Congratulations! You beat the WSJ by 6 minutes announcing Dick Cheney's death--and thanks for that great review of the film about Cheney. Very thought-provoking. You are certainly a man of parts--your range is incredible.
Great review with some interesting insights. I was 17 when the Gulf War broke out. The performance of Cheney, Baker, Scowcroft and company always stuck with me.
I wouldn't be surprised if the competence of the U.S. in the 1991 Gulf War contributed to the demoralization and collapse of the Soviet Union later that year.
Perhaps more accurately stated as the greater incompetence of Soviet equipment, training, and doctrine. But how much of that was exacerbated by Iraqi low-trust tribalism and low IQ?
Did the West ever interview the Red Army coup plotters to find out the answer? Grok says one shot himself and his wife to avoid arrest, the others were pardoned in '94 and died in their beds.
I read General William Odom's book on the fall of the Soviet Union. I don't recall if he offered an opinion on that precise question. I do recall him documenting how much the Communist Party coup plotters were beset by depression as soon as Yeltsin started to resist.
He quoted the youngest general who was in the room, a fighting general who'd become famous for winning battles in Afghanistan, who kept telling the Politburo: I'll just take my best battalion and go arrest Yeltsin. Just give me authorization and I can do it.
But the elder statesmen were like, Oh, what's the use, we're doomed.
It was like a Chekov play where everybody gets depressed. Very Russian. Russians seem to go through this phase where they all get depressed and practically comatose, and then they buckle down and grind for years. It happened to Stalin in July 1941 and he wasn't even Russian!
My favorite Chekhov bit is a peasant farmer with intellectual pretensions unloading all his theories on the stock travelling doctor character. He starts talking about ethical vegetarianism (inspired by Tolstoy?):
“Ah, yes, vegetarianism, that’s the way to go! [then suddenly tearing up] Ah, but what would we do with the pigs? No, it’ll never work!”
I have a Ukranian conservative friend who is my age -- which is likely much younger than most of you, sorry, coots, but I'm carrying my JBS card.
My friend spent years in Siberia in a mental institution/work camp for mockery. When the outhouses filled, they just had to move the structure, because you couldn't dig holes in the permafrost. Many years before that, in third grade, he made a cartoon of Lenin that got him permamently banned from ever purchasing art supplies or publishing his pictures. He is a gifted artist. Later, he had to exchange bottles of cheap vodka for drawing books and oil paints and pastels from the people permitted to have them.
Then he was cancelled in America and lost at least 60% of his income. He toils on. He is maybe the funniest dark punchliner I know, now that Norm Macdonald is dead. Samizdat humor is the the best humor. You need a piece of dense dark bread to go with it.
I think we were all shocked how thoroughly the US + allies annihilated Saddam and his Soviet style military. That was when the technological advantage really took hold. See for example, the Battle of 73 Easting, where an American Armored Cavalry Regiment annihilated two Iraqi divisions in a sandstorm. We had night vision, they didn't.
We'd been schooled by 60 Minutes and others for decades that our stuff didn't work. Non-govt GPS receivers were also a big help in the desert. Soldiers bought them themselves.
Yes. One thing that is difficult to convey in history books is the mood and psychology of a time. Post Vietnam, right up until the gulf war, the US mood and the overwhelming perspective of the press was (as Steve puts it above) ah what's the use, we're doomed (I love that).
It was in everything not just reports about the military. It was consumer reporting, economic reporting. I recall at the time that it was just accepted that the mafia was invincible and that rising violent crime was an insolvable problem--while we were in the middle of solving it.
I also recall some middle eastern guy, an arab government guy, being interviewed before the war started and he said that he didn't know why the US was overestimating Saddam and that we were going to be surprised how easily we beat him.
We were so high after the war that SNL did a sketch about all the democratic presidential hopefuls trying to throw the primary so bad that they wouldn't have to be the schmuck who got trounced by Bush in the upcoming election.
E.g., the Coens setting “The Big Lebowski” “around the time of our confrontation with the Iraqis”, so the Vietnam-era Dude looks especially out of date.
“Your revolution is over, Lebowski! The bums lost. Condolences!”
I had essentially the reverse experience. I was raised in a conservative small town, but as a bookish, callow young undergraduate, I adopted fashionably rebellious lefty leanings. Then, in a junior year abroad, I had the rare opportunity to visit the Soviet Union. This was in early 1987, i.e. just before glasnost and perestroika really got going, so it was still a mostly old-school soviet experience.
I found it all very interesting, but it didn't really affect me until towards the end of the trip, in Moscow, I was standing on a upper floor looking down at the ground level of the famous GUM department store, which forms one side of Red Square. At this point, GUM was the best the USSR had to offer --- it was its Harrod's, the showcase of Soviet production. And I saw how 'shoppers' there --- just as I'd read, but somehow not quite believed --- had to suffer through long queues, several times over, just to make a single purchase of what were (even to my naive eyes) remarkably crappy goods.
I had a 'Come to Hayek' moment, and realized that whatever the world's socialist utopia was doing, it was total bullshit.
It's no wonder even Boris Yeltsin was blown away by an ordinary American supermarket.
Soviet Union was collapsing since it decided not to help out East Germany in Autumn of 1989. Against the Chinese advice. Once East Germany was dispatched the disintegration didn't really stop till Putin - who curiously enough headed KGB in East Germany in 1989 - took power in Russia in 1999.
Indeed, the recent book "Chip War" by Chris Miller argues exactly that: the Gulf War was the first major conflict that demonstrated the pinpoint precision could be achieved with guided missiles and bombs using state-of-the-art semiconductor chips, an ability that had eluded the U.S. in the Vietnam War (though not for lack of trying). This put the whole world on notice, and the Soviets realized it was over for them.
Everyone should remember that Cheney and Bush followed the Powell doctrine in that war that Republicans have ever done since then. Look at how the Trump Administration has no idea about the Powell doctrine and are about to stumble into a cool war with Venezuela with no goal in mind and no definition of victory.
I assume they hoped some Ba'athist colonels or the Kurds and Shia would kill Saddam in '91. But they let too much of the Republican Guard escape the south, or not the right ones.
