Ellyn
Joined: 16 Jul 2000
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Two very telling articles on Vice President Dick Cheney
 Thu Dec 04, 2003 8:29 am
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http://www.fourwinds10.com/news/05-government/I-foreign-policy/2003/05I-11-04-03-cheneys-the-one.html
CHENEY'S THE ONE
by Jim Lobe
October 23, 2003
The image was not an edifying one: the president of the United States a horse, his vice president, the rider.
But that is the image Sen. Joseph Biden, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, used to describe the power relationship between U.S. President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in a recent interview with the National Journal.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, according to Biden's account, sometimes talks Bush into pursuing a more conciliatory foreign-policy line, as he has done with North Korea or the United Nations from time to time.
"Like with a horse, Powell is always able to lead Bush to the water. But just as he is about to put his head down, Cheney up in the saddle says, 'Un-uh,' and yanks up the reins before Bush can drink the water. That's my image of how it goes," Biden said.
That is also the image which is gaining currency in power circles in Washington. When it comes to foreign policy, Cheney is increasingly seen as holding the reins.
While the mainstream media continue to refer to Bush as the captain of his own foreign-policy ship, hints that Cheney - a Republican right-winger surrounded by neo-conservatives, many with close ties to Israel's Likud Party - is the dominant figure in Washington's diplomacy have become too plentiful to ignore.
The most stunning example was disclosed in a recent 'Washington Post' article that assessed Rice's performance as national security adviser. The authors reported that Bush had ordered Cabinet officials not to give any preferential treatment to Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC) as U.S. forces moved into Iraq last spring.
Imagine the shock felt by the State Department when, shortly after Bush gave the order, the Pentagon flew Chalabi and 600 of his armed followers into southern Iraq in early April "with the approval of the vice president."
Enforcing policy discipline, especially in a divided administration, is ordinarily the task of the national security adviser. But Rice, an academic whose substantive knowledge of foreign policy is largely confined to her expertise, the Soviet Union and Russia, has not been equal to the task.
Her failure in that regard, as well as Bush's own passivity and inexperience, is precisely what has enabled Cheney to dominate the policy process, particularly with respect to the Middle East where Cheney's views are almost entirely consistent with those of the neo-cons close to Likud and Sharon.
Even before Sep. 11, Cheney had endorsed Israel's selective assassination policy even as the State Department was denouncing it. One year later, Cheney told Israel's defence minister, albeit privately, that he thought Palestinian President Yasser Arafat "should be hanged."
That Cheney should assume such a dominant role is not surprising given the degree to which Bush depended on him during his presidential campaign and in the administration's early days. And the fact that Cheney, who was asked by Bush to recommend his running mate in 2000, chose himself suggested that he felt confident that Bush would give him extraordinary powers if he won.
Similarly, Cheney played a much more important role than Rice, despite Rice's much closer personal relationship with Bush, in the appointment of both cabinet and sub-cabinet national-security officials, beginning with Rumsfeld at the Pentagon.
Not only did Cheney personally intervene to ensure that Powell's best friend, Richard Armitage, was denied the deputy defence secretary position, but he also played a key role in securing the post for Paul Wolfowitz.
Moreover, it was Cheney who insisted that ultra-unilateralist John Bolton be placed in a top State Department arms position, from which he has pursued policies that run counter to Powell's own preferences.
Cheney's own chief of staff and national security adviser, I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a Washington lawyer and Wolfowitz protégé, is considered a far more skilled and experienced bureaucratic and political operator than Rice.
Moreover, his own national-security staff, the largest ever employed by a vice president, has largely been chosen for both their ideological affinity with their boss and proven Washington experience. "They play to win," said one State Department official.
With several of his political allies, including deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley and Middle East director Elliott Abrams, on Rice's larger but more diverse staff, Libby "is able to run circles around Condi," a former NSC official told IPS earlier this year.
Thus, Cheney played a key role in assigning responsibility for post-war reconstruction to the Pentagon, a major departure from past experience when the State Department was given the lead.
Similarly, Cheney backed the Pentagon's exclusion of State Department officials, including Tom Warrick, a highly regarded Iraq specialist who oversaw the mammoth 'Future of Iraq Project' that involved hundreds of Iraqi expatriates and other experts, in the post-war administration.
It was also Cheney and Libby whose frequent trips to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the run-up to the Iraq war played the decisive role in distorting the intelligence process, in part by pressing on CIA analysts questionable evidence supplied by the INC and Pentagon hawks under Rumsfeld, according to retired intelligence officers.
More recently, it was Cheney who led the effort to deny Powell the authority to negotiate a new U.N. Security Council resolution that could have reduced the Pentagon's control over the political transition in Iraq, even after the president had initially approved such a deal.
Even now, according to some sources, Cheney is actively trying to blunt Congressional pressure to reduce the Pentagon's control over Iraq policy and fire several senior Pentagon hawks, beginning with Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith, who are believed to have misled Congress about both the evidence used to justify the war and the post-war situation.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Richard Lugar and Biden, the committee's ranking Democrat, explicitly mentioned Cheney in what amounted to a bipartisan appeal on NBC's 'Meet the Press' television programme Oct. 12 for Bush to assert his control over foreign policy.
