Back during his time in Nixon’s White House, and then in the House leadership, Cheney had formed an entourage of his own acolytes and had mapped out the real positions and linkages of power throughout the federal government. After Bush won the election, during the transition, Cheney placed his people in those slots of real power. As Barton Gellman reported in his book Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, by the time of Bush’s inauguration, Cheney had grasped control of the executive branch.
This was true especially in foreign and defense policy. He formed a parallel National Security Council inside the Office of the Vice President. More crucially, he persuaded Bush to bring back his old friend Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary (this, over the objections of Bush Sr., who had grown to despise and distrust the man in his own term).
Working as a tag team, Cheney and Rumsfeld outmaneuvered the official National Security Council, headed by Bush’s highly educated but politically green national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice—and did the same to Bush’s secretary of state, now-retired Gen. Colin Powell. The latter displacement took everyone by surprise, not least Powell, who came into the job as a worldwide celebrity who thought that he would be running foreign policy.
Back in 1992, when Cheney was running the Pentagon, he had supervised a Defense Planning Guidance which concluded that America’s objective should be not only “to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region” but also to discourage any “advanced industrial nations” from challenging U.S. leadership. In the Middle East and South Asia especially, the goal should be “to remain the predominant outside power … and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region’s oil.”
Now as vice president, Cheney revived the document as policy (not merely policy guidance) and installed its chief authors in top second-tier positions in the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House.
The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, stamped these ideas with new urgency. Unlike the authors of the earlier document, notably Paul Wolfowitz, Cheney had no special interest in restarting the Iraq war or overthrowing Saddam Hussein. But he was now on the lookout for threats everywhere and bought into raw intelligence reports that drew links between the al-Qaida terrorists and Saddam’s regime in Baghdad, as well as other reports that Saddam was developing nuclear weapons—and so, just days later, laid the groundwork for an invasion of Iraq.