Dick Cheney's ghost has a playbook for war in Venezuela

Former vice president Richard Cheney, who died a few days ago at the age of 84, gave a speech to a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 2002 in which the most noteworthy line was, “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”

The speech was essentially the kickoff of the intense campaign by the George W. Bush administration to sell a war in Iraq, which it would launch the following March. The campaign had to be intense, because it was selling a war of aggression — the first major offensive war that the United States would initiate in over a century. That war will forever be a major part of Cheney’s legacy.

The Donald Trump administration’s escalation of confrontation with Venezuela displays disturbing parallels with the run-up to the Iraq War. In some respects where the stories appear to differ, the circumstances involving Trump and Venezuela are even more alarming than was the case with Iraq.

One similarity involves corruption of the relationship between intelligence and policy. Instead of policymakers using intelligence as an input to their decisions, they have tried to use scraps of intelligence publicly to make a case for a predetermined policy. This part of the story of the Iraq War I have recounted in detail elsewhere.

Cheney’s speech to the VFW preceded and in effect pre-empted work by the intelligence community on a classified estimate, which would become notorious in its own right, about Iraqi weapons programs. When Bob Graham, who died last year and in 2002 was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, became one of the few members of Congress to bother to read that estimate, he was so taken aback by how far short the intelligence community’s judgments were from what the administration was saying publicly that he voted against the resolution authorizing the war.

The Trump administration is using the same tactic of preemptive messaging from the top, regardless of what the intelligence agencies may be saying about Venezuela, that the Bush administration used regarding Iraq. Trump’s declarations about the regime of Nicolás Maduro have a definitive tone similar to Cheney’s “no doubt” formulation about Iraqi weapons programs.

Besides weapons of mass destruction, the other big issue that the Bush administration attempted to pin on Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime — capitalizing on the American public’s furor over terrorism in the wake of the 9/11 attacks — was a supposed “alliance” between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda. No such alliance existed, and the administration’s assertions on that subject were contrary to the intelligence community’s judgments.

The parallel with the current situation regarding Venezuela is especially clear, given the Trump administration’s assertions about the relationship between Maduro’s regime and certain gangs or drug cartels, which the administration equates with terrorist groups. Trump has declared that the gang most often mentioned, Tren de Aragua, is “operating under the control of” Maduro. This assertion is contradicted by the intelligence community’s judgments, as incorporated in a memorandum that is now available in redacted form.

The Bush administration not only disregarded intelligence judgments that did not support its case for war but also actively tried to discredit those judgments, and Cheney’s office was a part of this. For example, the policymakers tried to make life difficult for a former ambassador, Joseph Wilson, who, as a result of field research he performed for the intelligence community, was able to refute an administration assertion about Iraq buying uranium in Africa. The difficulties imposed on Wilson involved the career-ending outing of his wife, who was an intelligence officer under cover. Cheney aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby was convicted and sentenced to prison for obstructing justice and lying under oath in connection with that affair.

Cheney unsuccessfully lobbied President Bush to pardon Libby. But in a further connection to the present, Trump pardoned Libby in 2018.

The Trump administration is more ruthless than Bush’s ever was in making life difficult for anyone who dares to question its assertions or otherwise gets in the administration’s way. Following production of the intelligence memorandum that contradicted the assertions about the connection between the Maduro regime and Tren de Aragua, the head and deputy head of the component that produced the memo — which had been coordinated throughout the intelligence community — were both fired.

One of the most remarkable things about Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq was that there was no policy process preceding the decision. There was no options paper or meeting of administration principals that ever addressed the question of whether launching a war in Iraq was a good idea.

The parallel situation in the Trump administration involves the disorder produced by widespread political purges and Trump’s own impulsive style of operating. Especially relevant has been the disembowelment of the National Security Council, which is where an orderly policy process would be managed. The disorder there has been appropriately blamed for recent policy failures on other issues, such as security-related concessions to China.

Regime change in Iraq was a long-held dream of American neoconservatives. The militant post-9/11 mood of the American public and the appointment of prominent neoconservatives to senior positions in Bush’s administration finally brought that dream within reach.

The ouster of leftist regimes in Latin America has been a similarly longstanding objective of a strain of opinion whose foothold in the Trump administration is represented especially by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The Maduro regime in Venezuela is the immediate target, but this strain of opinion is driven at least as much by fervid opposition to the regime in Cuba, which is an ally of Venezuela. As acting head of the NSC as well as secretary of state, Rubio is well-positioned to preclude anything looking like a policy process that would stop the drive toward regime change.

After lacking a clear sense of direction during the first several months of his presidency, Bush found purpose as a “war president.” Even after getting a big boost in the polls after 9/11, leading the nation in a real shooting war rather than just a metaphorical “war on terror” seemed most likely to sustain the purpose and the popularity. Thus, Bush was susceptible to being led into the Iraq imbroglio by the neocons in his administration and assertive nationalists like Cheney and then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Donald Trump, being deeply under water in the polls, is even more in need of a boost and a distraction from an economic situation that underlies his bad poll numbers. And Trump clearly favors the tactic of doing things that distract. He also is vulnerable to being swayed less by any policy process than by the last person in the room, at least certain types of person, as illustrated by the remarkable influence in his administration of the right-wing activist Laura Loomer.

We should never lose sight of how colossal a blunder the Iraq War was. American casualties included more than 4,400 dead and nearly 32,000 wounded. Monetary costs, both direct and indirect, run upwards of $3 trillion. The war left an Iraq wracked by insurgency, leading to creation of the terrorist group that would become known as ISIS and take over much of Iraq and Syria, as well as to boosting Iranian influence. The negative vibrations are still felt today, as reflected in the statement the other day by the Iraqi prime minister that no disarmament of Iranian-influenced militias will take place until the United States withdraws completely from Iraq.

Many Americans, on both the right and the left, have looked with hope to Trump when he has spoken of wanting no more foreign wars. But the current trajectory is not reassuring, and one should not place much reliance on his recent comment in an interview downplaying the possibility of an American war in Venezuela.