As a junior weenie in a small Beltway Bandit, my job was affected by Cheney twice. As a congressman, he pushed "our" program in a very different direction after we convinced him not to cancel it entirely. As SECDEF, he cancelled one of his own longtime pet projects due to high cost soon after the Gulf War (IIRC, before USSR fell). I had to admit he was right both times and soon quit the DC rat race, for that and other reasons.
If only we'd had fracking earlier, most of us wouldn't have to have cared about the Middle East so much.
The smart Dem view in 1991-2 seemed to be that Bush had intentionally teed up the Gulf War to give him an unsurpassable electoral advantage (e.g., I read a book called “Mr. Bush’s War” published in early 92 making that argument, blurbed by the basketball player turned senator Bill Bradley). Truth seems to be that foreign policy wins where the country’s honor isn’t at stake fade very quickly. The Iraq War not going great for Bush Younger in 2004 was more helpful than the tidily professional win of his dad.
Bush 41 was so popular in the Gulf War's wake that Saturday Night Live aired a sketch called Campaign 92: The Race to Avoid Being the Guy Who Loses to Bush. This aired on November 2, 1991. The irony is that Bush not only did indeed end up losing a year later, but Bill Clinton wasn't even mentioned in the sketch; the five contenders were Mario Cuomo, Richard Gephardt, Al Gore, Lloyd Bentsen, and Bill Bradley
As an aside, Bill Bradley was my senator for 18 years and to this day I wonder if he ever would have won any election if he didn't lead Princeton to the Final Four and win two championships with the New York Knicks. He is currently 82 and I have to say, he hasn't really done much in the last 25 years
Clinton became president simply by a split of the conservative voters between Bush and Perot. Absolutely deadly in a 2 party system and not due to Iraq war. Before that Herbert Walker Bush did all he could to sabotage Itzchak Shamir and prevent Russian Jews from migrating to Israel. At that point in time, some people suddenly remembered that Bush sr's father was funneling US investments into Nazi Germany in the 1930s as well as managing German assets in the US. What goes around...
that's the general election. he won the weak field primary because several strong democrats chose not to run presumably partially because bush appeared too solid
The Clintons might have remained country bumpkins if the Gulf War had not gone so well. The only thing most Democrats knew Bill for was an atrocious speech he gave at the 1988 DNC. They booed him off the stage and that could have been the last anyone heard of him.
They did, I remember the video of Bush telling Iraqis to rise up and overthrow Saddam. Some thought the U.S. would support them with military force and they got crushed.
Cheney was obviously a very smart man, as was Rumsfeld, but they were at the center of a strategic error that had massively negative consequences for the US well beyond foreign policy. He deserves all the opprobrium he gets, but the list of confederates that also earned that is bipartisan and extensive, and many of these people still had quite lucrative careers despite blowing it.
I was barely out of college at the time, but it influenced my perception of politics and how our government operates because the invasion was so obviously a manufactured phenomenon. I used to walk past a Capitol Hill townhouse converted to offices that had a plaque for something called The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, but it was a tiny office and no one was ever there, even though the list of luminaries associated with it was quite long, bipartisan and impressive (google it). It sprang up out of nowhere and similarly disappeared at some point after the invasion. It illuminated for me that our ruling class simply decided to do things and would manipulate the executive and legislative branches along with the media to provide cover through our so-called democracy to justify it. It was amusing in recent years to see Democrats point to the Cheneys and their opposition to Trump as reasonable people who should be listened to.
Anyway, Steve is correct that the story of Cheney’s shift from caution about occupying a culturally alien place like Iraq to full bore support is of it is hugely important and curiously unexamined.
Democrats' support of regime change was as hollow as BO's support of the Afghan war as the important one. Clinton's bombing them the day before his impeachment vote should have warned us. That was a time when most Dems still supported Israel.
I'd like to think we killed thousands of international jihadis in Iraq who could have killed elsewhere, but we'll never know. We may have created just as many.
Iraq illustrated how modern legislators can be pressed into backing military action by minoritarianism. British Labour MPs were conditioned to vote for the invasion by being told stories of Saddam Hussein’s atrocities against the Kurds. Never mind that there are no saints among the nations in the Middle East and that despised minorities are often that way for a reason. Playbook got repeated with diminishing success for the Islamists of eastern Libya and the Yezidis (?) in Syria.
Ah yes, luminaries. When I read the book about Theranos and its list of luminaries that supported that strange blonde lady with the deep voice I finally figured out what nonsense the concept of luminaries really is.
I know that "Conservatism, Inc." is hackneyed, but I watched it happen systematically to every contact I had in Washington who were true, idiosyncratic conservatives. AEI goes hand-in-hand with the GOPe and the Kochs, who themselves go hand-in-hand openly with
Back in high school I read that "hanged" is preferred for the method of execution and it makes more sense to me than any other school marm usage rule. It just sounds right. Moving on to biology stream of thought, I've also long had this notion that the idea that a drop hanging causes instantaneous death (compared to the slow agony of old fashioned strangle hanging) is a load of hooey.
The US has an appalling ally in the Middle East alright, but it’s not Saudi Arabia. Does anyone else remember Iraq firing Scuds at Israel in ‘91? Israel wanted the job finished, just as they apparently want us to take out Iran now.
I’ve said it before: Trump is doing a lot of good things at home, but his turn toward the use and encouragement of military force is extremely disappointing.
I obviously do not know what the Israeli government thought at the time but during the war I had a number of Israeli friends who worked in Silicon Valley. I was very hawkish at the time (yes, I am embarrassed to admit it) and argued with them about the war. They were against it because they thought that taking out of Saddam would just end up empowering Iran which was a much more serious enemy. I asked them about the SCUDS, their response was that it was just a sideshow to gain Arab support and did not change the fact that Iran was the true enemy. They were right.
Precisely. I like Steve's review but his flaccid innuendo based argument that the great error of American foreign policy was ultimately because of the Jews is unconvincing to me. Of all the countries in the middle east to take out as a favor to Israel, Iraq was down the list even then. Saddam's anti-Israel rhetoric and actions were performative. The reason a handful of Jewish neocons wanted Saddam taken out was not mysterious. They believed the weapons of mass destruction thing and also didn't want America to fade away as the global hegemon.
