Dick Cheney is dead. The world’s workers and oppressed should mourn, not for Dick Cheney’s passing, but for the fact that yet another imperialist war criminal has passed away without ever facing justice for his crimes.

Vice President Cheney was deeply influential, if not indispensable, in the George W. Bush administration’s decision-making, especially in the arena of foreign policy. He oversaw US invasions of several countries during his lifetime while strengthening the surveillance state at home. Most notably, he orchestrated the invasion of Iraq, a war waged on the pretext of a bald-faced lie, which resulted in more than a million deaths in the region.

[Originally Published on Marxist.com]

What makes a monster?

The circumstances of Cheney’s early life give no indication of the sort of toxic conditions that we might expect to breed monsters. Raised in humble Nebraska to a family of middle-class Democrats, Dick was as far from political royalty as Wyoming is from Massachusetts.

It was only with his entry into the corridors of power—the vast apparatus of the American state machine—that Dick Cheney was molded into a bloodthirsty representative of US imperialism.

From the 1960s, he climbed the ladder of US politics, from a staffer for Midwest politicians, to an intern for a Republican congressman in Washington DC, and then to White House chief of staff under President Gerald Ford.

Having earned his stripes in the bureaucracy of the US federal government (through deferring his Vietnam War draft five times), Dick tried his hand in the legislature, which Lenin in The State and Revolution correctly described as but another division of labor within the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

Dick succeeded in becoming the congressional representative of Wyoming’s at-large district in 1978. As a congressman, despite being from a very humble background, he rapidly became the whip for the Republican Party. In the process, he scored illustrious achievements such as voting against the creation of a Department of Education.

A few years later, under George H.W. Bush’s administration, Cheney was named the Secretary of “Defense.” He “defended” his country by launching invasions against countries including Panama and Iraq.

Through his career, which saw him ascend through the executive and legislative branches of the United States, he accumulated the following of an enormous bloc of faceless bureaucrats across a thousand and one departments, offices, agencies, courts, and interest groups. While most ordinary American workers wouldn’t even know these bodies existed, they quietly permit the political system to function.

This is the defining feature of Dick Cheney. His rise to the top began from within the lowest corners of the US Federal Government. On his way, he became intimately acquainted with the bureaucratic workings of the state to a degree that few other elected officials did. He was the creature of US imperialism’s bureaucracy, a living embodiment of what became known as “the deep state.” He soaked up all its hypocrisies, false pleasantries, treacheries, proceduralism and cynicism.

During the Cold War, he also embodied US imperialism’s frustration that the world was not yet wholly dominated by it. He lusted over the potential markets and resources that he could not control. He wanted it all.

The problem was that the Soviet Union existed and placed a check on such a desire. Yet when the 90s came around and the USSR fell, the restraint vanished, and Cheney, along with the US ruling class, were rubbing their hands.

In his own words: “I viewed the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest step forward for human liberty in the last sixty years.”

The most powerful Vice President in US history

In 2000, George W. Bush (son of George H.W), with Dick Cheney at his side, succeeded Bill Clinton as President of the United States—which at this time effectively meant the president of the entire world—via a dubious election.

Much has been made of the persona of George W. Bush. Some say that he was a genuine idiot. Some say that he was secretly an evil genius. This debate is made irrelevant by the incontrovertible fact that the real power in the White House between 2000 and 2008 was not in the Oval Office, but in the lesser-known Number One Observatory Circle, i.e. the chamber of the Vice President on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. This was the room where US policies were decided, at the head of which was Dick Cheney.

The Vice Presidency of the United States is customarily a symbolic position, under the assumption that the President is the actual decision-maker for US imperialism. There is nothing in the law that codifies this assumption, however. When needed, a hitherto symbolic office can be easily adapted to serve the concrete needs of the ruling class.

Thus, the office of the Vice President under Dick Cheney was selected to shoulder the responsibility of captaining the country’s foreign policy, as well as an enormous range of other domestic duties, leading The New York Times to proclaim him “the most powerful Vice President in US history.”

