Cheney Emerging As Top Zealot In Bush Admin

by Jim Lobe

Calm, if intensely purposeful and focused, always substantive, and with virtually unmatched experience, Dick Cheney, who at age 34 had served as White House chief of staff under President Gerald Ford and later as defence secretary under Bush's father during the Gulf War, embodied competence and gravitas.

In addition to his government service, he had worked for several years as the CEO of one of the country's biggest and most profitable corporations.

You could trust him to round out Bush's own inexperience and curb his boyish enthusiasms, especially perhaps for Texas wildcatters, tax cuts, Christian fundamentalism, or baseball. His was the steady hand that communicated good old mainstream conservative Republicanism.

Now three years later, the image of Vice President Dick Cheney is changing.

Already tarnished by questions surrounding the huge no-bid reconstruction contracts won by his former company, Halliburton, in which he retains a financial interest, as well as his refusal to disclose to Congress what meetings he held during his creation of Bush's energy policy, Cheney is increasingly seen as a serious right-wing extremist and ideologue, and by far the most powerful number two in U.S. history.

As much as Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and his neo-conservative advisers have become the lightning rods for criticism over the Iraq war and the administration's hubris, Cheney appears to have acted as their principal patron and advocate with Bush, and, more than any other official except perhaps Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the driving force within the administration for war with Iraq.

Although long in the making, the secretive vice president's image as zealot appears to have impressed itself in the media just in the last two weeks.

In particular, his Sept. 14 appearance on the Sunday television news program 'Meet the Press', when he not only defended the administration's pre-war optimism about Iraq, but also revived two stories long dismissed by the intelligence community -- that one of the 9/11 hijackers had met an Iraqi spy at a Prague cafe just five months before the attacks on New York and the Pentagon and that Iraq sponsored the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center -- has attracted unprecedented attention.

The Prague story, which reportedly rests on a report to Czech intelligence by a single "Arab student" witness five months after the alleged meeting, had been pushed primarily by Cheney and several neo-conservatives outside the administration, notably Richard Perle and James Woolsey, since it first surfaced in November, 2001.

After an exhaustive investigation, U.S. intelligence agencies concluded a year before the March invasion of Iraq that the hijacker, Mohammed Atta, was in the United States at the time of the alleged meeting. Moreover, the Iraqi spy, who has been in U.S. custody in Iraq since July, has apparently failed to back up the story despite, no doubt, repeated suggestions that he do so.

According to a major account in the 'Washington Post' on Monday, Cheney and his top aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, continued to press the story on the administration long after intelligence had dismissed it, even insisting on the eve of Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation to the UN Security Council last February that it be included in Powell's indictment of Iraq's defiance of that body.

Powell kept it out, and 10 days ago, in a major blow to Cheney's credibility, Bush himself told reporters that the administration had "no evidence" that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein played any role in the 9/11 attacks.

Cheney's suspicions -- and their lack of any grounding in reality -- have now become fair game in the media. "Cheney in Wonderland" was how the 'Los Angeles Times' titled one editorial, while accounts in 'Newsweek' and the Post have gone to unusual lengths to debunk the theories.

There had long been hints that Cheney was not quite the reasonable and deliberate presence that he so effectively conveyed throughout his long career.

At the beginning of the administration, it was he who championed Rumsfeld, his former boss in the Nixon and Ford administrations, for the defence post, and then insisted, over fierce objections by Secretary of State Colin Powell, on placing Paul Wolfowitz in the number two position at the Pentagon.

He also insisted, again over Powell's misgivings, on making ultra-unilateralist John Bolton, then vice-president of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) (where Cheney's spouse, Lynne Cheney, is a fellow), undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.

Cheney also made Libby his own chief of staff and national security adviser. A hard-core neo-conservative who had worked with Wolfowitz in 1992 on a controversial draft strategy that called for global U.S. military dominance, Libby later served as general counsel to the Cox Commission, a congressional body convened to investigate alleged Chinese spying and acquisition of advanced-weapons technology.

Its final report was almost universally derided as flimsy, exaggerated and inaccurate, by both technical and China experts.

Libby also represented Marc Rich, a billionaire fugitive who reportedly enjoys very close ties to Israeli intelligence and whose pardon by Bill Clinton in the last days of his presidency became a major scandal, but one quickly hushed up by the incoming Bush administration.

Cheney also reportedly played a key role in the appointment of another controversial neo-conservative, Elliott Abrams, to head the Middle East office on the National Security Council.

Abrams, a strong right-wing critic of the Oslo peace process, has identified closely with positions of the Likud Party in Israel. Cheney himself told Israel's defence minister in a meeting in early 2002 that he though Palestinian President Yasser Arafat "should be hanged."

At the same time, in what was widely interpreted as an effort to intimidate the Near East bureau of the State Department, which has generally favored a more even-handed position toward Israelis and Palestinians, Cheney's daughter Elizabeth was appointed by the White House to serve as deputy assistant secretary of state of that office in early 2002.

It was also Libby and Cheney who reportedly visited the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) several times in the run-up to the war in Iraq, in what was seen as pressure on CIA analysts to take a darker view of Saddam Hussein's alleged ties to al-Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction.

In spite of the change in Cheney's media image and the questions raised about the propriety of his ties with Halliburton and the soundness of his judgment, there is little indication that his influence with Bush has been reduced.

While Powell appeared to have been given the authority to negotiate a new Security Council resolution that would dilute Washington's authority over reconstruction and political affairs in Baghdad earlier this months, Cheney led an internal effort to retain full control, even as Powell was negotiating in New York, say several knowledgeable sources.

"He has been far more inflexible than Rumsfeld," added one.