Ultimately it was all psychological. We won the cold war. There was no big threat and a lot of sensible people wanted to cut the military down and focus on making life great for Americans. Some people couldn't deal with that. It's obvious that if America had done so, eventually (like way eventually) some other country would rise to fill the vacuum and some people fret over things like that even if they are 50 or 100 years away.
The letter to Clinton about invading Iraq was purely because they perceived Saddam as defying us on the terms of agreement to end the first gulf war.
I'm used to it but I continue to be surprised when otherwise intelligent gentiles need to figure out how their own failings our inadequacies are somehow the fault of the Jews. It's the same instinct as people who compete to figure out the triple bank shot reasoning for blaming whitey every time something bad happens to a minority.
Bob Woodward said Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and others were itching to finish Saddam soon after 9/11. Don't remember if Cheney was in that group. I do remember the widespread belief that the long-time US goal of "stability" seemed to lead to terrorism as an outlet for suppressed grievances. Maybe the people were even more anti-Western than their tyrants.
Large Jewish presence in neoconservatism. It's like the Frankfurt school of the American Right. But I also recall the Iraq Wars were more motivated by this religious desire to have pluralistic secular democracy in the Middle East which as you observe will never work.
There is a straight line from the Bush and Obama administrations reaching all the way into the present with the installation of the bizarrely retrograde "President" of Syria, who's now the toast of the town.
There is a strange belief/delusion shared by the right and left that in the absence of some outside force actively preventing it, all cultures around the world would naturally adopt Western enlightenment values and forms of government.
From my perspective, the West seems engaged in a frantic struggle to prove the Enlightenment was right and Erik Voegelin and Carl Schmitt were wrong.
I'm so over the cliff I think Nietzche was right but his style and argumentation are very much a product of the Romantic and Christian Europe of his time and come across as florid and unpersuasive in the modern, American era.
That form of Utopianism seems to be the unique contribution of the formerly Trotskyist intellectual Jews who became the first neocons, although it has some similarity with Wilsonian democracy.
It goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden -- 'You shall be as gods'.
The desire for some substantial proportion of humanity to rebel against their Creator by trying to usurp His plan of salvation -- i.e. to decide that *they* can just go ahead and save the world -- is an under-acknowledged constant in human history. It crops up over and over, but has really burst forth in the past 100-150 years as technological and economic development have fueled hubris.
It's the same impulse that has manifested in socialism, progressivism, and neo-con 'democratization'.
Thank you for this. I found _Vice_ to be a disaster but never read such a well articulated review of just why it fell so flat. Bringing in Aristotle was a perfect turn, showing how much the film failed to stand up to its worthy subject matter.
Best part was the shot guy's trembling apology the next day for being shot. One senses the guy may have offended one of the Cheney womanfolk and received Cheney's imagination of a typical middle eastern response.
Most everyone forgets the "good" rationalization for going into Iraq: an attempt to create a democracy domino effect. The imaginary WMDs were an excuse to impose democracy in Iraq. Once the surrounding kingdoms and dictatorships got to see real democracy in action, the Arab world would become all nice and civilized, etc.
This delusional belief in democracy has been most of the US policy failures over the past century and change. First past the post elections only work when there are two candidates. Robert's Rules of Order and its variants only work when there is a general consensus and the legislators are haggling over details. (Just attend any Libertarian Party convention to see how easy it is to abuse the nested amendment process when you have a fractious body of legalistic thinkers.)
The defects in democracy were known to the Founding Fathers, who knew that our system was fragile.
For a deeply divided country like Iraq, you need a system which elects the least hated candidates, not the candidates with the strongest backing. Had we imposed Range Voting in Iraq instead of
letting them work out their own constitution, we might have a functioning Federal Republic of Iraq today with some Arab kingdoms (especially Jordan) following suit.
Way back then one of Steves original brilliant insights was that there was no way those people could have a democracy because they are too fond of marrying their cousins and fucking goats (the goat thing I might have filled in as a false memory). I was mildly hopeful at the time but Steve got it right.
Edward Luttwak also testified at Congress along the same lines, saying that Saddam was preventing deaths everyday by stopping all the rival tribes killing each other.
You may be correct. The Middle East doesn't have a history of democracy like Northern Europe. But it is also true that US style democracy has failed nearly everywhere other than the US, and it failed here in the mid 1800s and is failing here now.
What I can say is that proportional representation or first past the post both favor the biggest tribe, even if that tribe's candidate calls for screwing over other tribes. A Range Vote -- rating all candidates on a 0-10 scale -- would favor ideological candidates that offer something to other tribes. The latter would get fewer tens than the tribal candidates but would also get far fewer zeroes. A Kurdish separatist may give a 10 to the Kurdish separatist candidates, but is likely to hedge his bets by also giving nonzero values to socialist, classical liberal, or whatnot candidates as a means to keep out the Screw the Kurds parties. Ditto for the Sunni-Shiite divide.
(Of course, the other alternative to make Iraq a viable republic would be to follow through with what Saddam attempted. Baghdad and Kuwait should be part of the same country. Basra should be the independent emirate, given that they are Shiite but not Persian. This would make Baghdad part of a country with oil wealth that is under the feet of fellow Sunni Muslims.)
20 years later and perceptions have certainly changed. You wonder how many liberals will revert to the old hate in the age of Trump or do they even bother as 2003 doesn’t matter anymore. On the flip side, how many conservative will mourn his loss especially after the behavior of his daughter and 8 years of Obama.
What will the Trump era look like in 20 years? Will anyone still care?
I'm trying to find public comments on his death and struggling to find them. So far I have seen Jonah Goldberg and Bill Kristol praise him. Outside of career neocons, people are either ignoring his death, or ripping on Cheney. He really squandered it all in service of their agenda.
I have seen a few like journalists Jonathan Karl describe him as a patriot, since he was against Trump. Sort of ignores the rather glaring problem that part of the reason Trump is relevant at all is thanks to the failures and lies of the Bush and successor Obama administrations. The erosion of trust and legitimacy of the federal government and media that snowballed into Trump really started with W and the incredible amount of lying required to justify the Iraq invasion.
