DICK CHENEY: THE PLUTOCRAT FROM HELL, Part 2
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Similar Wavelengths
When Dick Cheney arrived at the Pentagon in 1989, he created a brain trust in his own image, cultivating young staffers with academic backgrounds like his own. These brainy types congregated in the highest ranks of the policy directorate run by then-Undersecretary Wolfowitz. In most administrations, the policy directorate largely deals with mundane tasks, such as the negotiation of basing rights and arms sales. Those issues held little interest for Wolfowitz and his team. "They focused on geostrategic issues," says one of his Pentagon aides. "They considered themselves conceptual." Wolfowitz and his protégés prided themselves on their willingness to reexamine entire precepts of U.S. foreign policy. In Cheney, they found a like-minded patron. Wolfowitz, in 1991, described his relationship with his boss to The New York Times: "Intellectually, we're very much on similar wavelengths." Nowhere was this intellectual synergy more evident than on the Soviet Union.
At the time Cheney took office, Mikhail Gorbachev had been in power for four years. By then, the Soviet premier had charmed the American media and foreign policy establishment with his ebullient style. Like many hard-liners, Cheney thought he saw through these atmospherics and publicly intimated his skepticism of perestroika. Appearing on CNN in April 1989--only one month into his term as Defense secretary--he glumly announced that Gorbachev would "ultimately fail" and a leader "far more hostile" to the West would follow. Such dourness put Cheney well outside the administration mainstream. Baker, Scowcroft, and President George H.W. Bush--as well as the NSC's leading Russia hand, Condoleezza Rice--had committed themselves to Gorbachev's (and the ussr's) preservation. But Cheney believed that, with a gust of aggressive support for alternatives to Gorbachev, the United States could dismember its principal adversary once and for all.
To craft an alternative strategy, Cheney turned to alternative experts. On Saturday mornings, Wolfowitz's deputies convened seminars in a small conference room in the Pentagon's E ring, where they sat Cheney in front of a parade of Sovietologists. Many were mavericks who believed the Soviet Union was on the brink of collapse. Out of these Saturday seminars, Cheney's Soviet position emerged--with concepts and rhetoric that perfectly echo the current Bush administration's Iraq policy. They would push regime change in the Soviet Union, transforming it into a democracy. Support for rebellious Ukraine would challenge the regime from its periphery; and support for Boris Yeltsin, the elected president of the Russian Republic, would confront the regime at its core. "[Yeltsin] represents a set of principles and values that are synonymous with those that we hold for the Soviet Union--democratization, demilitarization," Cheney announced in a 1991 appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press." Bush père and Scowcroft fretted about instability, but Cheney retorted, if the demolition of the Soviet Union required a little short-term disruption, such as a nuclear-armed Ukraine, then so be it. After all, as he observed in a 1992 speech to the Economics Club of Indianapolis, true security depended on the expansion of "the community of peaceful democratic nations."
Cheney was unsuccessful in pushing the White House away from Gorbachev. After he mused aloud about Gorbachev's shortcomings in a 1989 TV interview, Baker called Scowcroft and told him, "Dump on Dick with all possible alacrity." When the "Gang of Eight"--Bush's senior advisers--met to decide policy in the final days of the Soviet Union, the meetings featured, as CIA chief Robert Gates has recalled, "Cheney against the field." The Soviet collapse ultimately settled the issue. But Cheney's battle against realism had only begun.
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There was, however, a moment of détente in that battle: the Gulf war. Cheney accepted ending the war with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein still in power, as did all of Poppy's other senior advisers. (Not even Wolfowitz--now so associated with Saddam's toppling--dissented at the time.) The lasting effect of the war on Cheney, however, was less strategic and more bureaucratic: It shattered his faith in the CIA's ability to produce reliable intelligence.
When Saddam first began amassing troops on the Kuwaiti border in mid-1990, conventional wisdom in the U.S. intelligence community held that he was attempting to gain leverage in opec talks and, at the most, might seize a Kuwaiti oil field. The analysis made little sense--Saddam was moving his elite Republican Guard units, the very guarantors of his rule, from their Baghdad positions--yet only a few analysts issued starker warnings of an all-out invasion. Worse still, a National Intelligence Estimate released just before Christmas that year concluded that Saddam would withdraw from Kuwait to avert a war with the United States. In a paper for a 1994 conference on intelligence policy, Wolfowitz reflected, "[W]hen the signs started to turn up that the projected scenario regarding Iraqi behavior was not unfolding as we wished, ... somebody within the [intelligence] community should have said, 'Wait a minute, here are facts that we ought to take some account of.'"
Cheney saw little option at the time but to request thorough briefings from intelligence analysts and subject their judgments to as much scrutiny as he could muster. Before the Gulf war, one former analyst remembers being "whisked into a room, there's Dick Cheney, he's right in front of you, he starts firing questions at you, half an hour later and thirty questions later, I'm whisked out of the room, and I'm like, 'What the hell just happened?'" Yet analysts can distinguish between thorough questioning and contempt--or pressure. Cheney showed none of it. "He would ask you factual questions like, 'OK, about this thing you said. Do I understand you correctly that such-and-such is true? And are you sure about this, and how do you know that?'" recalls Patrick Lang, the Defense Intelligence Agency's (DIA) Middle East expert during the Gulf war and one of the few analysts to predict the invasion of Kuwait. "And I regard that as a legitimate question. ... He wasn't hostile or nasty about it; he just wanted to know how you knew. And I didn't mind that in the least."
