Vice (24 page)

Our government services revenue related to Iraq totaled approximately $5.4 billion in 2005, $7.1 billion in 2004 and $3.5 billion in 2003. We expect the volume of work under our LogCAP III contract to continue to decline in 2006 as our customer scales back the amount of services we provide under this contract. Moreover, the DoD can terminate, reduce the amount of work under, or replace our LogCAP contract with a new competitively bid contract at any time during the term of the contract. We expect the DoD will soon solicit competitive bids for a new multiple provider LogCAP IV contract to replace the current LogCAP III contract, under which we are the sole provider. Revenue from United States government agencies represented approximately 65% of our revenue in 2005 and 67% in 2004. The loss of the United States government as a customer, or a significant reduction in our work for it, would have a material adverse effect on our business and results of operations.

Corporations face legal sanctions, fines, and civil liability for lying to prospective shareholders. So the government's contractor has little choice but to admit that things aren't going so well in Iraq. After the 2006 prospectus was released, the Pentagon announced that the next LOGCAP contract will be split into three parts. The Army had decided that the old process of sole source, long-term contracts discouraged accountability, competitive pricing, and a broader range of services for the troops. The Pentagon's decision, if a little late, vindicates Bunny Greenhouse—and will certainly be included in the case her attorneys are compiling.

Did Dick Cheney know that Halliburton was being lined up for most of the work in Iraq? "Of course he knew," says a congressional staffer who has been working on Halliburton issues. "Of course the vice president knew what was going on. How does Cheney not know who is going to run all the Iraq infrastructure? Cheney had to know."

The vice president's office did not respond to questions regarding his possible involvement in the Halliburton contract.* Yet an answer to the question—Did the vice president personally steer business to the company he had left two years earlier?—is not unobtainable. The House Committee on Government Reform could subpoena Scooter Libby and ask him. Or use its subpoena power to bring in Halliburton executives and ask them. That, however, is not going to happen—unless the Democrats win a majority of House seats in November 2006. The House Committee on Government Reform routinely overrules Henry Waxman's subpoena motions—on a straight party-line vote. (Waxman's enthusiasm for robust congressional oversight lies at the heart of Republican fears of a Democratic takeover of the House in 2006.)

* See question 4, p. 225

So the story continues to evolve. Halliburton is at $16 billion and counting on its Iraq totals, even as profits decline. Bunny Greenhouse is awaiting her day in court, which might provide answers to some questions related to Halliburton. Mike Mobbs won't be back to tell his story to a congressional committee hearing open to the press and public unless and until Democrats control Congress. And as the country looks toward the
2006 midterm elections
, the vice president has had little to say about Halliburton. He brushes off the few reporters' questions on the topic. He has largely ignored Waxman's inquiries. When Vermont senator
Patrick Leahy
approached him on the Senate floor on the eve of the 2004 elections and mentioned the sole source contracting that Bunny Greenhouse had challenged, Cheney's response was straightforward.

"Go fuck yourself," said the vice president of the United States.

I think he saw those towers come down, saw what terrorists were capable of, and at that moment he became a strategic hysteric," says a defense policy analyst who learned the trade while working for Georgia senator Sam Nunn.

It's an interesting theory:

A man known for almost unnerving calm and the ability to set aside emotion and make rational decisions even when dealing with angina so intense he is gasping for breath sees what al-Qaeda visited on two U.S. cities on a clear September morning and becomes Dr. Strangelove.

It's more convincing after discussing the
September 11 attacks
with Pentagon staffers who were caught in the inferno. Or with women who were told to remove their high heels and run—from the Pentagon, the Capitol, or the White House. Or with a seasoned military officer who ran head-on into
Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld desperately searching for members of his staff in a smoke-filled corridor in the E Ring of the Pentagon.

Living that moment as Dick Cheney did, knowing that the one passenger jetliner unaccounted for was "ten minutes out" from Washington, must have had enormous transformational power.

There's another theory:

The al-Qaeda attack on September 11, 2001, was Dick Cheney's rendezvous with destiny. The moment he had been waiting for since he watched the nation's last imperial presidency collapse under the burden Richard Nixon imposed on it, then threw himself into Gerald Ford's effort to put the pieces of the shattered institution back together again. This is not to suggest that Dick Cheney wanted a violent, transformative event; but rather, that he was searching for the unifying principle that would define the U.S. role in the world in the absence of the threat of nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union.

Cheney's groping for that central purpose is evident in the digressive answer he gave
Nicholas Lemann
when interviewed for a May 2001
New Yorker
article. Lemann wanted to know if there was an organizing principle that could be compared to the Cold War. In the interview, which was probably recorded six months before the 9/11 attack, Cheney responded:

Well that's—I think it's much more difficult to say. Back at the time when I was at the Pentagon, ten years ago, the world had been arranged in a certain way throughout the postwar period, into the eighties. And because the Soviets represented a strategic threat to the United States—they could potentially threaten our very existence—we were organized from a military standpoint, and to some extent from an economic standpoint, to deal with that. When the Soviet threat went away, it was clearly a world-shaking event. The reunification of Europe, the
end of
the Cold War—it was fairly easily identified.