Al Gore is a total nut on the climate change stuff, but if he had been president instead of W I think we would have been substantially better off - fiscally, foreign policy, etc.
I have doubts about Gore being much different and certainly wouldn't have been better. Glenn Beck has told a story about getting called into the Oval Office by Bush near the end of his second term for making a foreign policy criticism of Bush. He said after a profane tirade Bush told him something like, "the next guy is going have the same policies because he is getting told the same intel and you don't have a choice." Gore also would have had Lieberman as his VP pushing him in that direction also. A lot of people were surprised when Obama didn't make many changes to the Bush foreign policy.
Fiscally, Gore's climate insanity would have destroyed the economy. We haven't had good options for President for a very long time.
Those are fair points but even with Lieberman I just don't see Gore going as far as W. Invade Afghanistan? Yes. Invade Iraq? No. The climate stuff may have been bad, but back then I don't see Gore kicking off something in that regard as costly as what our two wars cost, although I agree from a regulatory standpoint it would have been rough for sure.
You are right, the Iraq invasion probably doesn't happen with Gore. He was and still is so crazed on the environment I think the economic damage would have exceeded the cost of that war.
Their "newfound respect" when Cheney talked garbage about Trump was to use an old boogey-man to beat the new boogey-man. They were never anti-war and never believed the things they said ad nauseum for twenty f***ing years.
Ah, the glorious war to keep the princes of the House of Sabah--a family of predatory parasites from way back--in hookers and blow. What a victory!
I'd argue Cheney got it wrong *both* times. I really can not see *any* point to the Gulf War if you do *not* take out Saddam. Without that you are defending no principle whatsoever--not even "stability". You send the message--"hey assholes of the world, take your chances ... maybe we care enough to roll you back, but don't worry, you'll still be ok".
Put aside our sleazy down-low support of Saddam's--extremely bloody--war on Iran. Put aside all of Bush's Saddam dick sucking, and the confused messaging from April Glaspie and all that:
Even after Saddam invaded a simple: "leave and keep Iraq, but if we have to come over and get you, then your ass is done" would have been goodness. Even after we go kick out the Iraqis, no need to roll up Saddam ourselves, just a simple message to the Iraqi generals--"hey, this war ends when you kill Saddam, until then we're going to keep kicking your ass"--would have sufficed. Or support the Shia and Kurdish militias with air cover.
Instead, Iraq was left as a festering sore we had to police with no-fly-zones and periodic punitive raids for a dozen years. A pretty well-funded American enemy seething. With the great accomplishment, the Sabah parasites--who ran away and did not fight--get to keep looting Kuwait. How would you feel about your son dying for that?
It's amazing how these people take a victory lap on this sleazy debacle, but just sad to have sane people pretending they did a good job.
Bottom line: You get real "stability" when you kill the assholes who create instability. Crime and punishment.
Civilization: kill/expel invaders, kill/expel criminals and parasites, allow/encourage the productive flourish. Civilization depends on taking out the trash.
~
Of course, Cheney's real crime is not any of this foreign meddling b.s. It is that Cheney--like the Bush family--is one of these phony "conservatives" with little interest in actually conserving America for Americans, about conserving the American nation.
great post especially the hookers and blow. I think we did threaten Saddam a great deal before the war. The problem might have been the build up. To most western leaders that would have been the sign to declare victory and quietly leave Kuwait. I get the impression that he couldn't do that either because of his ego or because he couldn't look weak to his fractious population.
I agree with your implied principle. I have two memories of my opinions relating to 9-11 events. These could be false memories intended to make me feel like a prescient hero but I stand by them.
1) I read an article about a big terrorist meeting that included Al Queada guys including Bin Laden (I learned he attended the meeting more than a decade later) and I said to people at the time "if we knew about this terrorist Apalachin, why didn't we drop a bomb on it? Why is it just being reported like a human interest story"
2) my proposed strategy for Afghanistan was rush in, kill the top leaders of the Taliban, leave and tell their replacements that if there are further shenanigans we will return to briefly to kill you too.
I remember this review, and remember marveling at how bullet proof neoconservatism, amog the worst political philosophies Americans have ever thought up, was to criticism from the Left.
Cheney was also among the last of the professional political class that I thought of as "over my head," so to speak. I may have disagreed with Rumsfeld or Cheney, but they seemed like magisterial individuals who merited Cabinet posts. Savvy, decisive, big-picture managersSame for the very sharp individuals in the Reagan administration.
Clinton had some notables, with the traditional WASPy or WASP-adjacent ties to BigLaw or BigBank.
It's been downhill since and now I think most public figures are performative or downright dim. But I regard Trump as a lot smarter and more serious than people think. Rubio deserves eternal accolade for smashing USAID.
Congratulations! You beat the WSJ by 6 minutes announcing Dick Cheney's death--and thanks for that great review of the film about Cheney. Very thought-provoking. You are certainly a man of parts--your range is incredible.
Great review with some interesting insights. I was 17 when the Gulf War broke out. The performance of Cheney, Baker, Scowcroft and company always stuck with me.
I wouldn't be surprised if the competence of the U.S. in the 1991 Gulf War contributed to the demoralization and collapse of the Soviet Union later that year.
Perhaps more accurately stated as the greater incompetence of Soviet equipment, training, and doctrine. But how much of that was exacerbated by Iraqi low-trust tribalism and low IQ?
Did the West ever interview the Red Army coup plotters to find out the answer? Grok says one shot himself and his wife to avoid arrest, the others were pardoned in '94 and died in their beds.
I read General William Odom's book on the fall of the Soviet Union. I don't recall if he offered an opinion on that precise question. I do recall him documenting how much the Communist Party coup plotters were beset by depression as soon as Yeltsin started to resist.
He quoted the youngest general who was in the room, a fighting general who'd become famous for winning battles in Afghanistan, who kept telling the Politburo: I'll just take my best battalion and go arrest Yeltsin. Just give me authorization and I can do it.
But the elder statesmen were like, Oh, what's the use, we're doomed.