But, as Cheney and his aides watched, the intelligence failures kept on mounting. In the fall of 1992, U.N. inspectors uncovered an Iraqi nuclear weapons program far more advanced than the intelligence community had suspected. More disturbingly, the CIA admitted to having no clue about the Soviet Union's massive clandestine biological weapons program, which Yeltsin had spontaneously acknowledged in 1992--and this was an enemy the Agency had studied carefully for decades. Gradually, Cheney and his staff came to consider the CIA not only inept but lazy, unimaginative, and arrogant--"a high priesthood" in their derisive terminology. With uncharacteristic vitriol, Wolfowitz's 1994 paper argued that the Agency's style "allows [analysts] to conceal ignorance of facts, policy bias or any number of things that may lie behind the personal opinions that are presented as sanctified intelligence judgments."
By the time Cheney arrived at Halliburton in the mid-'90s, he felt he could no longer rely on his old Langley connections to provide him the information he needed to do business in the former Soviet Union. So, according to one ex-CIA operative, Cheney hired a team of retired intelligence agents to collect information independently. The ex-agent says, "Cheney would just bitch and moan about the CIA and various parts of the world that they didn't know shit [about]. ... He was terribly frustrated."
But, while the decision to leave Saddam in power at the end of the Gulf war would reverberate through neocon circles for the next decade, a policy initiative devised by Cheney's Pentagon in 1992 would be arguably more important, laying the foundation for every major theme of George W. Bush's post- September 11 foreign policy. Under Wolfowitz's direction, the Pentagon produced a strategy paper called the Defense Planning Guidance (DPG). At a moment of strategic uncertainty--the Soviet Union had formally collapsed just months before--the document offered a vision of unbridled U.S. dominance and proposed democratization as the only true guarantor of U.S. security.
Without a Soviet Union to contain, there was no longer any obvious reason for the United States to retain its outsized presence on the world stage. To meet domestic expectations for a "peace dividend," Cheney implemented force reductions across all the armed services. But the Defense secretary and his planning staff also saw danger in these cuts. It was impossible to predict the next global rival to the United States, and, without the forward presence to encourage and cement democratization in newly freed nations, the gains of a unipolar world could be short-lived. A new conceptual framework to justify U.S. leadership was necessary.
DPGs typically explain how the Pentagon plans to implement defense requirements. They traffic in the minutiae of weapons systems and force structures, not reconceived notions of global leadership. But, just as Wolfowitz had used a modest policy office for grander ambitions, in February 1992 his staff drafted a DPG, advocating a value-driven security policy. It would be a U.S. priority to "encourage the spread of democratic forms of government." The stakes, they said, were extremely high. Everywhere the DPG authors looked, they saw the prospects for rivalry: in Russia, where there was "the possibility that democracy will fail"; in "Indian hegemonic aspiration"; in communist Asia, "with fundamental values, governance and policies decidedly at variance with our own"; even in allied Europe.
Instead of passively accepting the emergence of such rivals, the DPG proposed snuffing them out. Washington needed to convince other countries that "they need not aspire to a greater [global] role," whether through "account[ing] sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations" or through traditional deterrence. By preventing the emergence of a rival, U.S. strategy could recreate itself for a unipolar world, where U.S. power could be used more freely. "We have the opportunity to meet threats at lower levels and lower costs," the document read. Chief among those threats was the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). A full decade before George W. Bush enshrined preemption as state policy in his National Security Strategy, the DPG raised the prospect of "whether to take military steps to prevent the development or use of weapons of mass destruction."
It was uncharted territory for the United States, and it alarmed certain Pentagon officials, who leaked drafts of the DPG to The New York Times. Cheney, Wolfowitz, and their staffs awoke on March 8, 1992, to the headline "u.s. strategy plan calls for ensuring no rivals develop." A horrified Senator Joseph Biden said the DPG led the way to "literally a Pax Americana." George H. W. Bush immediately disassociated himself from the document, begging the press corps, "Please do not put too much emphasis on leaked reports, particularly ones that I haven't seen." The White House strongly indicated its displeasure to the Defense secretary.
Cheney was forced to revise the document, sanding down its edges considerably, but he did not let its ideas perish. In January 1993, as they were about to leave office, Wolfowitz's planning staff recycled all the controversial ideas in the DPG and published them in a document called the Regional Defense Strategy. Again, the strategy was based on the concept of "a democratic 'zone of peace,'" defined as "a community of democratic nations bound together in a web of political, economic and security ties." It remained the task of American leadership "to build an international environment conducive to our values." The fact that the DPG vision didn't die a quiet, bureaucratic death wasn't just a tribute to the tenacity of Wolfowitz and his staff; it was a reflection of how deeply Cheney believed in it.
To this day, his closest aides point to the document as the moment when Cheney's foreign policy coalesced. The attacks of September 11 may have given Cheney a new sense of urgency, but the framework was already there. As one former staffer puts it, "It wasn't an epiphany, it wasn't a sudden eureka moment; it was an evolution, but it was one that was primed by what he had done and seen in the period during the end of the cold war."
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