Still the war-monger, Cheney settles scores in new memoir

Former US Vice President Dick Cheney’s memoir, In My Time, hits US bookshelves Tuesday and in his typical pugnacious fashion, the author has promised that “[t>here are gonna be heads exploding all over Washington" because of the revelations that will emerge from the work.

Billed as a “personal and political” memoir, Cheney was paid a multi-million dollar advance for the book, which he co-authored with his daughter Liz, and which was published by an imprint of Simon & Schuster founded by his former aide Mary Matalin.

The 576-page tome chronicles an expansive political career that spans four decades. In it, Cheney defends his most controversial political positions and he even occasionally reveals interesting tidbits about his health and behind-the-scenes moments at the White House, although most reviewers have thus far found Cheney’s claim that his book will cause heads to spontaneously combust to be hyperbolic.

Settling scores

Still, the book has already stirred the political pot, and much ado has been made about book passages that malign both former secretaries of state under George W. Bush: Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice.

No love’s been lost between Cheney and Powell over the years, and in his memoir, Cheney claimed that Powell tried to undermine the president by complaining about the war in Iraq in private conversations.

“It was as though he thought the proper way to express his views was by criticizing administration policy to people outside the government,” Cheney wrote . Cheney also revealed in the book that he suggested to former president George W. Bush that Powell be removed from his position after the 2004 election, and that Powell’s resignation “was for the best.”

The public tit-for-tat between Cheney and Powell began on Sunday, when Powell appeared on the CBS political talk show “Face the Nation.” “They are cheap shots,” Powell said of Cheney’s criticisms. “It’s not necessary to take these kinds of barbs.”

Cheney also directed a few jabs at Condoleezza Rice, calling her naïve in her negotiations over a nuclear weapons agreement with North Korea. He also  recounted how she had “tearfully admitted I had been right” about not needing to apologise for claiming—erroneously—that Iraq was searching for yellowcake uranium in Niger to produce weapons of mass destruction in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address. This mistaken claim, of course, was a major justification by the Bush administration for going to war in Iraq.

During his appearance on “Face the Nation,” Powell came to Rice’s defence and called Cheney’s portrayal of the former secretary of state “condescending.” “I think it’s a bit too far,” Powell said of Cheney’s description of Rice as having been too emotional. “I think Dick overshot the runway with that kind of comment.”

On Monday, Cheney was again  asked   on the “Today Show” about whether this passage was sexist: “You know that ’tearfully’ is a loaded description for powerful women in high office,” correspondent Jamie Gangel said. “It’s going to be seen by a lot of people as provocative.”

Cheney simply responded, “It’s an accurate description.”

Though Rice has not responded to Cheney’s writing, she will nevertheless have the last word since her memoir, No Higher Honour, comes out in November. It promises to be “surprisingly candid in her narrative of administration colleagues."

Other revelations

Cheney’s book does not beat back a retreat on foreign policy matters such as Iraq (he calls the war one of the Bush administration’s biggest accomplishments), or on controversial terrorist interrogation techniques such as waterboarding (he believes them to be “safe, legal, and effective” and he said he would use again).

Based on excerpts published by The New York Times and Politico  (which also published “A political junkie’s guide to Dick Cheney’s memoir,” here are a few additional moments from the book:

• One of the most surprising revelations to emerge from the book is that Cheney was the sole proponent within the Bush administration for bombing a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor site in June 2007. “I again made the case for U.S. military action against the reactor,” Cheney wrote. “But I was a lone voice. After I finished, the president asked, ‘Does anyone here agree with the vice president?’ Not a single hand went up around the room.”

• Though Cheney has denied having undue influence on the White House, he described his role as the “Oval Office gatekeeper,” as The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani put it. Cheney would be updated on the President’s Daily Brief, or PDB, “which contains reports on the most critical intelligence issues of the day,” before joining the president at his own briefing on the same material. Cheney would also sometimes ask for additional material, such as “responses to questions I’d asked or items my briefers knew I was interested in,” and at least once, this material was added to the president’s PDB. “If I was traveling or at an undisclosed location, the president would often be briefed in the White House Situation Room, so I could join by secure videoconference,’’ Cheney wrote.

• Cheney defended the use of interrogation methods on suspected terrorists that human rights groups have described as torture, as well as the National Security Agency’s now-defunct eavesdropping programme on stateside communications. “The Terrorist Surveillance Program is, in my opinion, one of the most important success stories in the history of American intelligence,’’ he wrote. “If I had to do it all over again, I would, in a heartbeat.’’

‘Darth Vader vents’

The reviews of the books have come down according to party lines.

In Maureen Dowd’s Sunday New York Times column, entitled “ Darth Vader Vents ,” she calls the book a bore.

A columnist with liberal leanings, she makes no effort to conceal her contempt for the former vice president: “Cheney takes himself so seriously, flogging his cherished self-image as a rugged outdoorsman from Wyoming (even though he shot his Texas hunting partner in the face) and a vice president who was the only thing standing between America and its enemies. He acts like he is America. But America didn’t like Dick Cheney."

Meanwhile, Glen Greenwald, a liberal columnist for Salon, decried the fact that Cheney was out peddling his memoir when he should be prosecuted for war crimes.

According to Greenwald : Less than three years ago, Dick Cheney was presiding over policies that left hundreds of thousands of innocent people dead from a war of aggression, constructed a worldwide torture regime, and spied on thousands of Americans without the warrants required by law, all of which resulted in his leaving office as one of the most reviled political figures in decades. But thanks to the decision to block all legal investigations into his chronic criminality, those matters have been relegated to mere pedestrian partisan disputes, and Cheney is thus now preparing to be feted – and further enriched – as a Wise and Serious Statesman with the release of his memoirs this week: one in which he proudly boasts (yet again) of the very crimes for which he was immunised.

But Cheney isn’t battling the entire US liberal media establishment on his own. “You’re not going to see any minds in the liberal media change because of what he says in his book,” Rich Noyes, the director of the conservative Media Research Center told Fox News . “At this point, it’s pure name calling.”

Noyes added that Cheney has received critical commentary from the media and is the least liked member of the Bush administration partly because “he never cared what (the media) said about him.”