It was like a Chekov play where everybody gets depressed. Very Russian. Russians seem to go through this phase where they all get depressed and practically comatose, and then they buckle down and grind for years. It happened to Stalin in July 1941 and he wasn't even Russian!
My favorite Chekhov bit is a peasant farmer with intellectual pretensions unloading all his theories on the stock travelling doctor character. He starts talking about ethical vegetarianism (inspired by Tolstoy?):
“Ah, yes, vegetarianism, that’s the way to go! [then suddenly tearing up] Ah, but what would we do with the pigs? No, it’ll never work!”
I have a Ukranian conservative friend who is my age -- which is likely much younger than most of you, sorry, coots, but I'm carrying my JBS card.
My friend spent years in Siberia in a mental institution/work camp for mockery. When the outhouses filled, they just had to move the structure, because you couldn't dig holes in the permafrost. Many years before that, in third grade, he made a cartoon of Lenin that got him permamently banned from ever purchasing art supplies or publishing his pictures. He is a gifted artist. Later, he had to exchange bottles of cheap vodka for drawing books and oil paints and pastels from the people permitted to have them.
Then he was cancelled in America and lost at least 60% of his income. He toils on. He is maybe the funniest dark punchliner I know, now that Norm Macdonald is dead. Samizdat humor is the the best humor. You need a piece of dense dark bread to go with it.
I think we were all shocked how thoroughly the US + allies annihilated Saddam and his Soviet style military. That was when the technological advantage really took hold. See for example, the Battle of 73 Easting, where an American Armored Cavalry Regiment annihilated two Iraqi divisions in a sandstorm. We had night vision, they didn't.
We'd been schooled by 60 Minutes and others for decades that our stuff didn't work. Non-govt GPS receivers were also a big help in the desert. Soldiers bought them themselves.
Yep, I remember all those 60 minutes stories about the Apache, the Bradley, night vision gear, etc etc.
Yes. One thing that is difficult to convey in history books is the mood and psychology of a time. Post Vietnam, right up until the gulf war, the US mood and the overwhelming perspective of the press was (as Steve puts it above) ah what's the use, we're doomed (I love that).
It was in everything not just reports about the military. It was consumer reporting, economic reporting. I recall at the time that it was just accepted that the mafia was invincible and that rising violent crime was an insolvable problem--while we were in the middle of solving it.
I also recall some middle eastern guy, an arab government guy, being interviewed before the war started and he said that he didn't know why the US was overestimating Saddam and that we were going to be surprised how easily we beat him.
We were so high after the war that SNL did a sketch about all the democratic presidential hopefuls trying to throw the primary so bad that they wouldn't have to be the schmuck who got trounced by Bush in the upcoming election.
E.g., the Coens setting “The Big Lebowski” “around the time of our confrontation with the Iraqis”, so the Vietnam-era Dude looks especially out of date.
“Your revolution is over, Lebowski! The bums lost. Condolences!”
I like to think the turning point was Boris Yeltsin visiting the Randalls supermarket in Texas in September 1989
Yes, his grocery shop put all of communism in perspective, a unique, profound and most unlikely historical event.
I had essentially the reverse experience. I was raised in a conservative small town, but as a bookish, callow young undergraduate, I adopted fashionably rebellious lefty leanings. Then, in a junior year abroad, I had the rare opportunity to visit the Soviet Union. This was in early 1987, i.e. just before glasnost and perestroika really got going, so it was still a mostly old-school soviet experience.
I found it all very interesting, but it didn't really affect me until towards the end of the trip, in Moscow, I was standing on a upper floor looking down at the ground level of the famous GUM department store, which forms one side of Red Square. At this point, GUM was the best the USSR had to offer --- it was its Harrod's, the showcase of Soviet production. And I saw how 'shoppers' there --- just as I'd read, but somehow not quite believed --- had to suffer through long queues, several times over, just to make a single purchase of what were (even to my naive eyes) remarkably crappy goods.
I had a 'Come to Hayek' moment, and realized that whatever the world's socialist utopia was doing, it was total bullshit.
It's no wonder even Boris Yeltsin was blown away by an ordinary American supermarket.
Soviet Union was collapsing since it decided not to help out East Germany in Autumn of 1989. Against the Chinese advice. Once East Germany was dispatched the disintegration didn't really stop till Putin - who curiously enough headed KGB in East Germany in 1989 - took power in Russia in 1999.
Indeed, the recent book "Chip War" by Chris Miller argues exactly that: the Gulf War was the first major conflict that demonstrated the pinpoint precision could be achieved with guided missiles and bombs using state-of-the-art semiconductor chips, an ability that had eluded the U.S. in the Vietnam War (though not for lack of trying). This put the whole world on notice, and the Soviets realized it was over for them.
Everyone should remember that Cheney and Bush followed the Powell doctrine in that war that Republicans have ever done since then. Look at how the Trump Administration has no idea about the Powell doctrine and are about to stumble into a cool war with Venezuela with no goal in mind and no definition of victory.
I assume they hoped some Ba'athist colonels or the Kurds and Shia would kill Saddam in '91. But they let too much of the Republican Guard escape the south, or not the right ones.
As a junior weenie in a small Beltway Bandit, my job was affected by Cheney twice. As a congressman, he pushed "our" program in a very different direction after we convinced him not to cancel it entirely. As SECDEF, he cancelled one of his own longtime pet projects due to high cost soon after the Gulf War (IIRC, before USSR fell). I had to admit he was right both times and soon quit the DC rat race, for that and other reasons.
If only we'd had fracking earlier, most of us wouldn't have to have cared about the Middle East so much.
The smart Dem view in 1991-2 seemed to be that Bush had intentionally teed up the Gulf War to give him an unsurpassable electoral advantage (e.g., I read a book called “Mr. Bush’s War” published in early 92 making that argument, blurbed by the basketball player turned senator Bill Bradley). Truth seems to be that foreign policy wins where the country’s honor isn’t at stake fade very quickly. The Iraq War not going great for Bush Younger in 2004 was more helpful than the tidily professional win of his dad.