As Vice President, Cheney ruthlessly pushed through the policies. He wanted the dirty deeds done without any room for public criticism. George W. Bush, as the titular commander-in-chief, took those public criticisms with his trademark imbecility, while Cheney did the work from behind the scenes.

Crimes of Cheney

US imperialism emerged from the Cold War dizzy with success. The pervasive spirit of total US dominance was captured by Francis Fukuyama in his comically arrogant and inaccurate book The End of History.

America reigned supreme. But, still, by the end of the 1990s, US imperialism was carefully assessing the new world situation. Of course, even with a relatively careful posture during the Clinton administration, the US still committed serious war crimes, such as the bombing of Yugoslavia.

This cautious assessment came to an end with the victory of George W. Bush. Under “Dubya,” and of course, Dick, the US acted with brazen arrogance, without thought as to the consequences. They imagined—and acted as though—American power was unlimited.

The pretext came in the form of the attack on the Twin Towers. Immediately after the 11 September attacks in 2001, Cheney drew the conclusion that an invasion of Iraq was necessary.

What does an attack perpetrated by a small group of Egyptian and Saudi religious reactionaries—the leader of whom had been trained by the US in Afghanistan during its conflict with the Soviet Union—have to do with the secular (albeit brutal) regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq? Demanding a logical answer to this question is a futile task. A child of six can see that it was about oil.

Before taking office, Cheney—after a brief retirement from “public service”—was the CEO of Halliburton, a private energy company that became the biggest in the world under his auspices.

Iraq has the fifth-largest oil reserves in the world. Long before the war, oil companies had salivated over what BP called “the big oil prospect.” A seasoned capitalist and strategist of US imperialism, Cheney saw in the attack on the World Trade Center an unlimited mandate for US imperialism and with it, an opportunity to enrich his own company and the entire US ruling class. The war on Iraq was pushed primarily by Cheney’s office.

Thus began Operation Iraqi Freedom, perhaps the most spitefully ironic name for an invasion in history. The Iraqi masses were “freed” from Saddam Hussein by the United States which occupied the country for eight years.

Cheney and the US ruling class, now masters of Iraq, achieved their ultimate goal—unfettered access to Iraq’s immense natural resources. First among the beneficiaries was Cheney’s Halliburton, which made tens of billions of dollars in contracts.

Iraq, meanwhile, paid for “freedom” at the cost of one million killed, widespread destruction from which the country still hasn’t recovered, starvation, social collapse, and the rise of even more extreme reactionary forces, such as ISIS.

The city of Baghdad, once one of the crown jewels of human civilization, was reduced to rubble. For years, the city was not even a unified entity, but was sectioned off into “zones” by the US occupiers. Countless civilians lost their lives or lived in conditions of the worst oppression. Any traces of the Euphratean civilizations that once stood on that land were demolished by M1 Abrams tanks.

What about the freedom and democracy that the US’ “military operation” promised? Rather than a flourishing democratic paradise, Iraq devolved into a chaotic scrabble for control among local elites and sectarian militias. The poor and oppressed masses never had any say in this, before or after the Iraq War.

Ironically, the chaos caused by the invasion actually strengthened the premier opponent of US imperialism in the Middle East, Iran. With the anti-Iran regime of Saddam Hussein removed, pro-Iran forces gained room to maneuver, and a succession of pro-Iranian governments came to power in Iraq.

This did not concern Cheney. He and his shareholders were far away from Iraq. They watched their shares soar in between golf games at US country clubs.

Alongside the invasion and occupation, the US employed widespread torture against any suspected terrorists, legally or extra-legally detained from around the world, many of whom were sent to the Guantanamo Bay military base in Cuba. Dick Cheney popularized the euphemism “enhanced interrogation” as a thinly veiled justification for the use of torture as a means of extracting information.

Such “enhanced interrogation” went far beyond its supposed goal and strayed into sadism. Measures used were so extreme that the chief of staff for the Secretary of State at the time, Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, years later revealed that “we knew at least 39 people have died” from torture.

