WAY back in the days of the Cold War, it was common for derision to be heaped on the Soviet Union and its satellites whenever the concerned authorities sought to explain away a leader’s prolonged absence from public view by tersely blaming it on a bout of flu. Every now and then the affliction proved to be fatal. The aversion to even vaguely credible medical reports  seemed not just unnecessary but also counterproductive.

 

There are times, however, when one is compelled to wonder whether, on occasion, obfuscation may be the lesser evil. That thought crossed the mind when it was reported last month that doctors removed five potentially cancerous polyps from President George W. Bush’s colon (not to be confused with Powell, the former secretary of state). Did anyone outside the presidential medical team really need to know that each of the polyps was less than a centimetre in diameter? For once, wouldn’t a cover-up have been prudent in the interests of good taste?

 

But, come to think of it, perhaps all was not revealed. There was, after all, no official word on whether the doctors designated the growths as miniature weapons of mass destruction. And there was neither confirmation nor denial of the possibly malicious rumour that, when examined under a microscope, one of the polyps bore an uncanny resemblance to Tony Blair.

 

Be that as it may, one of the reasons the colonoscopy needed to be publicized was that it required sedation. As a consequence, for two hours or so on the morning of July 21, Dick Cheney was king of America. Perhaps the world should consider itself fortunate that he did not choose to unleash a first strike against Iran during that particular opportunity. If truth be told, however, being on top of the world couldn’t have struck the vice-president as a particularly novel sensation. And not only because he was called upon to play exactly the same role five years earlier for exactly the same reason: an intrusive examination of the presidential insides.

 

Exactly a week after the Bush procedure (and no, there seems to be no evidence that his colonial misfortunes are related in any way to recurrent problems with his colon), Cheney underwent a bit of surgery of his own. His battery, it seems, was running low. Quite literally. Barely six months after he had taken oath as vice-president in 2001, cardiovascular specialists deemed it necessary to fit him with a defibrillator: a device that delivers a shock to the heart whenever it detects an abnormality in its rhythm.

 

From a clinical – as opposed to a political – point of view, the precaution was probably well-advised, given that Cheney’s  medical record is as convoluted as his ideological proclivities: it includes four heart attacks, a quadruple bypass and two angioplasties. It seems remarkable that someone with such a rich history of emergencies should even have been considered for a post that puts him a heartbeat away from the Oval Office, but that’s another story. The point is that during a routine check-up last month, doctors found cause for concern about the state of the battery and determined that the defibrillator be replaced. Hence the operation, which must have put Cheney out of action for a few hours. The vital question that no one appears to have asked is: who exactly was running the US during that time?

 

Dick Cheney’s precise role in the executive branch has been the subject of much conjecture and comment dating back to well before the “war on terror” in the wake of 9/11. Quite a few analysts – not to mention satirists – were inclined to see him as something more than an eminence grise. Mounting evidence of George W’s intellectual shortcomings made it easier to picture Cheney as the brains behind the throne. It was never quite as simple as that, but a 20,000-word investigation of the Cheney phenomenon by Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, serialised by The Washington Post over four days in the last week of June, suggests that the impression of the vice-president calling the shots was anything but illusory.

 

Crucially, the Gellman-Becker treatise fills in the blanks about precisely how Cheney went about the task of pushing his agenda on a variety of fronts, ranging from tax cuts for the very rich and Supreme Court appointments to the invasion of Iraq and the torture of prisoners. It suggests that the president isn’t knowingly dabbling in falsehood when he describes himself as “the decider”. Cheney’s deviousness lies sustaining that delusion while ensuring that the decisions made do not radically deviate from whatever he deems to be the ideal course in the circumstances.

 

A 100 per cent success rate would be uncanny. It doesn’t happen that way. But he succeeds often enough for it to safely be said that no vice-president before him has played a remotely comparable role in crystallizing an administration’s policies.

 

An evidently frustrated John Adams, the first vice-president of the US, described his post as “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived”. And thus it remained for the better part of 200 years. Constitutionally, the vice-president serves only two purposes: to step into the president’s shoes if the latter is debilitated or dies, and to cast the deciding vote if the Senate is split down the middle on some matter. In picking a running mate, presidential candidates don’t try to choose someone they can work with: rather, the tendency is to find someone whose personal standing will bring in more votes from a particular part of the country.

 

It’s hardly surprising, then, that Richard Nixon wasn’t particularly popular with Dwight Eisenhower and the Kennedy brothers loathed Lyndon Johnson. Spiro Agnew was a nonentity. Gerald Ford got lucky, but couldn’t translate it into electoral success. Walter Mondale and Bush the Elder were marginally more influential within the administrations they served, but Dan Quayle became a byword for idiocy (until George W appeared on the scene). When Quayle warned Cheney in 2001 that his duties would entail little more than attending meaningless inaugurations and state funerals, Cheney offered his trademark sinister smile and said: No, I have a different understanding with the president.

 

This involved, while the fiasco in Florida was as yet unresolved, putting together a team that included Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton and Lewis “Scooter” Libby. All of them are now gone, and Cheney’s malign influence may not be quite as strong as it once was, but it decidedly lingers on. It wouldn’t, in the event, be unreasonable to presume that his candidacy as running mate was part of a power-snatching plot by right-wing extremists, a consequence of unfulfilled aspirations left over from the Reagan era. And, from the point of view of its protagonists, the plot worked well for a while before it began to fall apart.

 

Cheney’s role was to keep the White House on side. He did so by surreptitiously initiating policy advice without leaving any fingerprints, and then making sure that his opinion was the last one “the decider” heard before making his decision. In some cases he went even further: for instance, the decision to strip prisoners in the “war on terror” of all rights was based on a Dick-initiated memo that took Powell and Rice by surprise when it was leaked to the press two years later.

 

Iraq had been something of an obsession with Cheney since his stint as defence secretary under Bush Sr, and he was determined to get rid of Saddam Hussein well before the “war on terror” provided a highly dubious context for naked aggression. Small wonder, then, that much of the impetus for dodgy intelligence on Iraq‘s weapons of mass destruction, as well as some of the rosiest descriptions of post-invasion prospects, emanated from the office of the vice-president. Furthermore, whenever any risk has arisen of congressional or judicial initiatives aimed at curbing particularly outrageous behaviour on the part of the administration – such as the maltreatment of detainees, for instance, or blanket surveillance of US citizens – Cheney has invariably been instrumental in discovering, or creating, loopholes.

 

The vice-president’s fascistic tendencies are underscored by his penchant for secrecy. Even scribbled notes about media talking points are designated as classified, as are visitor logs: Cheney doggedly resists all attempts to determine whom he has been talking to, and it took six years to clarify the identity of the men he consulted as the head of an energy task force back in 2001. The latter was anyhow a highly inappropriate assignment in view of his immersion in the petroleum industry, most notably as chief of Halliburton – on whose payroll he informally remained until 2005, long after it had become a leading beneficiary of the Iraqi occupation. Nor is it a coincidence that Cheney is the preferred emissary whenever anything needs to be conveyed to the Saudi ruling family.

 

Oil is thicker than water, and Bush’s own (rather less successful) background in the petroleum ought not to be overlooked. The deadliest double-act in US history – one of them freshly cleansed from behind, the other empowered with a brand new battery – will be around for nearly another 18 months and, despite significant setbacks, its capacity to wreak further havoc should not be underestimated. Chances are it will take a lot longer to undo the harm these two have caused in tandem both internationally and domestically, if their successors are at all up to the task. Given the power structure in the US, that’s a pretty big ask.

 

---