Bush 41 was so popular in the Gulf War's wake that Saturday Night Live aired a sketch called Campaign 92: The Race to Avoid Being the Guy Who Loses to Bush. This aired on November 2, 1991. The irony is that Bush not only did indeed end up losing a year later, but Bill Clinton wasn't even mentioned in the sketch; the five contenders were Mario Cuomo, Richard Gephardt, Al Gore, Lloyd Bentsen, and Bill Bradley
ha- I mentioned the same sketch in a different comment and this is a big reason Clinton became president.
For those wondering who played whom...
• Dana Carvey (Gephardt)
• Phil Hartman (Cuomo)
• Victoria Jackson (Tipper Gore)
• Kevin Nealon (Bradley)
• Kiefer Sutherland (Bentsen)
As an aside, Bill Bradley was my senator for 18 years and to this day I wonder if he ever would have won any election if he didn't lead Princeton to the Final Four and win two championships with the New York Knicks. He is currently 82 and I have to say, he hasn't really done much in the last 25 years
I dated a related Gephardt in college.
Morally, very disappointing.
Clinton became president simply by a split of the conservative voters between Bush and Perot. Absolutely deadly in a 2 party system and not due to Iraq war. Before that Herbert Walker Bush did all he could to sabotage Itzchak Shamir and prevent Russian Jews from migrating to Israel. At that point in time, some people suddenly remembered that Bush sr's father was funneling US investments into Nazi Germany in the 1930s as well as managing German assets in the US. What goes around...
that's the general election. he won the weak field primary because several strong democrats chose not to run presumably partially because bush appeared too solid
And Ross Perot was not yet that on the horizon...
On the other hand, I don't know what would have happened if strong liberal candidates would have been all over the place.
David Spade in 1992: “Hey, there’s _another_ skinny southwestern guy running for president? Dana’s already playing Bush, so maybe I’ll be Perot.”
Lorne Michaels: “No, we’re pre-taping Dana as Perot. You can play him in the wide angles, though.”
The Clintons might have remained country bumpkins if the Gulf War had not gone so well. The only thing most Democrats knew Bill for was an atrocious speech he gave at the 1988 DNC. They booed him off the stage and that could have been the last anyone heard of him.
Bill Clinton was not known as the Comeback Kid for no reason
Junior weenie sounds about right for me at the time. I think I’ll add it to my resume.
They did, I remember the video of Bush telling Iraqis to rise up and overthrow Saddam. Some thought the U.S. would support them with military force and they got crushed.
The earlier democratic Iranian experience ruined the potential victory marches.
Fracking or not AIPAC would make sure US cares about the Middle East.
I would not have imagined Midnight Cowboy appearing in an obit review of a film about Dick Cheney, but it seems weirdly fitting somehow.
That last scene on the bus...
Cheney was obviously a very smart man, as was Rumsfeld, but they were at the center of a strategic error that had massively negative consequences for the US well beyond foreign policy. He deserves all the opprobrium he gets, but the list of confederates that also earned that is bipartisan and extensive, and many of these people still had quite lucrative careers despite blowing it.
I was barely out of college at the time, but it influenced my perception of politics and how our government operates because the invasion was so obviously a manufactured phenomenon. I used to walk past a Capitol Hill townhouse converted to offices that had a plaque for something called The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, but it was a tiny office and no one was ever there, even though the list of luminaries associated with it was quite long, bipartisan and impressive (google it). It sprang up out of nowhere and similarly disappeared at some point after the invasion. It illuminated for me that our ruling class simply decided to do things and would manipulate the executive and legislative branches along with the media to provide cover through our so-called democracy to justify it. It was amusing in recent years to see Democrats point to the Cheneys and their opposition to Trump as reasonable people who should be listened to.
Anyway, Steve is correct that the story of Cheney’s shift from caution about occupying a culturally alien place like Iraq to full bore support is of it is hugely important and curiously unexamined.
Democrats' support of regime change was as hollow as BO's support of the Afghan war as the important one. Clinton's bombing them the day before his impeachment vote should have warned us. That was a time when most Dems still supported Israel.
I'd like to think we killed thousands of international jihadis in Iraq who could have killed elsewhere, but we'll never know. We may have created just as many.
Iraq illustrated how modern legislators can be pressed into backing military action by minoritarianism. British Labour MPs were conditioned to vote for the invasion by being told stories of Saddam Hussein’s atrocities against the Kurds. Never mind that there are no saints among the nations in the Middle East and that despised minorities are often that way for a reason. Playbook got repeated with diminishing success for the Islamists of eastern Libya and the Yezidis (?) in Syria.
Ah yes, luminaries. When I read the book about Theranos and its list of luminaries that supported that strange blonde lady with the deep voice I finally figured out what nonsense the concept of luminaries really is.
The 30 Rock plot arc guest starring Matthew Broderick captured this vibe
I don't recall that he was even in the show! I definitely watched at least the first 3-4 seasons but perhaps not after that.
Very smart insight.
I know that "Conservatism, Inc." is hackneyed, but I watched it happen systematically to every contact I had in Washington who were true, idiosyncratic conservatives. AEI goes hand-in-hand with the GOPe and the Kochs, who themselves go hand-in-hand openly with
Soros now.
Ought to have been hung alongside Rumsfeld and Dubya, years ago.
Back in high school I read that "hanged" is preferred for the method of execution and it makes more sense to me than any other school marm usage rule. It just sounds right. Moving on to biology stream of thought, I've also long had this notion that the idea that a drop hanging causes instantaneous death (compared to the slow agony of old fashioned strangle hanging) is a load of hooey.
I stand corrected
Ought to have been hanged
😂😂
Made me chuckle!
Enjoy Hell!
The US has an appalling ally in the Middle East alright, but it’s not Saudi Arabia. Does anyone else remember Iraq firing Scuds at Israel in ‘91? Israel wanted the job finished, just as they apparently want us to take out Iran now.
I’ve said it before: Trump is doing a lot of good things at home, but his turn toward the use and encouragement of military force is extremely disappointing.
I obviously do not know what the Israeli government thought at the time but during the war I had a number of Israeli friends who worked in Silicon Valley. I was very hawkish at the time (yes, I am embarrassed to admit it) and argued with them about the war. They were against it because they thought that taking out of Saddam would just end up empowering Iran which was a much more serious enemy. I asked them about the SCUDS, their response was that it was just a sideshow to gain Arab support and did not change the fact that Iran was the true enemy. They were right.