Guantanamo prison guards regularly subjected prisoners to sexual assault, rape, and humiliation for no other purpose than their own entertainment. At the US military’s Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, US soldiers relished in the agony of torture victims, as was brought to light by leaked photographs showing unspeakable cruelties.

Many of the victims of these measures had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. When confronted on television about this, Cheney flatly answered: “I have no problem [with it] as long as we achieved our objective.”

The so-called “War on Terror” not only terrorized the US’ opponents abroad, but its own citizens as well. The Patriot Act was swiftly introduced after the 9/11 attacks, which placed the entirety of the American population under government surveillance. Censorship was heavily enhanced in all spheres of life. Many musical bands were forced to alter their album covers that suggested “subversive” and “un-American” messages to avoid outright bans.

This onslaught against democracy, in the name of defending democracy, was enthusiastically supported by both Democrats and Republicans. Such “bipartisanship” was hailed as a beautiful moment when the “country came together.” From the office of the Vice President, Cheney masterminded these attacks with impunity.

In 2006, Dick Cheney shot his friend and Texas attorney Harry Whittington in the face with a shotgun by accident. An apology was not offered by Cheney, but the victim, Whittington, apologized to Dick. A better analogy for the enormously careless, arrogant, and self-entitled outlook of US imperialism that Cheney embodied could not be clearer. Whittington lived, but scores of people in the Middle East and beyond did not enjoy such fortune. Cheney was unrepentant to the end of his life. As he wrote in his autobiography, “If I had it to do all over again, I would, in a heartbeat.”

His last war: against Trump

After the landslide victory of Barack Obama in 2008, Dick Cheney retired into the shadows, but exercised his influence via his private connections and through his daughter, Liz, another at-large representative of Wyoming to Congress.

Cheney’s retirement years, like those of his predecessor Henry Kissinger (whom Cheney admiringly called “the master”), were spent tirelessly counseling the US ruling class and its representatives.

However, Cheney was an irreconcilable opponent of Trump. As he said himself, “in our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic.”

Cheney’s hostility is unsurprising. Dick Cheney was in many ways the epitome of the bureaucratic “neocon” Republican that Trump has sought to distance himself from politically.

Having dedicated his political career to expanding US imperialism across the globe, Trump’s opposition to “forever wars” and his attempts to retrench the American Empire in the Western Hemisphere risked undoing Cheney’s life’s work. Amongst the MAGA movement, Cheney is justifiably reviled as the very face of the “neocons.”

Dick and his daughter, Liz, styled themselves as Never-Trump Republicans and stood in vociferous opposition to Trump’s presidency. At the peak of their crusade against Trump, Liz Cheney collaborated with the Democrats to become the Vice Chair of the commission that investigated the 6 January storming of Capitol Hill by Trump supporters. Second fiddle to the Democrats, they shouted at the top of their lungs about the “danger” and “threat” that Trump poses to the edifice of American democracy.

But this strategy was doomed to fail. In the 2022 Republican primaries in Wyoming, Liz was defeated in a landslide by a pro-Trump challenger.

Don’t let any more of them get away with it

Dick Cheney died surrounded by the luxury and medical treatment that he and his ilk have denied his fellow countrymen since the beginning of his political career. He enjoyed a quiet and peaceful death, like Henry Kissinger and scores of US presidents and war criminals before him. Today the representatives of the American ruling class are singing the praises to the “integrity” and “unwavering sense of duty” of this servant of the American empire. Another war criminal has gotten away with it, dying without receiving justice for his barbaric crimes.

Moreover, scores of similar criminals, among them faithful students of Cheney’s methods, are not only alive but in charge. The Clintons, the Bidens, the Obamas, the Bushes, and now many under Trump’s employ, are still directing the brutal policies of US imperialism from behind, or at the front of the scenes.

Cheney and his kind are not merely evil individuals who shaped history according to their subjective wills. Cheney was a creature, servant, and executioner of the US ruling class, and the capitalist system in general.

The only way to bring an end to the crimes of people like Cheney, would be to overthrow the real culprit, American imperialism and capitalism. That would mean a victorious socialist revolution in America and across the world.