Examining Dick Cheney’s Controversial Political Impact – Joe Cirincione

The passing of former Vice President Dick Cheney has sparked widespread reflection on a complex legacy marked by both principled stands and controversial decisions. While many will remember his late-career opposition to Donald Trump’s authoritarianism, historians and policy analysts point to his role in orchestrating the 2003 Iraq War as his most consequential and damaging contribution to American foreign policy.

When George W. Bush and Cheney began their second term in 2004, they had successfully navigated the political fallout from what critics describe as a systematic campaign of misinformation about Iraq. The administration had made dozens of claims about Iraqi weapons programs and ties to Al Qaeda—none of which proved accurate after extensive post-war investigations.

Charles Duelfer, who led the Iraq Survey Group tasked with locating weapons of mass destruction, told Congress in October 2004 that Saddam Hussein had no active weapons programs or stockpiles. The weapons didn’t exist—they hadn’t been moved to Syria or destroyed shortly before the invasion as some administration officials claimed. United Nations inspectors and U.S. bombing campaigns in the 1990s had already dismantled Iraq’s WMD capabilities.

“We found no evidence of concerted efforts to restart the program,” Duelfer reported to lawmakers, contradicting pre-war assertions about imminent threats.

A Senate Intelligence Committee report in 2005 acknowledged major flaws in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that provided justification for the invasion. However, the committee largely blamed systemic weaknesses in intelligence gathering and analysis rather than direct political pressure—a conclusion many experts now dispute.

Evidence suggests Cheney and Bush had decided to overthrow Hussein even before the September 11 attacks. When this agenda faced opposition in summer 2003, including from respected Republican moderates like retired general Brent Scowcroft, the administration launched what historian John Prados described as “a scheme to convince America and the world that war with Iraq was necessary and urgent.”

Under Cheney’s guidance, a special White House Information Group chaired by Karl Rove coordinated the messaging campaign. The cornerstone was a CIA White Paper on Iraq’s weapons programs, hastily produced alongside the classified NIE that Congress received just days before voting to authorize military force.

The Carnegie Endowment’s subsequent analysis found virtually every claim in these documents to be false, with one exception: the assessment that Saddam was highly unlikely to transfer weapons to terrorist groups—a finding administration officials ignored and excluded from public materials.

The first paragraph of the White Paper stated Iraq “probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.” Even the classified NIE, which suggested a timeline between 2007 and 2009, presented a timeframe too distant to justify Cheney’s characterization of Iraq as “an urgent national security threat.”

One particularly controversial episode involved aluminum tubes that Iraq had purchased. Administration officials claimed these were intended for uranium enrichment centrifuges, though many experts in the Department of Energy and State Department disagreed. This dispute culminated in a front-page New York Times story on September 8, 2003, which Cheney and then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice promptly cited during Sunday talk show appearances.

“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” Rice famously warned, despite having been briefed on the significant disagreements within the intelligence community about the tubes’ purpose.

According to journalists David Corn and Michael Isikoff, Cheney personally visited CIA headquarters to pressure intelligence officials into emphasizing information supporting an invasion while downplaying contradictory evidence. In an August 2002 speech to veterans, Cheney declared there was “no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction” and was “amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us”—statements that intelligence professionals knew contained significant uncertainties.

Internal emails later revealed in the Senate report showed experts expressing frustration about how higher-ups were distorting their analysis, with one warning the administration would “eventually look foolish” over claims about the tubes and alleged uranium purchases from Niger.

The Iraq War’s consequences have been devastating: hundreds of thousands of lives lost, approximately $3 trillion in costs, and some 7 million people displaced. The regional instability it created continues to reverberate across the Middle East today.

While Cheney’s late-career stance against Trump’s assault on democratic institutions earned him praise from former critics, his role in what many consider America’s most catastrophic foreign policy decision of the modern era remains a defining aspect of his legacy. As the nation reflects on his life and service, both his principled moments and profound misjudgments warrant careful examination.