb 2007:

Dick Cheney has never been a great fan of open government. His staff refuse to reveal how many people work in his office, let alone what they do there. He went to court to keep the membership of his energy commission secret. You can find the White House and the Pentagon on Google Earth. But the vice-president's official residence is pixellated out. ...

Mr Cheney ... has the largest vice-presidential staff in history (an estimate 14 national security advisers compared with Al Gore's four, for example) and vassals in most branches of government. ...

The two characteristics that have emerged most clearly are ruthlessness and obsessive attention to detail. Mr Cheney was clearly determined to punish Joseph Wilson for casting doubt on some of the administrations' claims about WMD. ....

And from the moment he cut Mr Wilson's article out of the New York Times and scrawled notes all over it, Mr Cheney devoted a striking amount of energy to the administration's offensive against him. According to Mr Libby and a former PR aide, he dictated taking points for press officers to use. He discussed the case several times a day with Mr Libby, told him to deal directly with selected reporters, and instructed him to leak a sensitive document. Mr Libby's leaks are what landed him in trouble: ...

One possible explanation is that Mr Cheney knew that the administration's claims about WMD were false. But it seems unlikely. Mr Cheney continued to argue that Saddam possessed WMD long after Mr Bush had backed down. Hi problem was that he could not see evidence to the contrary. The other, more probable, explanation is that Mr Cheney was engaged in a personal vendetta, ...

He started his career as a failed academic, dropping out of Yale after a few terms and never completing his PhD at the University of Wisconsin. But he flourished with he came to Washington: attracted the attention of Donald Rumsfeld, rapidly climbing the greasy pole, and becoming Gerald Ford's chief of staff at the age of 34. ...

Mr Cheney seems to have acquired a profound distrust of the CIA. He became convinced that the CIA was underestimating the Soviet military building-up. [CIA was actually overestimating it] He lent his support to something called "Team B", a group of foreign-policy experts who made it their business to second-guess the CIA over the Soviet threat. Mr Cheney's distrust of the CIA grew even stronger in the 1990s when he concluded that the agency had misjudged Saddam's military capabilities ... He relied on his own intelligence sources ...

Where did Mr Cheney get his fervour from? The average Washington insider in a consummate trimmer. Mr Cheney comes across as a man firmly in the grip of an ideology. It will take more than the Scooter Libby trial to explain him fully. But at least Americans have learned a little bit more about the power behind King George’s throne.