It's much more difficult now. Whatever the arrangement is going to be in the twenty-first century is most assuredly being shaped right now.

Lemann asked if it still made sense to talk about "the threat," as we used to during the Cold War. Cheney said the threat is much different today:

There are still regions of the world that are strategically vital to the U.S. . . . And anything that would threaten their independence or their relationships with the United States would be a threat to us. Also, you've still got to worry a bit about North Korea. You've got to worry about the Iraqis, what ultimately develops in Iran. . . . I think we have to be more concerned than we ever have about so-called homeland defense, the vulnerability of our system to different kinds of attacks. Some of it homegrown, like Oklahoma City. Some inspired by terrorists external to the United States. . . . The threat of terrorist attack against the U.S., eventually, potentially, with weapons of mass destruction—bugs or gas, biological, or chemical agents, potentially even, someday, nuclear weapons. . . .

Cheney was holding his cards close to his vest. At the time, he was already involved in discussions about
regime change
in Iraq. And if he wasn't being evasive, he was way off the mark ("got to worry a bit") on North Korea.

Asked the question six months later, he would have answered with greater clarity. But like the American defense policy principles he struggled to describe at that moment, the
Bush-Cheney administration
lacked focus. In fact, it appeared that the team whose focus, discipline, and sense of purpose had carried it from the Florida recount to the White House was coming apart in those initial months in power.

Shortly before the September 11 attack, word from the Pentagon and Congress was that Cheney's confidant, colleague, and friend Don Rumsfeld was finished at Defense. While most agreed that Rummy had the right program for reform of the military, according to one retired general, Rumsfeld—"SecDef " for the second time in twenty-six years—was so arrogant and abusive that he alienated everyone he would need to make his reform agenda happen. Another source who served on a House committee at the time says
Sean O'Keefe
's name was floated as Rummy's replacement. O'Keefe had been comptroller at the Defense Department and secretary of the Navy during the first Bush Administration.

"Within six months Rumsfeld wrecked the DOD," says the general. "He refused to talk to the military. The opposite of what Cheney had done. He was worse than Les Aspin. He asked for a $37 billion appropriations increase. But he was out of sync with his own administration. All they were talking about over there was tax cuts. Nobody on the Hill took him seriously. No one in the Pentagon took him seriously.

"By September 8, they were talking about his replacement.
[Senator Richard] Lugar
, I would guess. O'Keefe would have been his deputy, not secretary. On September 7 there was a function at Walter Reed. [Senator Daniel] Inouye was there, [Senator led] Stevens, [Congressman Jack] Murtha. The talk then was that it was over for Rumsfeld."

The problems extended beyond the Pentagon. Six months into their first term, Bush and Cheney were adrift. Dick Cheney and Karl Rove treated Senator
Jim Jeffords
so shabbily that he left the Republican Party, returning Democrats to the majority. Secretary of State Colin Powell had to clean up after George Bush and negotiate a public apology when the president's hostile comments inflamed a crisis that began with an American EP-3 spy plane colliding with a Chinese fighter jet. The budget surplus was disappearing. The president was incapable of making a decision on
stem cell research
. And the vice president was back in the coronary unit at George Washington University Hospital, his third trip since the election. This visit required implanting a pacemaker/defibrillator in Cheney's chest, reviving late-night talk show jokes about George W. Bush being a "heartbeat away from the presidency."

The man who was a heartbeat away from the presidency was reading to second-graders in the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Elorida, when two passenger planes struck the World Trade Center towers on
September 11
. Dick Cheney was in his White House office with then national security advisor Condi Rice. As eight Secret Service agents escorted Cheney to the PEOC (the Presidential Emergency Operations Center bunker) in the East Wing, White House antiterrorism director
Richard Clarke
thought he saw "a reflection of horror" on Cheney's face. Among the others in the bunker were Lynne Cheney, political operative Mary Matalin, Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, deputy White House chief of staff
Josh Bolten
, and Bush's communications director, Karen Hughes. From the emergency command center in the bunker, Cheney directed Air Force One and the president to a secure site at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska—the vice president calling the shots from Washington while a seemingly confused president flew from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska.

Looking back on that morning in the White House bunker, Clarke writes that he knew that the vice president had been one of the "five most radical conservatives in the Congress," whose views would seem "out of place if aired more broadly." But in his book
Against All Enemies,
Clarke also seemed to find Cheney's presence in the
PEOC bunker
reassuring. While he had no sense of the president, he knew Dick Cheney. At the time, Bush hadn't been briefed on terrorism threats, although Clarke had briefed Cheney, Rice, and Secretary of State Colin Powell. And while Cheney, Rice, and Powell had been briefed on Clinton's National Security Presidential Directive to "eliminate al-Qaeda" by arming the
Northern Alliance
and pushing the CIA to use lethal force, Bush was unaware of that plan as well. Eight months into his presidency, the president was the only principal out of the loop on his predecessor's plan for dealing with al-Qaeda.

