Dissecting Cheney

[seemslikeadream]

By James K. Galbraith

Oct. 5, 2004 | History's final verdict on George W. Bush may well be to dismiss him as a frontman who was not quite up to his job. But nothing like that will be said of Dick Cheney. Cheney is undeniably intelligent, powerful and shrewd -- a force to be reckoned with, even though he has operated mainly in the shadows.

The key to understanding Cheney is that he is a throwback -- to a brand of strategic thinking that bedeviled the Cold War. He is part of the legacy that runs back to Generals Curtis LeMay and Thomas Power of the Strategic Air Command in the late 1950s. The two tenets of this legacy are absolutely consistent: 1) Overestimate the enemy and govern through fear, and 2) hit the enemy before it can hit you. In four words: "missile gap" and "first strike."


That school never quite seized control of American strategic policy while the Soviet Union existed, though it came close on several occasions, including the Cuban missile crisis. It often won budget and political battles through trickery, such as the CIA Team B exercise of the early 1980s, which led to the "Star Wars" missile defense program. But the first strike never happened. In the end cooler and wiser heads, from Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson through Nixon and Reagan, always saw the advantages of working with Soviet leaders to prevent war.

Economic competition with the Soviet bloc followed the logic of warfare. The Soviet Union represented an alternative industrial system, capable of absorbing the world's oil, gold, uranium and other strategic resources. Denying it access to key supplies -- oil in the Middle East, gold in South Africa, uranium in Zaire -- was the cornerstone of covert strategy in those years, dictating many ugly political choices. This too formed Cheney. It helps explain why, as late as 1986, he opposed a congressional resolution pressing for the release of Nelson Mandela from his South African prison.

The larger economic balance of the Cold War was a third element in Cheney's upbringing. With the non-Communist industrial countries, the United States cut a simple bargain. We provided security --including naval control of the oceans and a nuclear umbrella over Europe and Japan. They in turn tolerated a dollar-based world financial system, permitting the United States to live far above its productive powers. America's perpetual trade deficits were balanced, in simple terms, by the bomb and the fleet.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/10/05/cheney_beliefs/

[Xipe Totec]

1. Dissecting Cheney? If only it was literally true!

Cheney wants to return America to a simpler time, to the 19th century where people knew their place, worked an honest 60 hour day, respected their betters, and our battleships put fear in the hearts of the Barbary pirates!