Precisely. I like Steve's review but his flaccid innuendo based argument that the great error of American foreign policy was ultimately because of the Jews is unconvincing to me. Of all the countries in the middle east to take out as a favor to Israel, Iraq was down the list even then. Saddam's anti-Israel rhetoric and actions were performative. The reason a handful of Jewish neocons wanted Saddam taken out was not mysterious. They believed the weapons of mass destruction thing and also didn't want America to fade away as the global hegemon.
Ultimately it was all psychological. We won the cold war. There was no big threat and a lot of sensible people wanted to cut the military down and focus on making life great for Americans. Some people couldn't deal with that. It's obvious that if America had done so, eventually (like way eventually) some other country would rise to fill the vacuum and some people fret over things like that even if they are 50 or 100 years away.
The letter to Clinton about invading Iraq was purely because they perceived Saddam as defying us on the terms of agreement to end the first gulf war.
I'm used to it but I continue to be surprised when otherwise intelligent gentiles need to figure out how their own failings our inadequacies are somehow the fault of the Jews. It's the same instinct as people who compete to figure out the triple bank shot reasoning for blaming whitey every time something bad happens to a minority.
Bob Woodward said Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and others were itching to finish Saddam soon after 9/11. Don't remember if Cheney was in that group. I do remember the widespread belief that the long-time US goal of "stability" seemed to lead to terrorism as an outlet for suppressed grievances. Maybe the people were even more anti-Western than their tyrants.
Large Jewish presence in neoconservatism. It's like the Frankfurt school of the American Right. But I also recall the Iraq Wars were more motivated by this religious desire to have pluralistic secular democracy in the Middle East which as you observe will never work.
There is a straight line from the Bush and Obama administrations reaching all the way into the present with the installation of the bizarrely retrograde "President" of Syria, who's now the toast of the town.
There is a strange belief/delusion shared by the right and left that in the absence of some outside force actively preventing it, all cultures around the world would naturally adopt Western enlightenment values and forms of government.
From my perspective, the West seems engaged in a frantic struggle to prove the Enlightenment was right and Erik Voegelin and Carl Schmitt were wrong.
I'm so over the cliff I think Nietzche was right but his style and argumentation are very much a product of the Romantic and Christian Europe of his time and come across as florid and unpersuasive in the modern, American era.
That form of Utopianism seems to be the unique contribution of the formerly Trotskyist intellectual Jews who became the first neocons, although it has some similarity with Wilsonian democracy.
It goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden -- 'You shall be as gods'.
The desire for some substantial proportion of humanity to rebel against their Creator by trying to usurp His plan of salvation -- i.e. to decide that *they* can just go ahead and save the world -- is an under-acknowledged constant in human history. It crops up over and over, but has really burst forth in the past 100-150 years as technological and economic development have fueled hubris.
It's the same impulse that has manifested in socialism, progressivism, and neo-con 'democratization'.
Here is an article from Quillette on the government of Israel's attitude towards the 2003 war:
https://quillette.com/2025/11/05/despite-israel-not-because-of-it-iraq-war-bush-sharon-saddam-hussein/
The Gulf War was Netanyahu's 'breakout role' in America, with his appearances on CNN.
May he rotten in hell.
Thank you for this. I found _Vice_ to be a disaster but never read such a well articulated review of just why it fell so flat. Bringing in Aristotle was a perfect turn, showing how much the film failed to stand up to its worthy subject matter.
Have to say I kinda liked Cheney, everyone knew he was lying, he knew everyone knew, and he could care less.
Definitely was a guy with whom you did not want to go out hunting.
Best part was the shot guy's trembling apology the next day for being shot. One senses the guy may have offended one of the Cheney womanfolk and received Cheney's imagination of a typical middle eastern response.
Most everyone forgets the "good" rationalization for going into Iraq: an attempt to create a democracy domino effect. The imaginary WMDs were an excuse to impose democracy in Iraq. Once the surrounding kingdoms and dictatorships got to see real democracy in action, the Arab world would become all nice and civilized, etc.
This delusional belief in democracy has been most of the US policy failures over the past century and change. First past the post elections only work when there are two candidates. Robert's Rules of Order and its variants only work when there is a general consensus and the legislators are haggling over details. (Just attend any Libertarian Party convention to see how easy it is to abuse the nested amendment process when you have a fractious body of legalistic thinkers.)
The defects in democracy were known to the Founding Fathers, who knew that our system was fragile.
For a deeply divided country like Iraq, you need a system which elects the least hated candidates, not the candidates with the strongest backing. Had we imposed Range Voting in Iraq instead of
letting them work out their own constitution, we might have a functioning Federal Republic of Iraq today with some Arab kingdoms (especially Jordan) following suit.
Given how divided the United States has become of late, we could use some Range Voting here as well. https://rulesforreactionaries.substack.com/p/where-all-else-fails-change-the-rules
Way back then one of Steves original brilliant insights was that there was no way those people could have a democracy because they are too fond of marrying their cousins and fucking goats (the goat thing I might have filled in as a false memory). I was mildly hopeful at the time but Steve got it right.
Edward Luttwak also testified at Congress along the same lines, saying that Saddam was preventing deaths everyday by stopping all the rival tribes killing each other.
with hindsight I'd have to agree. probably same thing with whatsisname in Syria
You may be correct. The Middle East doesn't have a history of democracy like Northern Europe. But it is also true that US style democracy has failed nearly everywhere other than the US, and it failed here in the mid 1800s and is failing here now.
What I can say is that proportional representation or first past the post both favor the biggest tribe, even if that tribe's candidate calls for screwing over other tribes. A Range Vote -- rating all candidates on a 0-10 scale -- would favor ideological candidates that offer something to other tribes. The latter would get fewer tens than the tribal candidates but would also get far fewer zeroes. A Kurdish separatist may give a 10 to the Kurdish separatist candidates, but is likely to hedge his bets by also giving nonzero values to socialist, classical liberal, or whatnot candidates as a means to keep out the Screw the Kurds parties. Ditto for the Sunni-Shiite divide.