"I would say," Biden said, "Mr. President, take charge. Take charge. Let your secretary of defense, state, and your vice president know this is my policy, any one of you that divert from the policy is off the team."
Lugar, a staunch, albeit moderate Republican, said he agreed with Biden, adding, "The president has to be president. That means the president over the vice president and over these secretaries."
The past month's announcements that Rice had hired Robert Blackwill, Bush's former ambassador to India and reputedly a skilled bureaucratic and Republican infighter himself, as a top deputy and that she is heading up a new, inter-agency Iraq Stabilisation Group appeared designed to create the appearance that she was at last taking the reins.
So far, however, there is little evidence that Cheney is prepared to dismount.
(Inter Press Service)
Jim Lobe, works as Inter Press Service's correspondent in the Washington, D.C., bureau. He has followed the ups and downs of neo-conservatives since the well before their rise in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
AND THE SECOND ARTICLE (http://www.fourwinds10.com/news/05-government/I-foreign-policy/2003/05I-11-06-03-cheney-taps-syria-hawk-as-adviser-on-mideast.html):
CHENEY TAPS SYRIA HAWK AS ADVISOR ON MIDEAST
By MARC PERELMAN
FORWARD STAFF
October 31, 2003
Despite mounting criticism of the administration's Iraq policy, Vice President Dick Cheney appears to be ratcheting up his commitment to the circle of neoconservative intellectuals who helped spearhead President Bush's war policy, adding one of its most controversial proponents to his national security staff in a little-noticed move last month.
David Wurmser, a neoconservative scholar known for his close ties to the Israeli right, was appointed in mid-September to join the team led by Cheney's national security adviser, Lewis "Scooter" Libby. In recent years Wurmser, who boasts a complex network of relationships to a variety of pro-Likud think tanks and activist groups, has frequently written articles arguing for a joint American-Israeli effort to undermine the Syrian regime.
Wurmser's appointment sheds light on the prominent role played by Cheney and his national security staff in shaping foreign policy and coincides with the deterioration in the relations between Washington and Damascus. In recent months, Washington has accused Syria of sheltering Iraqi leaders, weapons and money and of allowing terrorists into Iraq. The administration backed Israel's recent bombing of a suspected terrorist training camp in Syria and dropped its objections to a congressional bill that grants the president the right to impose sanctions on Damascus.
"The vice president undoubtedly chooses staff whose views are compatible with the policies of the administration," wrote Judith Kipper, a Middle East scholar with the Council on Foreign Relations, in an e-mail to the Forward. "The question is, how does the vice president's [national security staff] function in relation to the president's national security staff and how important policy decisions are made in the White House. While the vice president has a critical role to play, the secrecy surrounding his unusually large foreign-policy staff raises many questions which the American public needs answered."
Cathy Martin, a spokeswoman for Cheney, confirmed that Wurmser had recently been hired, adding that he is serving as one of many foreign-policy advisers to the vice president. She declined to comment on questions about Cheney's or Wurmser's ideological leanings.
Before his appointment, Wurmser had served as a senior adviser to John Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security and one of the sharpest critics of Syria within the administration. In speeches and testimonies over the past year, Bolton has sounded increasingly alarmist far more so than the intelligence community about Syria's weapons programs.
Wurmser's appointment was first reported by Inter-Press Service and elicited criticism from the Arab American Institute, an advocacy organization.
Wurmser is the main author of a 1996 policy paper drafted for then-Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu by a task force composed of neo-conservative scholars. The white paper, titled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," advocated a remodeling of the Middle East that some critics see as a rough blueprint for the policy adopted by the Bush administration after the September 11 attacks. The paper advocated a strategy of preemptive action to remove Saddam Hussein from power, a "rollback" of Syria and the search for alternatives to Yasser Arafat.
"Whoever inherits Iraq dominates the entire Levant strategically," said the paper, which was commissioned by the Jerusalem-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, where Wurmser was working at the time.
The task force was headed by Richard Perle, now a key Pentagon adviser who sits on the Defense Policy Board. Its members included Douglas Feith, currently the undersecretary of defense for policy and one of the main proponents of the war in Iraq.
Another member of the task force was Wurmser's Israeli-born wife, Meyrav Wurmser, who heads the Middle East studies department at the conservative Hudson Institute. She is a founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute, or Memri, which translates Arabic press reports and which critics say highlights negative views of the West.
The policy paper suggested that in order to transform the "balance of power" in the Middle East in favor of an axis consisting of Israel, Turkey and Jordan, Saddam should be removed and replaced by a Hashemite ruler.
The next step would be a "rollback" of Syria by sponsoring proxy attacks in Lebanon and even striking at selected targets in Syria. In the late 1990s, Wurmser wrote frequently, arguing for a joint U.S.-Israeli effort to undermine the Syrian regime.
On Tuesday, retired Air Force General James Clapper, director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, told reporters he was not surprised that U.S. forces had not discovered any chemical, biological or nuclear weapons in Iraq, citing a big increase in the number of vehicles heading to Syria before the war. The administration also has renewed long-standing accusations that Damascus is developing chemical and biological weapons and is supporting terrorist groups operating against Israel, despite pledges to crack down on them
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