Despite the contrasting images—the president and First Lady in a room full of schoolchildren, the vice president and his wife in the communications bunker at the White House—the right guy, Dick Cheney, was in Washington and in charge. It's unlikely that what Cheney experienced that day rendered him in any way incapable of making policy decisions. For the vice president, September 11, 2001, was the day when all the variables in the national security/presidential power equations fell into place. The country's need for a strong leader who could make snap decisions unencumbered by the deliberative inefficiency of a Congress' provided an opportunity to restore an imperial presidency undone by Watergate. Constitutional impediments to intelligence gathering and arrest, detention, and prosecution of individuals who threatened "homeland security" could henceforth be selectively observed.

And the terrorist attacks of 9/11 could be used to move the country beyond the "Vietnam syndrome." From the White House, Cheney had watched an earlier moment of national humiliation on April 29, 1975, when the
fall of Saigon
became America's first military defeat broadcast on the evening news. The night the president ordered the evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, Cheney had stood silently in a West Wing corridor, with a dejected Ford and Rumsfeld, each man alone in his thoughts. Cheney would later say the war was lost because "America didn't do enough." Use of force in the Middle East would serve to end the executive's reluctance to use force that followed defeat in Vietnam.

Yet as deliberations regarding a response to the 9/11 attacks got under way, the vice president was cautious to an extent that recalled reporters' comments about adult supervision when Bush announced that Dick Cheney would be his running mate. Cheney and Powell had scripted and executed the near-perfect Gulf War ten years earlier. This time around, if Cheney wasn't as cautious and thoughtful as Powell regarding invading Afghanistan, he was close. He seemed determined to remind Bush of the unintended consequences of any decision he might make regarding war.

Cheney warned about the collapse of
Pakistan
. He was concerned about the rugged terrain of a country that had swallowed up the British Army when it was a colonial power. He asked whether Pakistan's decision to support the United States would galvanize enough Islamist radicals to overthrow Pakistani president
Pervez Musharraf
. When Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, at an August 4, 2001, meeting documented in Bob Woodward's
Bush at War,
advanced the preposterous argument that there was a 10 to 50 percent chance that Saddam Hussein had been involved in the 9/11 attacks, Cheney refused to take the bait.

Cheney maintained that the overarching goal of any campaign must be to ensure the "homeland" was never again attacked. If the best route to achieve that was through
Kabul
, he was willing to go there. He also refused to support Rumsfeld's argument, early in the deliberations that followed September 11, that Iraq was the country to attack because there were "not enough good targets" in Afghanistan. And after American pilots encountered no defenses of any consequence while bombing Afghanistan, Cheney also rejected Rumsfeld's proposal to take the war to other countries where there were large numbers of Islamic terrorist organizations. The focus of the military campaign should remain the capture or killing of
Osama bin Laden
.

Yet as the Afghan War wound down, concluding with the failure to capture Osama bin Laden, Cheney became the administration's leading proponent of
war in
Iraq. Cheney bears his share of responsibility for
bin Laden's escape from the cave complex at Tora Bora
. In December 2001, when CIA operatives were perched in the remote mountains of Afghanistan monitoring bin Laden's shortwave radio and pleading for American special forces to encircle the area, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld decided to honor an agreement with Pakistani president Musharraf to let the Pakistani Army close off its side of the border and grab bin Laden if he tried to escape into Pakistan's tribal lands.

Perhaps Cheney had already shifted his focus to Iraq.

Six years into the Bush administration, it seems clear that when historians look at its legacy, that legacy will be Iraq—which more and more appears to be a colossal foreign policy blunder. And while the buck might stop on George Bush's desk, Dick Cheney was the man who made the war happen.

Cheney wasn't always obsessed with overthrowing Saddam Hussein. His belief that the United States had achieved its objectives in the first Gulf War is evident in his response to a question following a speech he made at the Discovery Institute in Seattle after the Gulf War ended:

Well, the question often comes up about Saddam.

My own personal view continues to be one that he is not likely to survive as the leader of Iraq. I emphasize that's a personal view. You can get all kinds of opinions. That's based on the fact that he's got a shrinking political base inside Iraq. He doesn't control the northern part of his country. He doesn't control the southern part of his country. His economy is a shambles. The U.N. sanctions continue to place great pressure on him. We've had these reports of an attempted coup at the end of June, early July, against him. I think he—I think his days are numbered. . . .

The question that is usually asked is why didn't we go on to Baghdad and get rid of him? And let me take just a moment and address that if I can, because it is an important issue. Now, as you think about watching him operate over there every day, it's tempting to think it would be nice if he weren't there, and clearly we'd prefer to have somebody else in power in Baghdad. But we made the decision not to go on to Baghdad because that was never part of our objective. It wasn't what the country signed up for, it wasn't what the Congress signed up for, it wasn't what the coalition was put together to do. We stopped our military operations when we'd achieved our objective— when we'd liberated Kuwait and we'd destroyed most of his offensive capability—his capacity to threaten his neighbors. And no matter what he may say today, he knows full well that he lost two-thirds of his army, about half of his air force, most of his weapons of mass destruction, a lot of his productive capability. His military forces were decimated, and while he can try to regroup and reorganize now, he does not at present constitute a threat to his neighbors.