(Of course, the other alternative to make Iraq a viable republic would be to follow through with what Saddam attempted. Baghdad and Kuwait should be part of the same country. Basra should be the independent emirate, given that they are Shiite but not Persian. This would make Baghdad part of a country with oil wealth that is under the feet of fellow Sunni Muslims.)
20 years later and perceptions have certainly changed. You wonder how many liberals will revert to the old hate in the age of Trump or do they even bother as 2003 doesn’t matter anymore. On the flip side, how many conservative will mourn his loss especially after the behavior of his daughter and 8 years of Obama.
What will the Trump era look like in 20 years? Will anyone still care?
I'm trying to find public comments on his death and struggling to find them. So far I have seen Jonah Goldberg and Bill Kristol praise him. Outside of career neocons, people are either ignoring his death, or ripping on Cheney. He really squandered it all in service of their agenda.
I have seen a few like journalists Jonathan Karl describe him as a patriot, since he was against Trump. Sort of ignores the rather glaring problem that part of the reason Trump is relevant at all is thanks to the failures and lies of the Bush and successor Obama administrations. The erosion of trust and legitimacy of the federal government and media that snowballed into Trump really started with W and the incredible amount of lying required to justify the Iraq invasion.
Al Gore is a total nut on the climate change stuff, but if he had been president instead of W I think we would have been substantially better off - fiscally, foreign policy, etc.
I have doubts about Gore being much different and certainly wouldn't have been better. Glenn Beck has told a story about getting called into the Oval Office by Bush near the end of his second term for making a foreign policy criticism of Bush. He said after a profane tirade Bush told him something like, "the next guy is going have the same policies because he is getting told the same intel and you don't have a choice." Gore also would have had Lieberman as his VP pushing him in that direction also. A lot of people were surprised when Obama didn't make many changes to the Bush foreign policy.
Fiscally, Gore's climate insanity would have destroyed the economy. We haven't had good options for President for a very long time.
Those are fair points but even with Lieberman I just don't see Gore going as far as W. Invade Afghanistan? Yes. Invade Iraq? No. The climate stuff may have been bad, but back then I don't see Gore kicking off something in that regard as costly as what our two wars cost, although I agree from a regulatory standpoint it would have been rough for sure.
You are right, the Iraq invasion probably doesn't happen with Gore. He was and still is so crazed on the environment I think the economic damage would have exceeded the cost of that war.
Their "newfound respect" when Cheney talked garbage about Trump was to use an old boogey-man to beat the new boogey-man. They were never anti-war and never believed the things they said ad nauseum for twenty f***ing years.
True, I remember that poor lady whose son died and she became the face of antiwar protests. They disrupt
As much as anyone, Cheney is emblematic of the Republican party that primary voters rejected and Trump hijacked in 2016.
Ah, the glorious war to keep the princes of the House of Sabah--a family of predatory parasites from way back--in hookers and blow. What a victory!
I'd argue Cheney got it wrong *both* times. I really can not see *any* point to the Gulf War if you do *not* take out Saddam. Without that you are defending no principle whatsoever--not even "stability". You send the message--"hey assholes of the world, take your chances ... maybe we care enough to roll you back, but don't worry, you'll still be ok".
Put aside our sleazy down-low support of Saddam's--extremely bloody--war on Iran. Put aside all of Bush's Saddam dick sucking, and the confused messaging from April Glaspie and all that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Glaspie#Meetings_with_Saddam_Hussein
Even after Saddam invaded a simple: "leave and keep Iraq, but if we have to come over and get you, then your ass is done" would have been goodness. Even after we go kick out the Iraqis, no need to roll up Saddam ourselves, just a simple message to the Iraqi generals--"hey, this war ends when you kill Saddam, until then we're going to keep kicking your ass"--would have sufficed. Or support the Shia and Kurdish militias with air cover.
Instead, Iraq was left as a festering sore we had to police with no-fly-zones and periodic punitive raids for a dozen years. A pretty well-funded American enemy seething. With the great accomplishment, the Sabah parasites--who ran away and did not fight--get to keep looting Kuwait. How would you feel about your son dying for that?
It's amazing how these people take a victory lap on this sleazy debacle, but just sad to have sane people pretending they did a good job.
Bottom line: You get real "stability" when you kill the assholes who create instability. Crime and punishment.
Civilization: kill/expel invaders, kill/expel criminals and parasites, allow/encourage the productive flourish. Civilization depends on taking out the trash.
~
Of course, Cheney's real crime is not any of this foreign meddling b.s. It is that Cheney--like the Bush family--is one of these phony "conservatives" with little interest in actually conserving America for Americans, about conserving the American nation.
great post especially the hookers and blow. I think we did threaten Saddam a great deal before the war. The problem might have been the build up. To most western leaders that would have been the sign to declare victory and quietly leave Kuwait. I get the impression that he couldn't do that either because of his ego or because he couldn't look weak to his fractious population.
I agree with your implied principle. I have two memories of my opinions relating to 9-11 events. These could be false memories intended to make me feel like a prescient hero but I stand by them.
1) I read an article about a big terrorist meeting that included Al Queada guys including Bin Laden (I learned he attended the meeting more than a decade later) and I said to people at the time "if we knew about this terrorist Apalachin, why didn't we drop a bomb on it? Why is it just being reported like a human interest story"
2) my proposed strategy for Afghanistan was rush in, kill the top leaders of the Taliban, leave and tell their replacements that if there are further shenanigans we will return to briefly to kill you too.
I remember this review, and remember marveling at how bullet proof neoconservatism, amog the worst political philosophies Americans have ever thought up, was to criticism from the Left.
Cheney was also among the last of the professional political class that I thought of as "over my head," so to speak. I may have disagreed with Rumsfeld or Cheney, but they seemed like magisterial individuals who merited Cabinet posts. Savvy, decisive, big-picture managersSame for the very sharp individuals in the Reagan administration.
Clinton had some notables, with the traditional WASPy or WASP-adjacent ties to BigLaw or BigBank.
It's been downhill since and now I think most public figures are performative or downright dim. But I regard Trump as a lot smarter and more serious than people think. Rubio deserves eternal accolade for smashing USAID.