For many, Dick Cheney epitomized idealistic foreign policy hubris. Because of his role in the 2003 Iraq War, the former vice president has come to represent the ultimate neoconservative in the popular imagination. He was a fanatical warmonger, a man who got away with filling a friend’s face with birdshot, and never met a regime change project he didn’t like.
Yet Cheney once repudiated the very regime change war that would later define him. In 1994, in a discussion about the 1991 Persian Gulf War, he was asked if the United States military should have toppled Saddam Hussein. Cheney, who had been secretary of defense under George H.W. Bush, dismissed the notion. Going on to Baghdad would have been “a quagmire,” he said. “How many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?” he asked. “Our judgement was not very many, and I think we got it right.”
The popular image of Cheney is inaccurate. Since 2016, conservatives talk about national interest, restraint, and realism, contrasted to neoconservative or liberal universalism. Yet if they want to reckon with and avoid repeating Cheney’s foreign policy failures, they need to face a difficult truth. Cheney was once one of them. Meanwhile, the progressives who reviled him this week need to acknowledge how close their own views came to Cheney’s in the last years of his life.
To understand a man, Napoleon said, look to how the world was when he was in his twenties. Flunking out of Yale in the early 1960s, Cheney was by his own admission more interested in beer than study. Yet his time there did shape his views of foreign policy. Cheney fell under the influence of H. Bradford Westerfield, a professor of politics known for his fervent anti-communism and hawkish views on Vietnam. Cheney would later describe the Vietnam War as one lost by civilians who refused to listen to the military. That’s what conservatism meant for Cheney. Its mortal enemy was the emerging New Left, which regarded the war as the exercise of a militarized national security state, an imperial power in which civilian leaders were brushed aside.
Cheney joined Congress after his work in the Nixon and Ford Administrations, and assembled a thoroughly conservative record. In 1980, he endorsed Ronald Reagan for president rather than George H.W. Bush. He helped ensure that a resolution calling for the release of Nelson Mandela failed to pass. As part of the investigating committee on Iran-Contra, he defended presidential prerogatives on national security. These stances all reflected those of movement conservatism. Reagan had been the conservative presidential favorite since 1968. Cheney’s defense of Reagan during Iran-Contra followed conservative fears that in the wake of Watergate, the New Left had helped cripple the executive and damage the intelligence community.