Time and again, events would prove Mr. Cheney wrong. Iraq had no active programs producing weapons of mass destruction, and postwar analysis found no operational links to al-Qaeda. Saddam Hussein was captured, tried and executed, but the Iraq War continued until 2011, and U.S. troops remained in the country for another decade, seeking to stabilize the country and push back against Islamic State extremists. Nearly 5,000 Americans were killed in the war.
The conflict in Afghanistan continued until 2021, when President Joe Biden withdrew the last U.S. troops, ending a war in which more than 2,300 U.S. service members died and allowing the Taliban to retake control of the country.
Among the sharpest of Mr. Cheney’s critics was Dick Armey (R-Texas), the House majority leader during the run-up to the war.
Armey said Mr. Cheney gave him a private prewar briefing alleging that Iraq was close to building a miniature nuclear warhead and that members of Hussein’s family were working with the architects of the Sept. 11 attack. Armey learned later that neither assertion was supported by U.S. intelligence.
“I felt like I deserved better from Cheney than to be [lied to] by him,” Armey said in a 2008 interview, using a bit of vulgar “Texas vernacular,” as he put it, to describe Mr. Cheney’s conduct.
Mr. Cheney fashioned himself as an anti-politician, frankly indifferent to popular approval. When a “Good Morning America” interviewer noted in 2008 that two-thirds of the public opposed the Iraq War, he replied with a single word: “So?” Asked to elaborate, he said, “You cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the opinion polls.”
Around the midpoint of his presidency, Bush began to see the costs of that approach, according to Bush confidants, including the White House communications director, Dan Bartlett.
A growing backlash against Mr. Cheney’s signature policies, at home and abroad, persuaded the more pragmatic president to trim his course. A policy of strict isolation gave way to diplomatic overtures toward Iran and North Korea, despite the vice president's continuing belief that they were ripe for “regime change.” Bush put an end to waterboarding, secret CIA prisons, and electronic surveillance without authority of Congress and the courts.
By the time he left office, with the lowest approval rating on record for a vice president, Mr. Cheney had confounded old friends and, by some accounts, had spent down a reputation built over decades.