One Thousand and Sixty-Five Days To Go

(5 of 7)

The advantage for Bush was that it meant Cheney could be the lightning rod, draw the fire away from the President and not much care how badly he was burned. Every good cop needs a bad cop, the partner who leans so far forward that Bush can seem measured in comparison, even as together they haul the entire debate further and further toward their shared vision. Cheney came into office talking about treaties that deserved to be broken, like the ABM Treaty, and powers that needed to be restored. In Cheneyland, it is gospel that Congress took far too much authority from the presidency in the wake of Watergate, particularly with the War Powers Resolution and congressional oversight of foreign policy and the CIA. He fought successfully all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to keep the 2001 deliberations of his energy task force secret. He was the most outspoken advocate of a bare-knuckled foreign policy, building his own national- security staff, which drove Colin Powell's State Department berserk; Powell chief of staff Larry Wilkerson called Cheney's operation "a cabal" of "extreme nationalistic ... and messianic" members. Cheney pressed the case that there was a connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein long after others in the Administration had backed off. He said American troops would be greeted as liberators in Iraq and maintained that Saddam had amassed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. When the Administration was charged with distorting prewar intelligence, Cheney went after the critics as "dishonest and reprehensible."

But in recent months the internal dynamic has shifted. Through the first term, Cheney's dominion over foreign policy was unchallenged. And while he remains the Administration's voice on national security, the ascendance of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the distraction of the CIA-leak investigation and public doubts about the handling of the Iraq occupation mean the Vice President often finds himself advocating rather than orchestrating. An overstretched military narrows Administration options; Rice talks often about realistic approaches, and the Administration is more willing to acknowledge the utility of allies and even the U.N. than to pursue the more confrontational approach of Cheneyland. This has been most obvious in Bush's handling of North Korea and Iran, where Administration policy has softened noticeably, aligning the U.S. with countries that the President had been at odds with over Iraq. Cheney was also the White House point man in trying to thwart Senator John McCain's effort to ban torture of detainees in U.S. custody anywhere in the world. Even after Bush yielded to McCain, Cheney's staff worked hard to try to narrow the restrictions in the legislation.